Black & Decker Rice Cooker

Best would be to stop eating rice. All of it has arsenic. Some of it (like brown rice) has a lot. The full report is in the November 2012 Consumer Reports.

Being an online CR subscriber it isn't easy for me to tell which articles are available to non-subscribers. But numerous links are here:

You no need rice cooker, cook authentic in pan of boiling water on stove.

Yes, "authentic" is better. There is less arsenic when cooked the traditional way. Americans tend to add the exact amount of water, so that it is all absorbed. The traditonal way was in boiling water with the water then poured off through a strainer. Doing it this way will reduce the arsenic, as much will go out with the water.

Don.

Hi, Throw out that junk. Go to a Japanese or Korean grocery store and buy a micro processor controlled automatic rice/pressure cooker. Just put in rinsed rice, measured water. Close the lid and lock it. Push a button after selecting menu. It is done in about 20 mins. You can cook many other things with it. One in our kitchen is ~5 years old and still working fine. Cheapest plain cooker is about 10.00 bucks.

Just switch to foreign-grown rice. It's the US-grown rice that has the biggest problem, thanks to the poultry and pig producers feeding arsenic-laced feed to their animals. The manure is used in rice fields and is picked up by the rice.

Let me go back and reread the article... The article does not specifically state that foreign-grown is better, but none of the six foreign-grown that they tested is in red.

That is only part of the problem. I quote from Consumer Reports:

"White rice grown in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas, which account for 76 percent of domestic rice, generally had higher levels of total arsenic and inorganic arsenic in our tests than rice samples from elsewhere.

"That south-central region of the country has a long history of producing cotton, a crop that was heavily treated with arsenical pesticides for decades in part to combat the boll weevil beetle."

Don.

I have the Consumer Reports article open for my other post, so let me quote what they wrote about this:

Change the way you cook rice

---------------------------- You may be able to cut your exposure to inorganic arsenic in rice by rinsing raw rice thoroughly before cooking, using a ratio of 6 cups water to 1 cup rice for cooking and draining the excess water afterward. That is a traditional method of cooking rice in Asia. The modern technique of cooking rice in water that is entirely absorbed by the grains has been promoted because it allows rice to retain more of its vitamins and other nutrients. But even though you may sacrifice some of rice's nutritional value, research has shown that rinsing and using more water removes about

Don.