IF YOU dine off the finest antique porcelain, beware. The chances are it is
tainting your food with quantities of lead that would be illegal in modern
dinner plates.
Ralph Sheets, a chemist at Southwest Missouri State University in
Springfield, tested samples of old crockery bought in antique shops and flea
markets around the US. He found that half of them exceeded limits set by the US
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for lead released by new tableware.
The lead comes mostly from the paints that were used to decorate the
porcelain. They were applied on top of the glaze, because the high temperatures
needed to glaze white china spoils many pigments. The metal is released
gradually from the paint when it reacts with atmospheric carbon dioxide
dissolved in the thin film of water that is present even on 鈥渄ry鈥� crockery.
There it accumulates, until the crockery is used.
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鈥淚 grew up eating off these dishes, and I don鈥檛 think it has done me any
harm,鈥� says Sheets. 鈥淏ut some dishes are certainly unsafe if used all the time.鈥�
And his paper in the current issue of The Science of the Total Environment (vol
212, p 107) warns that 鈥渙ld ceramic ware should not be used for the serving of
food鈥�. Lead can impair neurological development in children.
The worst offenders included a Japanese dish that was more than 250 times
over the FDA limit. Antique porcelain from Haviland Limoges in France and Roslyn
China in Britain also failed the lead test. The offending paint has long since
been phased out.