Kale: An Interesting Little Article

[DamonIRB]

The scientific world has known about Thallium for 150 years and it has hardly made a blimp on anyone's radar as a concern for ingestion with various food items. It's just another heavy metal that is similiar to lead. It is no where near as toxic as lead though. Beyond that, thallium requires a fairly alkaline soil; it can barely survive in an acidic soil, which is required to grow kale. The only way it could be in the kale is if it is in the soil and is leaching into the plant. With the soil at 6.5-ish, the thallium isn't going to be sufficient enough for leaching to occur.

I agree with Sojourner... even if thallium were in your kale, you would have to eat 5 lbs of it a day, every day, for weeks, if not months, for it to even show up as a trace amount on a toxicology test. You, and your birds, are going to be struck by lightning before you get thallium poisoning from kale.