Is rice safe to eat?

What would you do if, after many years of building a company, you learned that, through no fault of your own, your products contained potentially dangerous levels of a notorious poison?

That’s exactly what happened to American rice growers beginning in 2012, when reports surfaced in the media that rice contained worrisome levels of arsenic. The grain, it turns out, is uniquely efficient at pulling naturally occurring arsenic out of the soil and absorbing it—up to 10 times as efficient as, say, wheat.

This raised further questions: How should consumers respond to this new information? Should they continue eating rice as usual, stop eating it, or eat less? Are some rice products—baby cereal, for example—more dangerous than others?

These are not questions rice farmers can answer. “We’re not scientists,” Grant Lundberg, chief executive officer of Richvale-based Lundberg Family Farms, said in a phone interview. “We depend on researchers in universities and the government” to understand the issue and come up with standards and recommendations, he explained.

It’s complicated. Rice is a staple in the diet of half the world’s people, and it’s grown on hundreds of thousands of rice farms. The amount of arsenic in the soil varies from region to region. Even if consistent regulations were in place, monitoring production and enforcing those regulations would be difficult, if not impossible.

Not only that, so far the experts don’t agree on how much arsenic people can safely consume. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency holds that any dose of arsenic carries a cancer risk. Consumer Reports, which has studied the issue and done its own testing, recommends no more than 120 parts per billion in rice and rice products. Codex Alimentarius, a body that develops international food standards for the United Nations and the World Health Organization, has proposed a maximum level of 200 ppb specifically in white (or polished) rice.

Right now the rice industry is anticipating a long-awaited risk assessment and set of recommendations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that should provide consumers with definitive guidance on how much rice can be ingested safely. Nobody seems to know when the FDA’s report will be released, however.

In the meantime, industry spokespeople are insisting that rice remains a healthful and nutritious food, especially when eaten as part of a balanced diet that includes other grains.

If you go on the website of the California Rice Commission or the Farmers’ Rice Cooperative, two of the most important organizations serving the rice industry, you’ll find no mention of arsenic in rice. It’s not something people are interested in, apparently.

As Brandon Harder, the director of governmental affairs and communication at Farmers’ Rice, put it during a phone interview, “I’ve been working here a little over a year, and you’re the first person who has asked about it.”

Harder told me to call Jim Morris, the communications manager for the California Rice Commission. Morris was eager to help but couldn’t tell me much. “We have no scientists on staff,” he said, echoing Lundberg. Like others in the industry, the CRC is waiting for the FDA’s risk assessment.

“We want to be able to address customers’ concerns, and we support the FDA’s research,” Morris said. “We’re very comfortable that rice is safe.”

Morris referred me to the USA Rice Federation, which operates a website called Arsenic Facts. It notes that, according to a September 2013 report, FDA scientists have “determined that the amount of detectable arsenic is too low in the rice and rice product samples to cause any immediate or short-term adverse health effects.”

Also weighing in on the website is Dr. Stephen R. Daniels, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Nutrition. “These FDA data are reassuring,” he writes. “While there is inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products, it is at a level that should be safe for consumption across the population. Diets that follow the AAP guidelines include a variety of foods and a variety of grains and remain a healthful approach to eating for children and adolescents.”

For their part, the folks at Lundberg, the nation’s largest producer of organic rice and rice products, decided early on that they wanted to get out in front of the arsenic issue.

“Since this bubbled up in 2012,” Grant Lundberg said, “we’ve been committed to staying on the issue. … This comes from our principles as a company. We believe consumers have a right to know what’s in their food. We take that seriously.”

Wanting to create a three-year baseline for monitoring arsenic levels, Lundberg Family Farms tested its rice and rice products for arsenic in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and posted the results on its website, which also includes succinct but useful explanations of the issues surrounding arsenic in rice.

In its testing, the company determined that the average amount of arsenic in its products was 92 parts per billion, below the Consumer Reports threshold and well below the 200 ppb level set by Codex. This figure is doubly significant because the company tested only brown rice, whose arsenic levels tend to be higher than those of white rice.

“We just put the data out there so our consumers can make more informed choices,” Lundberg said.