On February 4, 2021, a congressional report exposing four major baby food companies for allowing dangerous contents of heavy metals in their products was made public. Naturally, parents of infants and toddlers nationwide were outraged. To understand how weighty and urgent the problem is, let the following findings of the investigators sink in—the manufacturers exceeded the safe limit for arsenic by 91 times, for cadmium by 69 times and for lead by 177 times.
So far, only two companies have recalled their contaminated baby food. Beech-Nut has taken off the market one lot of Beech-Nut Stage 1, Single Grain Rice Cereal, and subsequently exited the baby food industry, while Maple Island Inc. removed three lots of Parent's Choice Rice Baby Cereal from the shelves. The reason for the recalls was the same—too much inorganic arsenic in the products, as rice is notorious for abounding in this heavy metal.