Interesting about wine and lead bowls. And, well, I’ll stop doing that /s Interesting. Learned something. Thanks.
You can still drink from lead crystal stemware, but storing liquor in lead crystal decanters isn’t advised.
I wouldn’t be too worried about lead glass-- Vitrification is generally the safest way to deal with toxic material. Glass is quite inert.
Are you sure that is true? I am not convinced the lead is so much encapsulated as part of the structure and possibly able to leach out.
My wife blows glass and we have a cold shop in our garage. The coloured glass is generally not recommended for food and beverage use. I believe the accepted practice if to make sure any coloured glass has a coating of neutral clear glass if the object is intended for food use.
I do understand that rather than go through expensive safety testing and liability is is more pragmatic for the small companies producing this glass to just issue a disclaimer.
Serving is fine, storing not so fine.
Not so much.
Typically, lead crystal contains 24-32% lead oxide. If beverages are stored for a long time in decanters made of lead crystal, tiny amounts of lead can leach out. The maximum allowable level of lead in drinking water is 50 micrograms per litre, a concentration that can be exceeded in wines that are kept in crystal decanters for a long time. Port wine, for example, can steadily increase its lead concentration up to 50 fold in four months, from 90 to 4000 micrograms per litre. Brandy stored over five years can have over 20,000 micrograms per litre. So while there is no problem serving alcoholic beverages from lead crystal decanters at your dinner party, they should not be stored in them for any period of time.
Joseph Schwarcz is someone who seems to be pretty authoritative on the subject of chemistry.
If I’m not misreading that, it’s saying that even before it’s stored in lead crystal, port wine starts off with nearly twice the allowable level of lead.
You’re not reading it wrong. Though note that 50 micrograms is the maximum allowable level for drinking water, but per the OIV the maximum amount is 100-150 (listed as 0.1-0.15 milligrams in their chart) for wine.
It would probably have been better to cite safe levels in wine in the article, admittedly.
According to this paper which cites multiple studies, the lead in wine is generally safe for adult human consumption.
90 micrograms per liter is safe. 4,000 is not.
Is that just because people (presumably) drink less wine than water, or because the alcohol somehow mitigates against the risk of the lead, or because wine and water are regulated by different bodies who use different methods for determining safe standards?
It is this yes.
This is from the study in my last post, this time citing the EPA:
While some wines were reported to contain Pb concentrations above the current EPA drinking water standard for Pb (15 μg/L), it is critical to note that the EPA’s drinking water consumption rate is considerably higher than the typical daily intake rate of wine. The recommended maximum intake for wine is one to two 5-oz glasses per day, whereas the recommended daily intake for water is 2.7 to 3.7 L (91 to 125 oz) per day, and the EPA estimated consumption rate for adults is 2.4 L (81 oz) per day (ACE 2008; DHHS 2005; EPA 2011, 2015).
Note to self: Drink more water than wine in 2024…
This time for sure!
Happy holidays! Minimum wage is going up in California, so Pizza Hut does the responsible thing and fires all its drivers.
Yeah, there’s no way to not see that as evil.
To be clear, it isn’t Pizza Hut doing the firing. It’s certain Pizza Hut franchisees. Yum! Brands may or may not be evil - those franchisees most certainly are.
Pizza Hut is evil for putting hot dogs and yellow mustard on pizza.
How do they expect to stay in business? I mean, sure, there are some pick-up and dine-in orders, but delivery is the core of the business for a big chain pizzeria. And Pizza Hut is not a premium product where, if people can’t get it delivered, they’ll go drive to pick it up themselves… They’ll just switch to some other pizza delivery place.
Lot of people now asking where they’re supposed to get weed
Any federal land, presumably.
They won’t, and then they’ll blame Biden for their own idiotic self-nut-punching decisions.
From a source inside Yum! Brand: They are planning to go to strictly gig delivery.
Yum! Brands contracts with Pizza Hut and KFC franchisees in the US give the franchisee a lot of latitude.
That seemed obvious to me the moment I saw the headline.
The last few years a number of fast food places around me have begun advertising about how they now deliver food to you. But they never do, it’s all through someone else like DoorDash or Grubhub.
By this I mean, you go to the restaurant’s actual website, place an order from their menu, and then someone delivers your order (but it’s through a third party).
That’s just how food delivery is done now. Pizza Hut is catching up to how everyone else does it. There are other pizza places around me (Little Caesar’s and Mod Pizza come to mind) that deliver that way and have been doing that for a while.
Expect this to be the norm.