You know those little silver balls you use to decorate cakes and cookies? Well, they have a name - dragées. And apparently they are bad, bad, bad for you. They contain silver! Which is almost as bad as mercury, except not really!

Some guy in California (of course) has apparently dedicated his life to the eradication of this evil menace, and is merrily suing bakers and decorators across the land.

How bad for you are they? Well Jim Hu did the math:

So...if you ate a 25 g package (which has hundreds of individual dragées), you'd ingest about 20 mg of silver. The amount of silver in a bunch of cookies would be more in the range of tenths of mgs.
emedicine writes:
The normal human body contains approximately 1 mg of silver; the smallest amount of silver reported to produce generalized argyria in humans ranges from 4-5 g to 20-40 g. Silver at 50-500 mg/kg body weight is the lethal toxic dose in humans.

So you'd really have to go crazy on these puppies to do any damage. And although I'm sure there are destructive individuals out there who would eat entire packages, the danger to your children seems small. And if you are letting them eat that many cookes anyway, you have other problems.

On the bright side, a society in which the toxicity of cake decorations is seen as a major threat is a comfortable society indeed.

On that note, have a Merry Christmas (insert other holiday here). I am going to my parents' for a few days, where there is only dialup internet access.

I plan to spend the time reading Virginia Postrel's book, which is fitting since I found the dragée story her site.

Posted by Ginna Dowler
(Cross-posted to Gin and Tonic)