Flowering Tea - Vassia Atanassova (Spiritia)

Every time I drive from the South Bay to the East Bay, I pass the Numi tea factory and start to crave a hot cup. I love tea–the ritual of heating and pouring the water, the warm mug in my hands and the slow sipping as it cools–and Numi makes some of my favorites.

Knowing this, a friend recently gave me a Numi gift box: "FLOWERING TEA^TM handsewn leaves blossom when steeped." Pleased but confused, I did some research, and quickly figured it out.

Did you ever get those pill-shaped foam toys when you were a kid? You'd throw one in water, the capsule would dissolve, and the foam would expand into a huge dinosaur or shark.

Flowering tea is the classy grown-up version of grow monsters.

Grow Capsules - Alibaba

The teas don't expand quite as much as the toys, so you might be able to guess they're using a different technology. Grow monsters showed up in the 1970s, using super-absorbent polymers originally developed for medicine and hygiene (think diapers). Super-absorbent polymers are long-chain molecules that bind with water so enthusiastically that they can absorb up to 500 times their weight. (I presume that's why it says "expands hundreds of times!" on some toy packages; an inch-long capsule certainly does not expand to a 40-foot dinosaur.)

Blooming teas don't contain any super-absorbent polymers—only tea leaves and flowers. But because they've been dried, they have a lot of room to expand when soaked in water again. A Star Trek alien once called humans "ugly bags of mostly water," and the same could be said of almost all Earthling animals and plants. Fresh tea leaves contain 75-80% water, but are dried down to 2-7% before being sold as tea (flowering or otherwise). When you add water to this dried biological bundle, it readily expands and uncurls according to the whim of the tea artist.

Numi's Dragon Lily (which I drank while writing this post)

Numi isn't the only place to get blooming tea–you can also find it at Red Blossom Tea Company and Peet's, among others.

Of course, San Franscisco hipsters are keen to debate whether it is truly hip or merely a "gimmick." Apparently, no one is sure how long blooming tea has been around. It might be just a few decades old (about the same age as grow monsters–coincidence?) but there are thousand-year-old Chinese references to "display teas." These weren't quite the same as modern blooming teas, because nobody actually drank the water the display teas were steeped in–they were strictly for entertainment.

Just like grow monsters, come to think of it.

The paint on this piggy bank tested for lead at 7253 parts per million (ppm); that is 11 times higher than the legal limit for lead paint.

Editor's Note: This week we have the first of two special reports on lead.

As a parent, there is a lot to worry about when it comes to the safety of my kids. Lead wasn't high on my list. Lead poisoning in children has dropped significantly in recent decades since the ban on lead-based paint in homes and the phase-out of leaded gasoline. Then came the record toy recalls of 2007, where millions of imported items coated in lead paint and made by household names like Mattel and Fisher Price violated the 30-year-old lead law.

Suddenly, parents, including me, eyed the toys in our homes and on store shelves with suspicion. Extensive research links lead exposure in children to lower IQ scores, neurological and behavioral problems, even anemia.

The toy recalls prompted congress to pass the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

The Act not only lowers limits for lead and bans certain kinds of phthalates–it makes manufacturers and distributors accountable for products sold to American consumers by requiring items to be certified by third-party labs. But the testing, or certification piece of the Act, was postponed for a year. That raised a lot of questions for me as a reporter and as a parent.

I contacted the Center for Environmental Health, which researches lead, and other toxics, in consumer items and has sued manufacturers and distributors for violating standards.

CEH and KQED were interested in looking at what's sold at discount chains and 99 cent stores because of the history of previous recalls. CEH, through its regular spot testing, also thought that many of the larger retail outlets seem to have improved their process to weed out lead in children's items after the 2007 recalls.

I got some tips from CEH about potentially problematic products to look for. We purchased about 200 items and then CEH did the first round of testing using an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) device. The XRF is a handy tool used by a lot of commercial lead inspectors. It shoots high-energy x-rays at the item and sends back a chemical analysis, including the lead content.

Most items that exceeded the lead limits (600 parts per million) set by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act using the XRF device were then sent to a federally-accredited lab, MACS in Hayward, for detailed testing. At the lab, the parts or components that exceeded the lead limits were cut or scraped off and dissolved in an acid solution. Then tests were run to determine the lead content.

View a slide show of several of the items that violate the new lead limits below. We've also put together a list of items that violate the new lead limits, along with the test results.

So how can parents keep leaded toys away from kids? In addition to avoiding vinyl products, stay away from metal jewelry.

If you can, choose natural wood toys instead of painted items, especially if they are in yellow. Check the recall list posted by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Many companies sell home lead test kits for consumer products. They're not 100-percent reliable and can give false negatives-and false positives too. If you're really concerned about your child's lead level, the best thing to do is to get a blood lead test.

Listen to the Playing with Lead – Part 1 radio report online.

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Artificial Turf. Credit: Anthony V. Thompson

And that's just the beginning. Lead has been found in venetian blinds, in pens, in the glaze of ceramic cups and bowls. It has been found in imported candies. And one Mexican folk remedy to cure stomachaches has landed a number of children in the hospital recently – a packet of powder that is almost entirely lead.

Since the effects of lead are cumulative, all those points of contamination add up.

Children's developing brains and central nervous systems are most susceptible to damage from ingesting lead. That's why a new federal standard for lead in children's products was recently put in place. And that's why the Center for Environmental Health, for one, focuses on products that come in contact with children on a daily basis.

The amount of lead in artificial turf, by itself, is unlikely to cause lead poisoning. And the same is true for the amount of lead found in lunch boxes, or in children's jewelry. But medical experts say that if kids play on artificial turf in the morning, distractedly put a charm bracelet in their mouths during class, and eat food from a lunch box with lead embedded in the vinyl – then those kids are at risk for lead impairment, such as a loss of IQ points, a sign of brain damage. For more, listen to the QUEST Radio story, or check our photos below.

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