PSA: Rethink Your Spice Rack
TWO CENTS | SEP 28, 2020
PSA: Rethink Your Spice Rack
If you want to protect yourself from killer spices, you should probably resist the urge to buy loose packed spices, especially in foreign countries.
Spices are a disproportionately dangerous food group. Who knew, right? But this has nothing to do with their age. Your ten-year-old spices are as safe as when you bought them.
The question is whether they were safe to begin with.
In 2012 I spent a year living in the part of Indonesia that 16th-century Europeans had dubbed “The Spice Islands.” The roads were literally lined with spices. Taking advantage of the equatorial sun and the heat-absorbing qualities of asphalt, locals would construct huge arrays of spices on the highway shoulder to dry out. This isn’t exactly a food-safe technique, since the spices were bathed in a constant plume of auto exhaust, bacteria-laded dust, and other stuff that accumulates on a highway shoulder.
So what happened to those pavement-dried spices? They were sold, aggregated into larger batches, resold, processed, resold again, and maybe exported. Herein lies the first risk associated with spices: the supply chain is global, interminable and opaque.
But that’s not the bad part. Lack of supply transparency creates the ideal environment for a more nefarious practice in the spice trade: food fraud.
It is estimated that a quarter of the food supply has been tainted by some sort of fraud. Read that again. In the case of spices, “fraud” comes in the form of a middleman diluting his product (a la your local coke dealer). Spices have been cut with dirt, twigs, rice, salt, flour, seed husks, other spices, and anything cheaper and loosely resembling the thing they’re supposed to be.
This is nothing new. Spices made irresistible targets for adulteration from the very beginning: they were both expensive (there’s your incentive) and impossible to verify (a first-time nutmeg buyer in 17th-century Holland had no idea what nutmeg was supposed to taste like). It is more likely the Dutch dude went home with an acorn dipped in shoe polish than the prized nut itself. This couldn’t possibly happen in modern times… or could it?
I’m not sure about you, but I couldn’t put a pinch of cinnamon on my tongue and approximate its purity. Is my cinnamon 90% sawdust? Maybe! I’ll never know.
Spice dealers have also been known to sneakily “enhance” the color of their product —not unlike you with those Mexico vacation photos you ‘grammed last year. In order to crank up the saturation on cayenne pepper, they might add mercury or Sudan Red Dye — a carcinogen more suitable for hair dye and smoke bombs than food.
If you haven’t sworn off spices forever, let me alarm you with one more anecdote. Spices, it turns out, are a perennial hot topic in the food-safety community, since it’s extremely difficult for epidemiologists to pinpoint spices as the cause of food poisoning. Here’s why.
Whenever there’s a virulent outbreak of foodborne illness, epidemiologists are summoned to identify the source of the trouble. If you’re one of the unlucky ones who gets a bad Chipotle order, for example, an epidemiologist might visit you in the hospital and ask questions about your food history while you vom into a pail. This is not a fun process for either party:
Epidemiologist: “You recall having eaten a burrito bowl for lunch on…”
You: [projectile vomit; the violence of the expulsion ruptures a blood vessel in your eye.]
Epidemiologist: OK, so it was Wednesday the 16th. Did that bowl continue your choice of freshly grilled chicken or did you opt for the barbacoa?
You: [whimpering softly as bile drips from your chin.]
Once the epidemiologist is done with you, she will calmly continue the investigation, hunting for a common food eaten by you and the other poor souls who got sick. She will scan your credit card statements, scrutinize your supermarket receipts, and photograph the contents of your refrigerator.
When 189 people were sickened with salmonella in 2010, a common brand of salami was discovered in several of the victims’ refrigerators. This prompted a recall: 1.3 million pounds were pulled from supermarket shelves. But as the investigation continued, the meat was vindicated and a new culprit emerged: the peppercorns purchased by the salami manufacturer. Tests indicated that the spice itself was riddled with the same strain of bacteria found in the victims. The investigation shifted and 55,000 pounds of peppercorn were recalled due to contamination that had occurred at some point along the supply chain. But how much pepper had already ended up in manufactured food? How much of that tainted pepper is still sitting untouched in your pantry?
Probably none. But if you want to protect yourself from killer spices, do the following:
1. Resist the urge to buy loose packed spices, especially in foreign countries.
2. Shop at reputable markets and buy spices from reputable brands; you can trust that they’re sourcing them responsibly.
As for your old-ass spices: spices lose flavor over time, but that’s a taste issue, not a safety one. Maybe throw out the ones you brought back from your Bali trip. Otherwise you’ll be fine.
Ned Klein is a food safety consultant living in New York City. You can find his answers to everyday food safety questions on his website Nom Nom Vom Vom Dot Com.
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