© unknownPork that glows blue because of the presence of bacteria was purchased in a Shanghai market in April.
Almost all of the attention we've paid to food safety in recent weeks has been fixed on the
deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany. And justifiably so. But if you happen to have taken a peek at China in the last few months you would have seen an eye-popping string of food safety oddities culminating in the state-sponsored suppression of journalists.
As I mentioned in
my column today there was the famous village wedding at which
more than half of the 500 guests were hospitalized after eating pork contaminated with Clenbuterol, a drug that accelerates fat burning and muscle growth. (It makes pigs grow faster and leaner, and when consumed in excess by humans can cause nausea, convulsions, dizziness, vomiting and heart palpitations.) Clenbuterol was banned from pig feed in the 1990s, but is still used under the name "lean pork powder."
The sickening of nearly 300 people from ingesting pig steroids is probably the least bizarre of China's recent food safety "blunders." There are the
watermelons that began exploding in Eastern China, due to (according to China Central Television) overuse of a chemical that makes them grow faster; the
raw pork that glows blue because of phosphorescent bacteria; and the discovery that one in ten meals is cooked using
oil dredged from the sewers (collected under the cover of darkness from drains behind restaurants, filtered, and resold).
A lack of ingenuity is clearly not the problem: China has also boasted
pork disguised and sold as beef (using a legal and fairly benign additive),
counterfeit eggs made from chemicals and egg-shaped molds, and
soy sauce made using clippings of human hair. (Are you reading this? Have you fallen over yet?)
In the wake of China's worst recent food-safety-related disaster, in which
melamine-tainted milk sickened 300,000 babies and killed six in 2008, the government has been actively trying to crack down on all manners of "tainted food," but it's clear from recent events that the state has its hands full. On June 13th,
China's health ministry said that it was trying to clamp down on media outlets "deliberately misleading" the public about food safety issues, the idea being
to blacklist the irresponsible journalists who are risking harm to the development of China's food industry. A
recent Los Angeles Times article quoted Phelim Kine, a researcher for Human Rights Watch: "In China, the reflexive desire to cover up and hide has trumped transparency and the need to protect public health."
Sadly, you could say the exact same thing about the U.S.
Our agricultural system is opaque, and works hard to hide all sorts of "peculiarities" from public view; from the (comparatively tame-sounding) threat of spreading drug-resistant bacteria to humans after
using 80% of our antibiotics on animals, or the prevalence of
GMO-containing products in our supermarkets, to the literal enslavement of farm workers, or the horrific abuses of some factory-farmed animals.
If the dark bellies of our food system were constantly dragged into the light we'd be inundated with stories like these: Pig "brain machine" cripples Hormel workers,
chemicals hospitalize 173 Tyson Chicken employees and
undercover video documents unspeakable pig abuse.
Reports like these are unpleasant at best, and downright nauseating at worst. I want to watch a piglet get tortured about as little as the next guy, but if we're never (or seldom) allowed to see how screwed up our food "system" is, how will we ever know to make a fuss to fix it? Same goes for China, but let's clean house here first.
Reader Comments
China like Japan has made a faustian deal with the devil for easy money. Japan , a Nation that saw firsthand the effects of Hiroshima & Nagasaki has doomed itself , & the World , with experimentation with nuclear energy ( if anyone could have invented a better energy source it would have been Japan) - FukUshima.
China that saw firsthand the effects of the Great Leap Forward when 30 million people died and cannibalism was rife - flooded her agricultural heartland, & now scrambles with bizarre food experimentation to feed her billion people.
Both in the name of PROFITS both to feed GREED! J'accuse!
I don't think we have to worry about China overtaking us. They will poison themselves if they don't collapse from internal strife.
Our worry is will they poison us too? Its difficult to find Tilapia that doesn't come from China's sewers(perhaps an exaggeration, but who knows if there is no regulation).