++What contaminated applesauce reveals about how lead exposure happens. +
++Lead keeps showing up where itâs not supposed to be. +
++In 2024, one of the most potent neurotoxins known to humanity persists all over the world as a public health threat. For the second time in six months, lead contamination in food products has put public health authorities on high alert in the wealthiest nation in the world. Last fall, contaminated cinnamon-applesauce pouches caused dozens of lead poisoning cases across the US, eventually prompting recalls in November. And in March, the federal government announced that some ground cinnamon products also contained slightly elevated levels of lead and advised customers not to buy them. +
++Lead might seem like something we left behind in a past era. By the 1990s, nearly every country had eliminated leaded gasoline, once easily the most ubiquitous source of lead pollution when we spewed it into the open air. The US and Europe also instituted more stringent rules for another common source of exposure, lead paint, by greatly restricting or outright banning its use. You can see the improvements in the numbers: From 1978 to 1991, the average level of lead in the blood for Americans younger than 75 dropped by 78 percent. +
++But lead usage has actually been on the rise worldwide, even in the US. The proliferation of lead-acid batteries globally and less stringent rules in the developing world for everything from cookware to spices has allowed lead consumption to grow despite its known health risks. +
++Lead is linked to a wide range of neurological and development problems, and exposure is especially dangerous for children. Research has found kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood experience a range of effects, from speech and hearing problems to learning and behavioral issues. They develop more slowly, physically and mentally. +
++And it remains an especially serious plight for poorer countries: A 2021 review of studies involving children in 34 low- and middle-income countries found that 48.5 percent had elevated levels of lead in their blood. But in a globalized economy, some of the same lead pollution endangering kids in those countries can find its way into consumer products that travel around the world and contaminate the food that children in the US eat. +
++In the case of the applesauce, the cinnamon was originally harvested in Sri Lanka and then shipped to Ecuador, where it was ground into powder to be mixed into the products. Both countries are dealing with lead exposure crises: One 2021 study found that almost all mothers and children living in Quito, Ecuador, had levels of lead and other metals in their blood that exceeded public health guidelines. The pollution stemming from Sri Lankaâs active lead-acid battery manufacturing and recycling sector, too, has created health problems for the workers and people who live near the plants. +
++When the applesauce ingredients passed through Ecuador, they were contaminated there with lead before they moved for sale to the US, where there have been more than 500 confirmed or suspected cases of acute lead poisoning related to the recalled products. The FDA believes the lead may have been added intentionally for economic reasons. The Ecuadorian government has named one individual as a suspect in its own investigation. +
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Matt Ramey/Washington Post via Getty Images
++The entire episode encapsulates the difficult truth about lead: Even though the US has cracked down within its borders, pollution elsewhere persists â and, in some cases, American efforts to reduce its own pollution merely moved the contamination to other parts of the world. +
++âSo much of the food that we eat is coming from all over the world,â said Stephen Luby, who studies lead pollution at Stanford University. âSo we are deluding ourselves if we think we can push pollution problems to low-Âincome countries and not worry about it.â +
++It will take a multifaceted, multilateral, multinational strategy to eradicate lead contamination. And it starts with recognizing the whole world is in it together. +
++We keep finding lead everywhere we look +
++Lead exposure can be either high-grade (which can lead to acute poisoning and, in rare cases, even death) or low-grade (which can still result in developmental and cardiovascular problems). +
++The amount of lead in the cinnamon that was used in the applesauce pouches was enormous, with a concentration of more than 5,000 parts per million. That is thousands of times higher than the amount public health experts consider to be acceptable and high enough to cause acute lead poisoning. +
++The ground cinnamon the FDA warned about in March, by contrast, contained 2.03 to 3.4 parts per million. Although that amount is unlikely to result in an immediate ER visit, experts emphasize that no level of lead exposure is considered safe. Even these trace amounts could contribute to health problems over the long term when added to other exposures. +
++âWe want to eliminate all exposures, donât get me wrong, but I think thatâs a very different situation with those much, much lower levels,â said Perry Gottesfeld, executive director of Occupational Knowledge International, an advocacy group focused on public health and industrial pollution. +
++One of the fundamental challenges in eradicating lead is that pollution can be low-grade and long-running. The lead that crept into our environment during the era of leaded gasoline and lead paint is still in the soil. Even pots and pans made from recycled aluminum that was mixed with leaded products or ceramics covered with a lead-based glaze (the kind used and traded around the world) can contribute over time to higher levels of lead in a personâs blood through degradation or exposure to heat. +
++âItâs always been there, to be honest. From a basic level, since industrialization, lead has been there,â said Jenna Forsyth, a research scientist at Stanford who works with Luby on lead research. âLately, thereâs been a closer inspection. And the more we look, the more lead we will find.â +
++A recent analysis from the environmental group Pure Earth examined more than 5,000 samples of consumer products in 25 low- and middle-income countries, ranging from foods and spices to cosmetics and toys to cookware and paints. It found that 18 percent of all samples had dangerous amounts of lead, based on reference levels drawn from public health agency guidelines. About half of all of the ceramic and metallic foodware and 41 percent of the residential and commercial paints tested had excess amounts of lead. +
++The US food supply relies on imports from countries with high levels of lead exposure, according to a 2019 report from the same group. The United States imports nearly all of its spices, coffee, and cocoa, for example. Independent tests conducted from 2014 to 2018 found most of the chocolate products tested â 96 out of 127 â had amounts of lead and cadmium (another dangerous neurotoxin) higher than the levels allowed in California, according to the Pure Earth report. +
++The US also imports about half of all fruits and vegetables consumed here. Farmers in lower-income countries must sometimes rely on untreated industrial wastewater to irrigate their crops, which can then contaminate the produce that is shipped around the world. +
++Once lead finds its way inside a personâs body, it quickly enters the bones because of its molecular similarities to calcium. It then subsists for decades, moving around and finding easy access to important organs, including the brain. And as lead takes up residence in places where calcium is supposed to be, it disrupts important biological and neurological functions. +
++âLead is a toxin like no other,â Luby said. âPeople think about âOh, yeah. Leadâs bad. Mercuryâs bad. Cadmiumâs bad. Air pollution is bad. All these things.â No â lead is really disproportionately bad.â +
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Jaime Razuri/AFP via Getty Images
++One global estimate of leadâs impact concluded that exposure had contributed to 5.5 million adult cardiovascular deaths and $6 trillion in lost economic potential in 2019. âBut we donât see lead. We donât think about it,â Luby said. âWhen Dad dies of a heart attack, we donât blame it on lead.â +
++Three reasons for continued lead contamination +
++Weâre all at risk from lead â but not at equal risk. Children in low- and middle-income countries have average blood lead levels roughly three times higher than those in high-income countries, based on the available national data. While one in three children worldwide have dangerously high amounts of lead in their blood, the share is closer to one in every two children in the developing world. +
++Lead-battery manufacturing and recycling in lower-income countries where plants are subject to less regulation can lead to local pollution. There are fewer restrictions on lead in paint and other everyday products (food included) in the developing world. And, as mentioned, exposure also comes through agricultural practices. In the US, besides food imports, deterioration of aging civil infrastructure contributes to exposure, as was the case with lead-leaching water pipes in Flint, Michigan. Lead ammunition, commonplace in the US, has also been linked to elevated lead levels in childrenâs blood. +
++Leadâs persistence, unfortunately, is multifaceted. Drew McCartor, executive director of Pure Earth, put the sources into three buckets. +
++First, some polluters actively disregard the rules around lead use and its known health effects and intentionally continue to use lead in their products. Spices are a good example of how this can happen: Lead chromate pigment is often used to produce a more vibrant color in spices such as cinnamon and turmeric. +
++Forsyth, in her work with Luby to address lead exposure linked to turmeric among rural mothers in Bangladesh, noted that the use of lead chromate is âeconomically motivated.â It adds the yellow color desirable in traditional turmeric. It is also denser than the spice itself and reduces the amount of time it takes to process the turmericâs roots, which increases the producerâs yield. The FDA has said it is investigating whether the presence of lead found in the cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches was the result of such practices. +
++Companies have proven adept at migrating their operations to less restrictive jurisdictions. Thatâs a particular problem for lead acid batteries, which are most commonly used for automobiles and represent about 85 percent of leadâs use in the modern global economy. Most lead batteries are recycled to make new ones, but lead recycling has been linked again and again to the contamination of nearby soil and water. +
++The US sends most of its used car batteries to Mexico to be recycled, and the towns there that are home to recycling plants have been found to have extremely high lead levels. âYou look at the history of battery recycling in the US, which is basically closed down and overwhelmingly moved to places where thereâs weaker environmental regulation,â Forsyth said. âWe in the wealthy world are like, âOh, yeah, I want cheap batteries.â And the fact that itâs killing people nearby in another country is a connection we donât make.â +
++The second source of contamination is negligence, when companies fail to address lead levels that do not exceed regulations but still present a risk. A toy manufacturer that doesnât test its raw materials for lead or a food maker who doesnât perform due diligence on their suppliers may not be intentionally contributing to lead pollution, but their lackadaisical attitude allows lead to continue moving through the economy, where it ends up exposing consumers, including children. +
++Last, there are the legacy sources of lead, the result of our overdependence on the material in the decades before we realized how dangerous it was. +
++Lead was added to gasoline as an anti-knocking agent to improve the performance of automobilesâ combustion engines. By burning leaded gas, humans pumped lead into the atmosphere for decades; the US did not completely phase it out until 1996. That lead eventually settled into the soil, where it is difficult and expensive to remove. +
++Itâs the same story with leaded paint: The paint chips and slowly erodes, creating lead-laden dust that finds its way into the soil or the water supply. Commonly used pesticides have likewise left lead behind in the ground where they were sprayed. And lead used in other products is likely to be around for years in one form or another, creating more and more of those small-scale exposures that add up over time. +
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Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
++âLead is introduced into the material stream and then stays in that material stream as itâs reused for different purposes,â McCartor said. âThese are usually smallÂ-scale producers. So I wouldnât describe them as irresponsible. They donât have the means to test for lead. They are certainly not introducing it, I donât think, intentionally. But itâs a product of our longstanding use of lead in the world.â +
++How do we get rid of all this lead? +
++The solution starts with the right policies â including prohibitions on the most potent sources of lead exposure â but it doesnât end there. +
++The experts I spoke to said national governments could be more aggressive about cracking down on common sources of lead exposure. Lead paint, for example, is still widely used around the world. Even in the US, where its use is restricted for residential use, industrial use is fair game. More than 120 countries voted symbolically in 2009 to phase out lead paint, but there has been little action since. +
++Following through on that commitment would be one place to start. Environmental activists also advocate for prohibiting the lead chromates that are added to spices for appearance and weight, the suspected source of the recent lead scares in the US. +
++Given the outsize role of lead batteries in lead pollution, they are also necessary targets for change. But this presents an enormous economic challenge: These batteries are ubiquitous â used âin every electric vehicle, in every solar household, in every cellphone tower,â as Gottesfeld put it â and their alternatives have struggled to gain a market share. Lithium-ion batteries are the most common option, but theyâre more expensive for manufacturers (and therefore, ultimately, the consumers) and present their own recycling challenges. +
++Still, experts say the world must keep working to reduce lead use and thereby exposure. Action by wealthy nations can create incubators for new alternative technologies as well as set an example for the rest of the world. +
++âWhen you look at the amount of human harm from all of this, it makes more sense for us to just move to substitutes and literally get this toxin out of the economy,â Forsyth told me. âI think that highÂ-income countries would be a great place to start. Because if they did this, they would both reduce their own risks and they would also clarify technologies and ways forward.â +
++But the right policies are insufficient. We also need more government attention and resources dedicated to the problem. +
++Removing lead from the soil has been chronically underfunded, even in the US, and the FDAâs negligence on the food side of its âfood and drugâ portfolio has been well documented. Monitoring of lead levels in food being imported to the US is minimal. That leaves America vulnerable to the weaknesses in other countriesâ regulatory infrastructures, which are poorly funded and less robust. +
++In Mexico, although the pollution from lead battery recycling plants has raised the local lead levels above the countryâs threshold for intervention, there has been little effort by the government to crack down on the industry. The tainted cinnamon that passed through Ecuador before ending up in applesauce pouches sold in US stores should have been subject to the countryâs existing lead pollution laws, but oversight has stayed lax because of a lack of resources. +
++âHaving the policy in place wasnât enough. It wasnât being enforced,â Forsyth said. +
++There are pockets of progress, as with Bangladesh and turmeric. McCartor said heâs been encouraged by a lead eradication campaign in Ghana, where his group collaborated with the national government to survey children for lead levels in their blood and to identify the likely sources of pollution. +
++The survey found that lead recycling plants were major contributors, much as they are in Mexico. So Ghana decided to shut down two of three lead recycling plants within its borders. +
++âWe cannot inspect our way out of this problem. You could spend a fortune in perpetuity and only catch a tiny fraction of contaminated goods coming into the United States,â McCartor said. âIf we really want to solve this, it requires a whole-Âof-Âgovernment commitment to work outside of our borders.â +
++Americans used to live in multigenerational homes. Weâre starting to, again. +
++Layla Ahmed is, by any measure, a responsible adult. She works at a nonprofit in Nashville helping refugees. Makes 50k a year. Saves money. Pays her bills on time. +
++But thereâs another measure of adulthood that has so far eluded her. Ahmed, 23, moved back in with her parents after graduating college in 2022. +
++âThere is a perception that those who live with their parents into their 20s are either bums or people who are not hard-working,â she told the Today, Explained podcast. +
++Being neither of those things, Ahmed and her situation actually point to a growing trend in America right now: More adults, especially younger adults, are either moving back in with family or never leaving at all. +
++According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of all adults ages 25 to 34 now live in a multigenerational living situation (which it defines as a household with two or more adult generations). +
++Itâs a number thatâs been creeping upward since the early â70s but has swung up precipitously in the last 15 years. The decennial US Census measures multigenerational living slightly differently (three or more generations living together), but the trend still checks out. From 2010 to 2020, there was a nearly 18 percent increase in the number of multigenerational households. +
++The research arm of the apartment listing and resident services company RentCafe went granular on Gen Z and found that 68 percent over the age of 18 still live with a parent or parents. As for millennials, 20 percent are back with mom and/or dad (or just never left). +
++Given the bum stigma (to paraphrase Layla Ahmed), whatâs going on here? +
++Whatâs driving this? +
++When Pew recently surveyed people living in multigenerational homes, more of them said financial issues drove the decision to move in with family than any other reason. +
++Which: Yes. Total student loan debt has ticked slightly down in the past few years but not by much. Meanwhile, inflation. You may have heard of her. And, oh yeah, home affordability last fall was the lowest it had been since the â80s. +
++âI think itâs a contemporary trend, whether itâs to be able to save the money to buy a home, to be able to go back for a masterâs degree or to be able to do something to further their ability as independent adults,â said Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a nonprofit that researches and advocates for multigenerational households. +
++Major macro disruptions â financial or otherwise â often lead to spikes in multigenerational living: âWeâve seen the largest increases when our country has had a recession or a housing bust and then Covid,â Butts said. âBut what people are surprised by is they always think that the numbers are going to decrease again.â +
++Masks off, goodbye Mom and Dad? Not exactly. +
+ ++The census found that there was a dip in younger adults living with parents after a spike at the height of the pandemic. But the dip was pretty shallow. Which means many people moved in and just never left. +
++Amid skyrocketing costs and labor shortages in care work at either end of life have also pulled people into multigenerational housing. Nearly a third of people surveyed by Pew said caregiving â child, elder, or otherwise â was the primary reason they lived in a multigenerational situation. +
++One more reason multigenerational housing is on the rise: America is getting less white. Hispanic and Asian people, especially if they are immigrants, are more likely to live with extended family. Black families are also traditionally more open to these arrangements. +
++In many cultures around the world, multigenerational living â at least until marriage, and often even after â is the norm, not the exception. +
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Getty Images
++Given some of these factors driving the increase, I suppose itâs not surprising to see the way polling shakes out when it comes to these living situations. +
++Overall, a little more than a third of Americans say this trend is âbad for societyâ (ouch), per Pewâs research. But white people are more likely to say itâs bad news (41 percent) than Black people (26 percent), Hispanic people (28 percent), or Asian people (23 percent). Men find it more objectionable than women, older people are less on board, and Republicans are the least into this of any group measured. +
++Dave Ramsey fits a few of the above categories. White dude; baby boomer. Definitely conservative, though heâs not much for party politics. He is also perhaps the most popular personal finance personality in America, preaching a gospel of aggressive saving, home ownership, and freedom from debt (besides a modest mortgage). +
++Ramsey told Today, Explained on a recent visit to his studio, âItâs not a kid thatâs a college graduate with a degree in logistics that has the ability to make 120k. Heâs not living in his daddyâs basement, okay? Itâs career choice and direction.â +
++But Ramsey loosened up a bit when asked about the potential for an adult living with parents to pay down debt. He said that if giving up autonomy temporarily means getting very real about paying off debt, âSure. Have at it. Iâm in.â +
++Butts points out, though, that multigenerational living used to be pretty common before World War II â and for decades before that. It was after the war when people got in cars, got jobs in suburbs, and bought homes with more space for fewer people. Nuclear families. +
++By 1960, a new norm had entered the chat. The vast majority of adults were peacing out from mom and dadâs and not looking back. +
++âAnd we then said that was the way that people should live, that they should be independent, that we donât need each other â when in fact we do need each other,â she said. That includes for things like caregiving, staving off loneliness, and helping out (collectively) with the bills. Pooling resources is also better for the climate, she said. +
++âWe need to realize that itâs not a matter of us going back. Itâs a matter of us going forward to something that is better and healthier for many families.â +
++Additional reporting by Noel King and Amanda Lewellyn. +
++This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Voxâs flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions. +
++
++The president has a housing affordability problem. +
++Biden is in campaign mode, and the president wants voters to know he understands housing is out of control. +
++Over the last month, Biden has ramped up his bully pulpit focus on the housing crisis. In his State of the Union address, the president pledged new tax credits for first-time homeowners and to âcrack down on big landlordsâ who price-fix rents. His new budget includes proposals to expand vouchers and housing supply, and he gave a second speech promising to âbuild, build, buildâ to âbring housing costs down for good.â When the president hit the campaign trail in late March, he dedicated a Las Vegas stop to stumping his affordable housing initiatives, and on Friday his administration even announced it would embrace some new rent control. +
++You donât have to squint to see how the housing crisis is complicating the otherwise positive economic message the president hopes to sell. +
++Mortgage rates are so high that most homeowners feel they canât afford to move, and most renters feel priced out of the idea of homeownership altogether. Wages have gone up, but not faster than home-buying costs, and over 22 million households now spend more than a third of their income on rent as of 2022. +
++Inflation and the economy remain the top issues for voters, and economists cite high housing costs as a main culprit for inflation still exceeding the Federal Reserveâs target goal of 2 percent. +
++This is all creating bad vibes, at a time when the president wants to build enthusiasm for a second term. A Redfin-commissioned survey from February found almost two-thirds of homeowners and renters say housing affordability makes them feel negatively about the economy. +
++Politically, the president also has a lot to worry about when it comes to mobilizing the young people and voters of color who helped him eke out a victory in 2020. Polling indicates that itâs these voters â who are more likely to be renters â that Biden is now struggling with: those who cast ballots for him four years ago but are now leaning toward Donald Trump or considering staying home on Election Day. +
++The White Houseâs âopportunism is finally catching up to them and I say that in a good way,â said Tara Raghuveer, the director of KC Tenants, a tenant union in Kansas City, Missouri. âThey know now that what they do needs to feel material to people.â +
++Housing doesnât typically play a big role in presidential elections given that itâs a difficult issue for the White House to deliver short-term change on, and federal lawmakers more broadly have steered clear of issues like zoning, which largely fall under the purview of state and local governments. +
++Thatâs starting to change in Washington, though, with both the House and Senate holding more hearings recently on housing affordability than each chamber has in years. Housing costs are generally the biggest bills voters are responsible for, and politicians are realizing they simply canât ignore it. +
++The president wants housing to be part of âBidenomicsâ +
++The Biden administration has talked previously about housing, but it wasnât an issue that stayed particularly high on the crowded legislative agenda. It fell out of the presidentâs $2 trillion Build Back Better package, and Biden rarely gave any speeches on the topic. +
++In 2022, his team did put out the Housing Supply Action Plan, a grab bag of proposals that the White House called âthe most comprehensive all of government effort to close the housing supply shortfall in history.â But housing advocates critiqued the administration for failing to really lead bipartisan housing negotiations in Congress, for not fighting hard for housing money in competitive spending bills, and for not working closely enough with the private sector to bring down construction costs. (Daniel Hornung, deputy director of the White Houseâs National Economic Council, told Vox they discuss housing often and itâs âpart of almost every economic conversation we have with members of Congress.â) +
++In promoting his economic agenda in the summer of 2023, in what would become known as âBidenomics,â the president emphasized three main planks: empowering workers, reviving domestic manufacturing, and reining in corporate power through competition. +
++Housing wasnât much part of that conversation, but the White House is trying to change that now. In a newly released report, the presidentâs staff economists dedicated an entire chapter to increasing the supply of affordable housing and called for more aggressive federal action to lower costs, like pressuring cities to loosen zoning laws. +
++For now, the presidentâs $258 billion housing proposals seem geared toward the election, elevating more popular issues like junk fees and rent gouging. Biden also proposed new tax credits for first-time homebuyers and for middle-class families selling their starter homes, and a new $20 billion grant program to increase housing production. And rather than running on a universal expansion of housing vouchers to all eligible renters, as he did in 2020, the president is now proposing an expansion of housing vouchers to more politically popular groups â low-income veterans and youth aging out of the foster care system. +
++Some conservatives criticized Bidenâs plan on the basis that the proposals would actually make things worse if supply didnât also significantly increase. âBidenâs backwards solution is to subsidize demand by handing out more government money to buyers, renters, and developers,â argued Judge Glock, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank. +
++It will be hard to make a real federal dent on housing without Congress, and itâs unlikely that any major congressional action will happen before the next election, with Republicans loathe to give Biden any more bipartisan victories to campaign on. While the House of Representatives did authorize a meaningful increase to the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program in January, that package looks increasingly dead in the Senate. Experts say the expiring Trump tax cuts in December 2025 look like the next big likely opportunity for new housing spending. +
++Until then, the president needs to walk a tight line between elevating the housing crisis and not polarizing it. The pro-housing âYes in My Backyardâ movement has been successful so far largely by building bipartisan coalitions. +
++Perhaps the biggest shift is really in the White Houseâs willingness to focus on the plight of renters, something tenant advocates say took years to finally see. +
++âIn the summer 2022, when inflation was really bad and the biggest driving factors were shelter and gas, the Biden administration never uttered the word ârent,ââ Raghuveer said. âTwo years later, they are talking about rent gouging and about exactly the policy solutions weâve been proposing since 2020, including conditions for federal subsidies, tax credits, and financing. The bar is really low but weâre breaking new ground.â +