Stats

Cash: 10.9%
Core: 78.6%
Explore: 10.5%
Workout: 30min dog walk (still fighting the cold, but I'm winning now)
Alcohol: Sam Adams Kellerbier
Sleep: 11pm to 6:45am, rested (thank you again NyQuil)

Scary Thoughts

I spent a decade in Japan, and my wife is Japanese, so a lot of Japanese food is eaten in my house. One of the staples of Japanese cuisine is miso soup:

The miso paste is made from fermented soybeans, and the soup will typically contain tofu and wakame, a type of seaweed. We usually buy a high quality wakame imported from Japan, but that brand was sold out the other day, so my wife bought this much cheaper brand:

Looks innocent enough, right? After we get home, she flips the bag over and sees a special message:

I've seen this message on flat-pack furniture that uses formaldehyde in the manufacturing process, so I was a bit surprised to see it on a food item. I did a little digging and found a 22-page pdf file provided by the State of California that lists ALL the chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. This obviously didn't narrow it down very much, so I did a little more digging and found that seaweed in general contains high concentrations of organic arsenic. (Note, this is not "organic" in the supermarket sense, but rather "organic" in the organic chemistry sense.) While inorganic arsenic is a known carcinogen and toxin (think rat poisin), apparently organic arsenic is safely metabolized and non-toxic. I guess Prop 65 doesn't distinguish between different kinds of arsenic, so it just issues the blanket warning, because liability.

In the end we decided to throw it away, not trusting the overall food safety record of the country of origin. For all I know they wash it in formaldehyde, so better safe than sorry ;-)

Happy Thoughts

Sophie decided to build herself a den tonight, I guess she's trying to keep warm:

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