Your Spice Cabinet, U.S.A. (The Daily Whatever Press) — There is lead in the fucking cinnamon, again.
Galil Importing Corp. of Hauppauge, New York, recalled its Lior Cinnamon Ground Seasoning this week after testing found elevated lead in 3.2-ounce plastic tubs sold at grocery stores, delis, and supermarkets in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, and Illinois from November 18, 2025, through September 7, 2026. That’s ten months on the shelf — an entire school year of French toast.
So who caught it? Not the Food and Drug Administration, an agency whose name is literally its job description. The Maryland Department of Health pulled a sample, ran it, and found the lead. Maryland isn’t even on the official distribution list, which tells you how well anyone knows where this tainted stuff actually went.
Why is a state health lab carrying the federal government’s lunch tray? In 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cut about 10,000 jobs, roughly 3,500 of them at the FDA. The agency fired 89 people from its Human Foods Program, including ten chemical safety staffers hired to review unsafe ingredients, according to the deputy commissioner who resigned over it and called the firings “beyond short-sighted,” possibly the most polite sentence ever written by a man watching his house burn.
Then the FDA suspended quality-control testing for its network of about 170 food labs because the layoffs had taken out a quality assurance officer, an analytical chemist, and two microbiologists.
They fired the chemists. Lead: one. Science: zero.
We already did this, assholes
I am from the leaded generation. GenX rode in the way-back of wood-paneled station wagons with no seatbelts, sucking down leaded exhaust, while our little brothers gnawed on windowsills painted during the Nixon administration. Getting the lead out took my entire childhood: decades of regulation, science, and nerds with clipboards. Now I’m raising two daughters in a country where the lead snuck back in through the spice aisle.
This isn’t even the first cinnamon crime scene. In 2023, apple cinnamon puree pouches — food for babies fer fucks sake — contained cinnamon testing between 2,270 and 5,110 parts per million of lead, and the FDA found lead chromate, a yellow pigment, at the Ecuadorian manufacturer. Somebody dyed the cinnamon. Since then, the FDA’s cinnamon naughty list has grown to 16 brands and counting.
Neil Young did not write “Cinnamon Girl” about a toddler’s blood lead panel.
Meanwhile, at MAHA headquarters
The man who built an entire movement on the premise that poison is hiding in your food spent this week launching a formal HHS inquiry into… cell phones, Wi-Fi, smart meters, and 5G. This follows his recent assurance to a conspiratorial audience that federal agencies are looking into chemtrails. Also this week, the Wall Street Journal reported he moved $12 million out of the Office of Minority Health to pay for his own security detail.
So let’s compare. Lead is a known neurotoxin that a state chemist can measure with an actual instrument. Chemtrails are what your uncle yells at the sky after his third Coors Light. Guess which one got a formal Request for Information.
Great.
Guess who checks the pantry…
And who does the government want to clean this up? You. The FDA’s advice is to check your home and throw the product out. This is the important part: Look for UPC 794711005484 and lot code GAP11304 on the side of the tub, under the ingredient list, in print sized for ants.
Now picture who, in most American households, is squinting at the back of a spice tub at 9pm with a phone flashlight in her teeth. It sure as shit isn’t the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The federal government has outsourced food safety to Maryland and to moms, and neither of us got the budget.
For the record, no illnesses have been reported, and the FDA says permanent damage comes when a kid eats enough for weeks or months. This one is a warning light more than a catastrophe. But the people we paid to read the warning lights got fired, and the guy who fired them is out chasing radio waves.
Lead doesn’t care who you voted for. It only cares how small your kid is.
RECALL NOTICE: One (1) Secretary of Health and Human Services, distributed nationwide from February 13, 2025, through the present. Contains elevated levels of bullshit. Do not consume. Return to place of purchase — the United States Senate — for a refund.
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
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RFK …driving out to the suburbs, to park at the Goodwill and stare at the chemtrails…
A commentary on the gullibility and idiocy of the MAGA voters - they must’ve been served cinnamon covered paint chips, their entire childhood 🤬