America is the toxic food dumping ground of the world. This new infographic depicts that, explaining how most other nations have far more strict limits on contaminants (heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, dioxins, etc.) so when crops are heavily contaminated, they get sold to America where the USDA, FDA and EPA have near-zero testing and insanely high tolerances.
The FDA, to its credit, does test less than 5% of food imports (such as spices, turmeric, etc.) for lead, cadmium and mercury, but the USDA requires no testing whatsoever for heavy metals (not even for "organic" certification), and the EPA does very little actual testing of pesticide residues on crops that Americans consume every day.