The Safe Spice Shopping Guide

The problem: Lead. In one Boston-area study all 32 store-bought jars tested contained it, half were above the 0.1 ppm the FDA recommends as a maximum for lead in children's candy, and two ran up to 1,000 times it — and some sellers add lead chromate (a paint pigment) on purpose to brighten dull batches. There is no federal limit or action level for lead in culinary spices at all — the FDA has set them for bottled water, juice, candy and baby food, but not for the spice rack.

Buy instead: a powder brand that publishes heavy-metal testing, or whole turmeric root you grate fresh.

Cowell et al., Public Health Reports 2017 (32 Boston-area samples) · Forsyth et al., Environmental Research 179, 2019 (lead chromate in 7 of 9 Bangladeshi producing districts) · FDA, Lead in Food and Foodwares & Guidance for Industry: Lead in Candy, 2006

The problem: These are the two worst performers anyone has published on. When Consumer Reports tested 126 products across 15 types of dried herbs and spices in 2021, oregano and thyme were the only two where every single product came back at levels their experts called concerning for children. Not a bad brand — the whole category. The likeliest reason is botanical rather than criminal. Heavy metals get into food from the soil and water a plant grew in, and how much any given plant takes up varies by species — in this testing the leafy herbs clustered at the bad end while the seeds and barks did better. Nobody is adulterating your oregano. (That leaf-versus-seed pattern is what the results show; the mechanism behind it is our reading, not a stated finding.)

Buy instead: grow and dry your own if you cook with them often — that is Consumer Reports' own first recommendation, and a pot of either on a windowsill is about as hard as keeping basil alive. Failing that, use a lighter hand: their risk threshold was roughly three quarters of a teaspoon a day, every day, of a product that tested high. An occasional pinch in a ragu is not the thing to worry about.

Consumer Reports, November 2021 — 126 products across 15 types of dried herbs and spices; one third carried arsenic, lead and cadmium at levels CR judged a health concern for children.

The problem: Most supermarket "cinnamon" is cassia, which is naturally high in coumarin. EFSA sets a tolerable daily intake of 0.1 mg per kg of bodyweight — about 6 mg for a 60 kg adult. Cassia averages around 3,000 mg/kg, so a single teaspoon can reach that limit on its own. The concern is liver effects in sensitive people at high regular intake, usually reversible. True Ceylon cinnamon is very low in it.

Buy instead: Ceylon ("true") cinnamon if you use it daily; keep cassia for the occasional bake.

EFSA / German BfR — coumarin tolerable daily intake 0.1 mg/kg bw/day; cassia vs Ceylon coumarin content.

The good one: Worth saying out loud, because spice-safety writing is nearly all alarm and that is its own kind of dishonesty: seven of the fifteen types Consumer Reports tested had no product above the concern threshold. Every brand passed. Those seven are black pepper, coriander, curry powder, garlic powder, saffron, sesame seed and white pepper.

Buy: normally. Whole peppercorns in a grinder still beat pre-ground on flavor, but that is a cooking argument, not a safety one. If you want to lean your cooking toward the low-risk end of the rack, lean on this list.

Consumer Reports, November 2021 — 126 products across 15 types of dried herbs and spices; one third carried arsenic, lead and cadmium at levels CR judged a health concern for children.

That's four of the thirteen. The full edition covers the other nine — saffron, paprika and ground chili, basil, cumin, ginger, bay leaves, rosemary, cloves and fenugreek — each with what the problem actually is, what to buy instead, and the study behind the call. Two of them are the ones people get wrong most often: bay leaves are sold as five different plants, and nobody has published any testing on rosemary at all.

It also has the part that solves the problem instead of managing it: how to grow and dry your own oregano, thyme, rosemary and bay — including the honest reason most people won't.

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