How to keep your food safe from lead — and a Giveaway!!!

Did you know that October is Lead Poisoning Prevention Month? Well, you might think it is weird that I am talking about lead when I talk about food on my blog.  But, did you know that lead can get into food and cause many serious health problems, especially for young children.  That is what I want to tell you about in this post -and a giveaway!!! I will be giving one lucky winner a dump truck toy from the Lead Safe America Foundation sponsor Green Toys – it’s made from recycled milk jugs!  The winner will get to choose a pink and lavender one or a red and yellow one!

First I want to tell you about an experience that happened to me with lead so you can see how dangerous this is.  I was just six years old and my brother was three years old. It was during the summer and I was at camp.  When my mom came to pick me up I was surprised because we didn’t go home right after.  My mom filled me in on the details.  Earlier that day a painter was working on repainting our house.  He had lied to us and told us he would remove the paint safely. This was important because our house was an old house and had lots of lead paint from many years ago.  But while everyone was gone he sanded the paint without using proper tools and he contaminated the whole house and all of our things with lead dust.  My mom and my brother saw white dust covering everything! My mom got my brother out of the house as quickly as possible. And we had a company come test every room to see if it was safe.  They found that it was very unsafe and told us we could not go back to our home.  We had to leave even without all of our things and had to get rid of almost everything including our books, clothes, toys and much more. Luckily, we got out quick enough and didn’t get lead poisoning which is the most important part.  Here are some pictures of our house with all this bad lead dust:

Anyway, it was hard for us and it took three or four months before we could move into a new house.  So because of this, we learned a lot about lead and I feel sad that lead can get into food too.  I feel like we shouldn’t have to worry that the food we are eating to help our bodies grow could have something bad in it that could be poisonous.

So I want to share how lead can get into food and what you can do to stop it.

Lead can get in your food through the air or soil when bits of lead land on your food or in the soil while it is growing. Or it can get in your food through the packaging or dishes it is served on.  Some things you can do to prevent this are to always wash your fruits and veggies before cooking and eating them and if you grow your own food in your garden you can test the soil for lead. Also, old ceramic dishes might have lead in them and you should be careful about that especially with hot food and food with acid in it like tomatoes.  We use glass dishes in our house to be safe about this.

Earlier in the post I mentioned a giveaway.  For Lead Poisoning Prevention Month, Lead Safe America is giving me a toy dump truck from Green Toys as a giveaway for my readers! In order to be entered to win, you must click here: http://leadsafeamerica.org/gluten-free-kid/ and also be a fan on my Facebook page by clicking “LIKE!” That’s all you have to do!

I bet all of you think about safe and healthy food.  For me, I work really hard to find food that I can safely eat and share for information with you.  So, it makes me mad that there is also lead that we all have to watch out for. But I hope this post helps. And good luck with the giveaway!