Brad's Kale Chips Were Recalled for Rat Poison, and Brad Is Fine

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — Brad’s Raw Chips, a snack whose brand name has always been less a description than a dare, have been recalled from across the United States because they may contain thallium, a metal best known as the classic ingredient of rat poison, in what the FDA confirmed Tuesday after the company agreed to pull roughly 25,000 bags of crunchy kale from the food chain of an entire nation.

The affected products are Brad’s Plant Based Crunchy Kale and Brad’s Veggie Chips Kale, in flavors with names like Cheeze It Up and Radical Ranch, distributed nationwide and — a timeline only the snack industry could produce — sold through much of last year, recalled this year, and stamped with best-by dates running through next spring. Brad’s chips, in other words, live in all four seasons at once, and at least two of them are dangerous.

The health news, offered by the CDC with appropriate gravity, is that enough thallium causes hair loss, numbness in the hands and feet, and problems for the heart and gut. It also has no taste, which is its main talent. Everything else about it, including the fact that it has been standard issue in rat poison since before anyone invented the word “kale,” the FDA described in the dry prose of an agency that has recalled a great deal in its time and has clearly never once been handed a bag of chips by a man named Brad.

The public, to its credit, has responded with the level of panic the situation does not warrant and the snacks deserve.

“I’ve eaten worse salads,” said Marguerite Esquivel, 54, of Coral Gables, who said she had already finished a bag of the Radical Ranch before the recall and felt “structurally unchanged.” A nutritionist at a downtown juice bar defended the product on grounds this desk found creative: thallium is a mineral, she noted, and minerals are, after all, why spinach exists. City officials urged calm. The mayor’s office issued a statement advising residents to “chew responsibly,” which is not a phrase any mayor’s office has ever needed before.

A tenth-grader at a school two blocks from the company’s mailing address, asked whether the recall would change his snacking, said he “wasn’t even eating them” and then, after a pause that reporters have come to think of as the sound of a decision, said he would “keep an eye on the cheese ones.”

The company has not commented. The chips remain on counters, cupboards, and gas-station freezers next to the lottery tickets, and at one Coral Gables convenience store Wednesday morning, the clerk said nobody had complained. Nobody’s hair, she added, had mentioned anything.