Saturday, October 4, 2008

Like Water for Chocolate


I do not have time to write a full entry on this but, there are a couple of recent articles that I feel are really important to post.

The first is on the melamine coming from China in the form of a lot of our processed foods. Candy such as Cadbury Chocolate, other candies, baby formula, toothpaste, pet foods and so many other foods that have been contaminated in this crisis. Unfortunately it takes a lot sometimes for companies to own up to the responsibility and possibly the blow to their reputation when they have to publicly admit that their products are cheaply manufactured in China as opposed to with some care and tradition as they are often thought to be. This underscore the importance of the eat local movements in this country and the need to protect local agriculture. When we outsource and centralize our food supply far, far away from our homes we lose complete control over what we are consuming. There is no accountability in our food supply unless numerous people become deathly ill. One, two, or even unfortunately in a lot of cases hundreds of outbreaks get swept under the rug or interpreted as not having strong causal links to a food or manufacturing plant.

Be wary of eating anything made in China, especially if it is a milk derivative or made with milk. But on the whole, we have so little trade regulation with China, I am confident that if wide scale testing were done on imports, we would find much much more of this type of contamination in the foods that Americans ingest everyday. We only find out about the ones that are killing too many people to keep them quiet.

Here is just one, the most recent article I have just read on the Melamine outbreak, do a search in any paper for many many more. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/world/asia/02milk.html?ref=health

The other issue is of our water supply in this country. The EPA is failing us once again by failing to take action on the amount of Perchlorate in our drinking water right here in the US. We can't blame China for this one...
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/09/22/rocket.fuel.epa.ap/index.html

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