China's food safety woes now a global concern

Source: MSNBC/AP

The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China’s chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.

In recent weeks, scores of cats and dogs in America have died of kidney failure blamed on eating pet food containing gluten from China that was tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers and flame retardants. While humans aren’t believed at risk, the incident has sharpened concerns over China’s food exports and the limited ability of U.S. inspectors to catch problem shipments.

“This really shows the risks of food purity problems combining with international trade,” said Michiel Keyzer, director of the Center for World Food Studies at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit.

Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18078824/

If Bushco funded port security properly. Obviously terrorists aren't the only problem in our ports.

The chinese are so hell-bent on growth at any cost, that they are truly destroying their own country.
I've read articles where Chinese industrialists just dump thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into rivers. Further downstream, hundreds of people get sick & die. These are their own people. They simply do not care.
They probably figure they've got a surplus of Chinese, so they can afford to "lose" a few.
It's really disgusting, and thank you for posting.
Remind me to NOT buy anything 'made in China'.

I used chinese medicine...but no naturalpath/herbs products from China.

manufactured in the u.s.

and we'll never know who supplied this or that or the other thing to the can of _____ that we open. especially if the label says distributed by an american firm but doesn't tell you where the product was manufactured.

Apparentyly they didn't get the memo on global warming.
We are so "screwn."
BHN

And they are going to take our economy down with them...

The third part, "Food is Heaven", shows farmers sloshing pesticide and waste-laden water over crops bound for market (and no safety equipment on them, either). The "environmental lawyer" segment is particularly alarming. Also I thought it was interesting, that apples grown for export in polluted areas have to ripen inside individual paper bags, or they will not get through the screening! (And I'm having increasing doubts about how widespread or rigorous that procedure is.)

I have been avoiding Chinese produce in the supermarket (tricky, because the store often doesn't say where things come from).


http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/specials/chinarises/foodisheaven/INTRO_FEATURE/alt_00.html

Just judging byt he headings. I'd expect nothing less from the New York Times.


How do you identify Chinese food products?

I've watched it numerous times -- and in the "Food" segment alone, it showcases pollution, economic disparities, and the impacts of runaway development. The globalization boosters, in China and outside, are made to look blissfully ignorant and outright greedy. The filmmakers spend most of the time talking to people like the Chinese lawyer who is trying to help local villagers take polluting companies to court, the Chinese environmental agency official who has been demoted numerous times for speaking out in public, and the peasants who have been forced off their land (and who are living in abject poverty in the countryside -- one woman spends hours each day trying to find sources of water). I showed the film to a Chinese professor who studies the social problems caused by industrialization, and she says it's pretty accurate.

There might be some ironic intent to the names of the segments. ("Food is Heaven" refers to an old Chinese saying ... alluding to the fact that so many in the past did not have adequate food, and also to the major role that food plays in Chinese culture. Using food as an example, the documentary makes the case that the Chinese government (and some of the people) have been so eager for prosperity that they have forgotten their heritage and social responsibility ... forsaking traditional food, and customs such as the sharing of food to make sure that everybody in the community was fed, for Western fast food and cut-throat capitalism.

meanwhile, the get mifed about our software protection laws......

Do something smart for once, Congress!

Keep the Chinese mafiosi from poisoning us with adulterated or counterfeit goods.

The food is as rancid and polluted as the air,ground and water.

Send the Chinese take out to Africa

you think Africans need tainted food any more than we do?

(or did you forget this: :sarcasm:)

Montezuma isn't just a WMD anymore

I used to live in a place where there were many Chinese restaurants. Many of them were indeed filthy and rat infested. I also fortunately knew of many Chinese people that would not eat at these places and they would make it a point to tell people which ones to avoid. :puke:

:kick:

The corporatists will kill us all.
BHN

The average bite of American food travels 1200 to 1500 miles. Buy locally. Fresher, less transport costs, you know who is growing your food, and housing developments aren't as likely to grow in the land near where you live. Most in my area are organic or pesticide-free. Strawberries and apples are foods you really want to avoid if they are not organically grown.

:scared::scared::scared:

"Don't eat that shit," I tell myself after having done some "looking around" totally bummed cuz nothing floats my boat like black bean and garlic sauce in a jar...

without Jacuzzi jet-boat diarrhea

They are little CHINESE Louisiana Lobsters!

with Salmonella!

And I don't see it going away any time soon.

...A unique combination of culture, residual communism, and economic growth-cum-liberalization has brought China to the brink of a full-blown ecological disaster. It is a commonly held belief in China that the good of the whole far outweighs the benefit of a few. Communist leaders, working in a strange comradery with the new captains of industry, have used this belief to excuse factories from pollution controls. Industrialists dump waste into rivers, blacken the air with soot, and continue to deplete forests (just like their public sector predecessors did, only more efficiently)...

(In) my year-and-a-half of living in China, I met few people with environmental concerns. Some have compared the level of China's environmental awareness to that of Eastern Europe before the Chernobyl meltdown, i.e. they need some kind of wake up call. Most Chinese are used to trusting their leadership utterly—so many Chinese are still not even aware the problems even exist. Consider this anecdote:

One day, I went with my students on a field trip to an amusement park. We drove through some heavily industrialized areas, where the smog limited visibility to less than a quarter mile. We drove past factories making Ikea furniture and Nike shoes as well as Chinese brands. As a Westerner, I felt a certain degree of complicity in causing their pollution problems, since so much of our stuff is made there in factories that produce levels of gunk that would never be acceptable in the US. You could barely see up the road. "Is it always like this here?" I asked a student. "Yes," he said. "It is very foggy here."

This was not a grammatical mistake. He actually believed that the black soot in the sky was fog. The next week, I wrote the word smog on the blackboard and asked what it meant. No one knew. I pointed out the classroom window at the darkened horizon. "Oh, fog!" they said. After I attempted to explain to them the difference between smog and fog, most of them gave dubious looks. They didn't believe me. Obviously "smog" was just a silly Western concept. (It's worth noting that these were the children of wealthy industrialists—industrialists who provide the fodder for the Communist party projects.

http://www.abetterearth.org/Stories/id.3387/story_detail.asp

Very interesting story...It shows the true paranoia of the West...but then again, years of imperialism will create that.

This is one of the most important dilemmas the world faces - how can poorer nation develop and increase living standards without destroying their environment?

They censor news of China's environmental disasters or China's growing labor unrest. We live in a fantasy of how China is grateful to become consumers and capitalists, and they don't face any of the problems we faced before labor, environment and civil rights movements were organized. I think the US would be better served knowing the complexities of globalization, but apparently corporate media wants to keep it simple.

Source: By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN

SHANGHAI, CHINA — The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef's nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China's chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.

In recent weeks, scores of cats and dogs in America have died of kidney failure blamed on eating pet food containing gluten from China that was tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers and flame retardants. While humans aren't believed at risk, the incident has sharpened concerns over China's food exports and the limited ability of U.S. inspectors to catch problem shipments.

"This really shows the risks of food purity problems combining with international trade," said Michiel Keyzer, director of the Center for World Food Studies at Amsterdam's Vrije University.



Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/4711115.html

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As 'free trade' become more of a reality, these cheap good may be tempting. Buyer beware.

I think that the pet food fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg. Where did I read that the US inspects only 1% of the food coming into this country? I need to find that info.

on edit: Found it.

"The FDA inspects about 1% of the imported foods it regulates, down from 8% in 1992 when imports were far less common."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-03-18-food-safety-usat_N.htm

It makes shopping a bit of a hassle, but it's worth it.
Even if my farmer is a grumpy guss.

so to speak. Cheat the americans, they deserve it seems to be the attitude over there. It's sure a sorry thing when any country puts nation above humans, above safety. I'm certain it has always been this way, as long as evil has been around some folks will cheat and kill others. Kinda like our current administration. Cheaters and liars, seems like almost every government is made of them.

sorry moderators.

I have traveled much and standards vary from country but some countries are particularly bad when it comes to sanitation standards. We were bad prior to the establishment of the FDA. There is a lot of black market stuff to begin with. There is no need for this. Standards need to rise and consumer awareness id one way. The pet food scandal is the opening salvo.