China out of control

We were eyeing off the price difference between farmed and wild scallops in the supermarket tonight. It has always been an ethical preference to buy farmed fish since they are a renewable resource, so to speak. The wild fish are twice the price - and rightly so. But we noticed that the farmed scallops came from China and immediately we recoiled in horror. Such is the impact spurred by the Chinese pollution of the food chain.

Their toxins now are in fish food - and young farmed fish fed with their cheating ingredients are suspected to have been liberated into the streams of America. Heaven alone knows what the Chinese are using as feed in their own fish farms. One can only imagine that yet more corners have been cut. One simply has no trust in the Chinese any more.

Now there are poor people with kidney failure from the antifreeze ingredient, diethylene glycol, the Chinese substituted for glycerine. People drank it in cough syrups - took it as medicine to make them well. What a grotesque irony.

Sick and dead people, sick and dead pets, polluted fish...
Where will it end?

I'm now boycotting all foods from China. Every thinking person should do so.
In fact, they should boycott the Olympics, too.

China and melamine

The poisonous petfood horror story gets bigger and bigger now the killer ingredient has been traced back to a massive Chinese scam of adding melamine to feed and fertiliser products to give them a false reading on protein content.
China turns out to have an industry devoted just to turning coal into melamine to enable Chinese companies to cheat their market. It is standard practice.

Wikipedia, as ever a brilliant resource, offers a succinct understanding of just what melamine is. It explains:
Melamine is used combined with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, a very durable thermosetting plastic, and of melamine foam, a polymeric cleaning product. The end products include countertops, fabrics, glues and flame retardants. Melamine is one of major components in Pigment Yellow 150, a colorant in inks and plastics.
Melamine is also used to make fertilizers.

The awful issue here is that China, in the grip of capitalist frenzy, is employing any devious method of finding added profit that it can devise. Brilliant people with a brief for expediency will find some nasty shortcuts if there are no regulations to stop them.

The scam may now be exposed, but the problem remains, with melamine-containing feed and fertiliser products exported all over the world - and, alarmingly, some US pork products already out in the market before it was realised that the pigs had been fed melamine-containing swill.
Of course, it may yet come to pass that we discover that farm animals around the world have been eating it for years. After all, the idea behind the melamine con is that the foodstuff is rich in protein to help with the fast growth of animals.

One greed feeds another greed.
Again.

Not just a petfood scandal

Rat poison in wheat from China! This turns out to be behind the renal failure death of dogs throughout America.
How the wheat became contaminated is anyone's guess. A rat plague in the wheat storage facilities? Misuse of agricultural chemicals?
China has quite a history of the latter. It remains a very disturbing problem as Dune Lawrence points out in Bloomberg.
"Pesticide poisoning affects half a million Chinese a year, causing more than 500 fatalities"

For a long time Western bio-tech companies were dumping into the Third World markets products no longer saleable in their own arenas. This, notoriously, resulted in some serious pollution of food sources, especially in China, where farmers were making almost random chemical mixtures because they were unable to read the labels on the products. There was a time that Hong Kong put a ban on fresh foods from mainland China because of the toxic levels of pesticides etc.

My suspicion, therefore, is that we have here a tale of greed from two directions. Firstly, there are the agri-chem corporations which sacrifice ethics for profit in dumping discredited product on hapless poor countries. Secondly, we have the petfood people buying the cheapest ingredients to keep their shareholders' pockets lined. And, in a class of their own, there are the pet-owners who choose expediency as a way of nourishing their animals. Theirs is the crime of laziness.

It astonishes me that people who purport to love animals don't think about giving them more pleasure and better nutrition in their meals. Food is not only necessary, it is one of the fundamental sensual experiences of life. And yet, people who are prepared often to pay thousands for a pedigree animal will blithely fill its bowl with tinned or pellet food.

It truly is not hard to cook for the dog. We cook in three-day batches - ground chicken stewed with carrots, chard and parsley, bulked with pasta or rice and sprinkled with vitamins (plus, for our elderly doberman, Glucosomine). There are variations on this theme, of course. The dog loves the whole ritual of his food preparation, as he loves his food. He drools for handouts of carrot as the chopping goes on - his favourite treat, apart from blueberries. Cooking the petfood is as economic as it is wholesome - and it has provided a dividend of eliminating dog farts capable of asphyxiating a small nation.