Determined to get a true and accurate test of the risk of lead leaching into food, I found an inexpensive used Rival crock pot and planned to take a sample from it and have WeeCycle send it to the lab for a leach test (for obvious reasons, I didn’t want to take a chip out of my fairly new crock pot!). I ended up with quite a selection of crock pots, covering four of the five major brands (I couldn’t find anyone with a Cuisinart crock pot for some reason!) in several colors, since each color could have a slightly different chemical make-up. I think the wonderful ladies at WeeCycle were a bit surprised when I schlepped them all down to their office this morning to do the XRF test.
The results absolutely caught me off guard. Not one of the crock pots we tested had any lead in it at all. We tested each crock pot twice and threw a couple of red herrings (a dish made in China and some tiles from Italy that the WeeCycle staff keep in the office because they know they have lead in them) just to make sure that the XRF was working correctly.
Obviously, I did not test every crock pot on the market, nor can testing half a dozen crock pots on a single day account for things like a bad (read “lead-laden”) batch of glaze or a new color that uses slightly different chemicals. Some of the manufacturers themselves certainly seem to be leaving the door open for using lead in the glaze if they need to. But we tested the following crocks this morning and, again, they showed ZERO lead:
West Bend – black
Rival – black
Rival – dark green
Rival – beige
Rival – white
Hamilton Beach – white
Crock pot – black
Being a natural skeptic, I have to admit this was not what I was expecting to discover. I didn’t even get to smash the stylin’ $5 beige Rival crock pot I bought just for that purpose because there’s no point in doing a leach test on a crock that contains no lead to begin with. My frustration that the FDA has a standard (or many, actually) that I do not believe is actually safe, and that manufacturers do not arm their telephone representatives with accurate, detailed information to answer consumer questions about safety aside, I feel a fair level of comfort with the results of this test, and with continuing to use my crock pot to cook things that I might otherwise have bought in BPA-laden cans. Woot.
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The skinny on lead in crock pots – It may surprise you! » Terminal Verbosity