In 2023, Ellen Smith of Keeping Our Promise, an organization that helps resettle special immigrant visa holders who aided American troops during the war in Afghanistan, learned that children of families they were serving began seeing heightened levels of lead in their blood.
The source of the lead was unclear. Keeping Our Promise had replaced the families’ cooking pots — pressure cookers made in Afghanistan that were often contaminated with exceedingly high levels of lead — with brand-new pots and pans purchased from a local Price Rite.
Those pots and pans, made by Colombia-based Imusa, are made from cast aluminum and are extremely popular in immigrant communities. They’re cheap, durable, and due to their ability to heat evenly and quickly, are particularly good for making rice dishes with a consistent outer crust. They can also be bought at Walmart or online.
But when Smith sent a set of newly purchased pots to be tested at Nazareth College, she found out they also were contaminated with lead.
“There's no federal standard for lead in cookware, and people will say, ‘Well, there shouldn't be lead in cookware,’” Smith said. “And yes, there should not be lead in cookware. But the bottom line is there is, and there is no standard.”
Unregulated pots
The Food and Drug Administration advises that there is no safe level of lead exposure. But there is also no federal or state regulation on how much lead can be contained in cookware.
But Smith was not the first to have concerns about Imusa pots.
In 2019, King County in Washington began to research the amount of lead in cookware. An X-ray fluorescence (XRF) test of various pots found wildly different levels of lead. The investigators found that Imusa pots, at the high end, contained about 13 parts per million of lead. By comparison, the pressure cookers of Afghan origin sometimes exceeded 600 ppm.
That study led to the first state law adopted to cap the amount of lead contained in cookware. Adopted in 2024, the Washington law set a cap at 90 ppm beginning next year, with a goal of less than 20 ppm beginning in the coming decade.
Katie Fellows is an environmental scientist with the Hazardous Materials Program for Seattle and King County. She said the program identified the problem after it started seeing children of Afghan refugees with high levels of lead in their blood.
“We can recommend these families just stop using the cookware they brought with them from Afghanistan, purchase something locally in stores here, and maybe they would be safe. We decided that we should first test that cookware that they would might be purchasing,” Fellows said.
So, they purchased cookware and did XRF testing on it. And the results showed "you could still find cookware here in the United States on shelves in King County and in Seattle, Washington, that contained high amounts of lead.”
The Kings County study prompted the FDA to issue a letter warning of potential lead content in imported pots from a number of manufacturers. But the agency did not ban cookware from those manufacturers.
But despite the relatively low results in Imusa pots tested in Washington, the actual amount of the heavy metal can vary significantly from pot to pot, even in the same brand.
In the results from Nazareth, the amount of lead found in three tested pots ranged from 187 to 266 ppm. Biology professor Stephanie Zamule, who conducted the testing, was not available for comment.
Clare Robinson-Henrie is head of the Coalition to Prevent Lead Poisoning. She said that the accumulation of lead in aluminum cookware is generally the result of poor industrial practices in the pots’ production.
“It's generally not on purpose, it's accidental," she said. “It's a result of a bunch of different factors. But the challenge really becomes when it's been shown that they have leachable lead in them; it should be on these very big corporations to change their practices.”
Imusa’s corporate offices did not respond to a request for comment.
Robinson-Henrie partnered with Monroe County Legislature President Yversha Roman for an event last month dubbed Healthy Pots, Healthy Homes. It was meant to warn about the risks of potential lead contamination in cookware and offer suitable stainless-steel replacements.
She said that she still wanted to see additional testing done on the pots. For example, in the Washington study, food was tested after being cooked in various pots. At the high end, a single serving from an Imusa pot clocked in at 4.63 micrograms per 250 milliliter serving.
While there is no true safe dose of lead, the FDA recommends a cap of 2.2 micrograms per day for children.
“If you're eating from it daily, especially if you're a small kid, that can be more dangerous,” Robinson-Henri said. “It also depends on what you make in it. Foods that are more acidic might be able to pull the lead out faster. And if you're using it on really high heat regularly, that can also bring out the lead and allow the lead to leach more readily. If you're storing leftovers in the pots that were used to cook it, that can also be riskier.”
Cultural touchstones
The Imusa pots are popular with a wide range of people, but their affordability and culinary uses make them most attractive to both immigrants and poor communities.
Roman, the legislature president, is Puerto Rican. She said aluminum pots are something of a cultural touchstone: Every family has one, and everyone’s mother had one growing up.
“Those pots, unfortunately, especially the ones marketed in our communities, are and have been shown to have higher lead contents in them,” Roman said. “I think we know, right? Lead exposure contributes to learning disabilities, developmental delays, and speech delays. There are so many negative outcomes that come from lead exposure.”
Roman said effectively dealing with the risk of the contaminated pots is difficult for a variety of reasons, but not the least of which is how intertwined cultures become with their cookware.
“Many of us in the community were really excited about this cookware in our community,” she said. “It is typical to the Caribbean cuisine and South Asian cuisine to use this type of pot. I grew up using aluminum pots. It is, I would say, it's a part of our cultural cooking.”
Mubaraka Mohammadi is community program director for Keeping Our Promise, and an Afghan immigrant. She said she was aware of two families whose children had heightened levels of lead in their blood.
“They shouldn't be allowed to be sold in the stores. That's it, very simple,” she said. “...It's going to prevent many other issues in the future and long term, which is good for the immigrant and refugee community here in Rochester. And the poor people. It's not just the immigrant and refugee community.”
