In a spirit of adventure I tried tofu skins the other day. Searching through the numerous options at our large Asian market, it looked like we found one that didn’t have the California lead advisory statement on the package - but later found one buried in the fine print.
We ate them anyway, and really like them, but wonder why they have lead. Internet searches so far haven’t yielded any answers.
Does anyone here know why they contain lead?
PS / TIL: tofu skins apparently are not be confused with tofu curls.
The California advisory doesn’t mean the product contains lead. It means that somewhere along the production process, some potentially toxic chemicals were used. This could be a chemical that is destroyed in the baking process, or it could be a chemical that is used in the fabrication of the packaging.
For example, if the packaging contains paper, that fabrication process uses some nasty chemicals, none of which should remain by the time the product gets to you.
The advisories are on literally everything and are basically useless since they don’t give you any information about what the relevant chemicals are, how they were used, and what remains of them.
Or somewhere in a component of one of the machines that makes it, even if it doesn’t contact the final product. Does your machine have a circuit board in it? Semiconductors! Resin! Solder! Bam: Anything made with it gets a California Proposition 65 warning label.
You are correct that the Prop 65 program as it currently stands is less than useless. This is largely down to the fact that there are penalties if your product is found to contain any substance on the list without disclosure, but there is no penalty for hedging your bets and making the blanket declaration that your product “may” contain chemicals known to the State of California, etc. if you can’t be bothered to perform and pay for the testing to certify that it doesn’t.
It is therefore cheaper for manufacturers to just plaster the Prop 65 warning label on absolutely everything, so they do. Now the label no longer has any meaning, because its presence does not accurately inform anyone if the product really does contain anything worth knowing about. It’s become a Boy Who Cried Wolf situation with consumers, who see the label on every item they touch and still don’t understand what it means, so it just becomes another meaningless formality that they ignore along with all the other crap on packaging they’ve been desensitized to seeing, like the resin identifier codes, worthless shield shaped “guarantee” logo, choking hazard logo, forced arbitration notices, etc., etc.