Dangerous Dining: Tainted Food From China
My mom has always told me that I must never buy food that was imported from mainland China.
The first time she said this, very long ago, I asked why not.
Her Taiwanese housewife friends had told her all kinds of terrible stories about tainted Chinese food imports. Besides, my mom said, food imports from China are just plain dangerous. "You don't know what could be in there," she insisted. "They don't have the same health standards that we do."
By "they" she meant China, and by "we" she meant America. She added, "There are health inspectors here in America. Who knows what they do in China?"
So, if an outsider had heard this conversation, he might have thought, "Oh, these ladies have an anti-China bias anyway." Maybe. But Mom turned out to be absolutely right.
Do you remember the tainted Chinese kimchi exported to South Korea in 2005? Korean health inspectors condemned the kimchi as unfit for eating. It had been contaminated with bacteria from untreated sewage.
After that, I made a point out of checking the origin of every Asian food import I buy, and I told all my friends to do the same thing. Who wants to get sick from eating contaminated food?
Then today's Washington Post ran this horrifying story of massive amounts of tainted food from China, imported to the US. Here's the start of it:
Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical. Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics. Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria. Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides. These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines. For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught -- many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry. Now the confluence of two events -- the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China -- has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up. |