News like this is a bit disconcerting, if not border-line, paranoid-frightful (via USAToday):

In tests for arsenic in more than 1,300 samples of rice and rice products, the Food and Drug Administration has found levels vary but overall are far too low to cause any immediate or short-term adverse health effects.
…
“Nobody wants arsenic, period,” Hamburg said. “But it’s a fact of life, it’s in soil.”

(Illustration found here).

Of course, considering all the other shit bordering our living and sanity, arsenic in rice is most-likely down on the terror-level chart, though, the numbers make it a bit creepy:

The results, out Friday, represent the first time FDA has released broad numbers on arsenic’s presence in rice products.
The findings show the highest average levels in brown rice, the lowest in rice wine.
The brown rice had 160 parts per billion inorganic arsenic per serving, infant rice cereal 120 and rice wine 11.
Arsenic comes in two chemical forms, organic and inorganic.
Inorganic arsenic is more common. It occurs in rocks and is a known human carcinogen.
Organic arsenic is considered harmless.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set arsenic limits for drinking water at 10 parts per billion, by comparison.
Officials note that Americans drink much more water than they eat rice.
Except for apple juice, federal agencies have not yet detailed safe limits in other foods.

And this ‘first time’ has apparently been long in coming:

Last year, the magazine Consumer Reports called for the FDA to set limits for acceptable arsenic content in rice after it found levels potentially above what some consider safe.
The magazine editors are very pleased that the FDA has released the new numbers, said Urvashi Rangan, director of consumer safety for Consumers Union, the policy division of Consumer Reports, based in Yonkers, N.Y.
“It’s an important step that needed to be taken to deal with a food product that’s particularly prone to taking up arsenic,” she said.

Even in such a low-esteem danger, and awareness of poisonous rice, there seems to be more afoot in this FDA report than meets the chopsticks.
Noted science writer, Deborah Blum, offers some insights in a post at Wired:

As since we already know that short term is not the problem, why did the FDA feel a need to state the obvious today?
My own suspicion is that the agency is part responding to growing consumer concerns about the safety of rice.
The issue was bumped up in prominence last fall when Consumer Reports published a detailed analysis of rice products sold in the US, concluding that far too many rice products contained “worrisome levels” of arsenic.
They were referring to worrisome, of course, in the long term sense.
The FDA responded by announcing that it had begun its own analysis of rice, that early results showed no real problem, but that more information would be forthcoming.
This did not stop people from worrying.
I think I actually appreciated how deep those concerns were running when a story in The New York Times food section, mostly about a recipe for beet green, rice and ricotta blinis was titled “Brown Rice and the Arsenic Conundrum.”
So I see in today’s move a deliberate move to more loudly reassure.
And I also suspect that it’s also designed to reassure the US rice industry, which has expressed growing unhappiness over the arsenic story.
In most coverage of the FDA announcement, you’ll find representatives of the USA Rice Federation basically celebrating: “The FDA has provided American consumers with renewed assurances that there is no need to change a well-balanced diet that includes rice,” a spokeswoman told USA Today.
A notable exception to such cheer is the story from The Consumerist, which is published by the same company that publishes Consumer Reports, and which hailed the FDA announcement merely as confirmation of widespread arsenic contamination of rice.
…
And we should also acknowledge the bigger message, somewhat unfortunately buried in today’s FDA statement, that the really serious work has yet to be done.
Agency scientists are preparing to do a health analysis of long-term effects because that’s actually the major issue here.
They’re also planning to do more analysis of individual rice species and to look at geographic issues – where are the highest arsenic rice plants grown in the United States (mostly the South), are there species of rice that tend to take less arsenic out of the soil (most researchers praise basmati rice in that regard.”
In other words, the real serious work, the one that addresses the big picture health questions, has yet to be done.

This is just another indicator that humans don’t really know what we’re doing — feeding millions of people in this industrial age is mind-bungling in its scope and violence (i.e., slaughterhouses) in the required rush to get all these various components to keep us alive and kicking. Just thinking about the fragile systems in which we depend — now that’s enough to scare the shit out of you.
The liquor store I manage is right next to a Safeway super market — standing out back on a cigarette break I can watch the tractor-trailer rigs unload their goods. Safeway trucks carry the same slogan on their big trailers: Safeway — “Ingredients for Life.”

Now, that’s shitty-scary.

Arsenic: A metalloid element most commonly occurring as a gray crystal, but also found as a yellow crystal and in other forms. Arsenic and its compounds are highly poisonous and are used to make insecticides, weed killers, and various alloys. Atomic number 33; atomic weight 74.922; valence 3, 5. Gray arsenic melts at 817°C (at 28 atm pressure), sublimes at 613°C, and has a specific gravity of 5.73.