food, wtf [paging upton sinclair]

[lapsedmodernist]

so ever since the pet food recall shit hit the fan, I have been glumly predicting that the tainted product will end up in the human food supply, and a month later, I am proven right.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20070501/hl_hsn/fdamillionsofchickensfedcontaminatedpetfood
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/business/worldbusiness/30food.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2007-04-30-chinese-imports-usat_N.htm
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/04/27/hogs_that_ate_melamine_not_fit_for_humans_fda_rules/

I especially liked this part of the NYT article on the subject:

In recent years, for instance, China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.


I am already scared of 80% of food...so, seriously, what is safe to eat now?

If something is certified organic, does that mean it definitely doesn't have the melamine-poisoned wheat gluten?

If I get something from local farms, is there guarantee that they didn't get ingredients from elsewhere that might contain this shit?

Free Trade and deregulation are awesome for the kidneys!

Comments

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

You ever read John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up? Good times!

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I have not read it and probably should not. I imagine it would prove to be a "poisonous" book for me and would probably be detrimental to my mental health. Of course, reality is detrimental to my mental health, too.

[the-macnab.livejournal.com]

Probably the strongest recommendation I can make against your reading it is to say that it profoundly shaped my outlook on these things.

[chelvis.livejournal.com]

hey hey it's not free trade's fault, if common markets exist, and they should exist, they just require efficient policing and standards to protect against the above mentioned incidents. If governments enter into bilateral contracts with other countries, then some countries get problems with things like farming subsidies, dumping goods in foreign markets, and poor quality standards. Instead of all that, what we need is some type of, oh, I don't know, an organization to govern world trade.

[klingrap.livejournal.com]

Woody Allen once said that someday science will discover that the only things that are actually good for you are chocolate and hamburgers.

Actually, maybe it wasn't Woody Allen. It may have just been my dad.

[macthud]

It was Woody. Sleeper is well worth the watching.

[beginnersmind.livejournal.com]

They baby powder the rice in China too, so that it will look more white. Also, they inject fruit with saringes of water so that it will weigh more (and thus cost more). Both relatively harmless, but creepy none the less.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

the water-in-fruit thing is pretty common, I think, they do it in South America, too, or so I was told. But cuttlefish in calligraphy ink?

When I was growing up, in USSR, there was this persistent urban legend about how the cheapest kind of ice-cream (there were only three kinds, all in all), was supposedly made from milk in which hospitals had bathed patients with skin diseases. This was creepy-sounding, but completely insane and untrue, not because the Soviet industry wouldn't do that, but because that is just not the kind of treatment sick people would get in the USSR, with milk shortages. Still, it made the ice-cream have this totally surreal, disgusting association attached to it...that's what the soy sauce from human hair and calligraphy ink and the birth control pills for eel sound like to me, except that apparently they are true?

[macthud]

It never ceases to amaze me (and it really *should* cease!) that even the people who've been forced to read 1984 and The Jungle and so many other fables of our not-so-distant-past have *so* little comprehension of their connections to reality.