Food from China: really food?
You gotta read this article, and QUICK, since the New York Times has now taken their content behind a "wall of payment":
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08food.html
Scary stuff. I ask you, how hard is it to raise an egg-laying chicken? I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that chickens have been raised for THOUSANDS of years. And yet, somebody in China whipped up a recipe for fake eggs because there's a few extra points in it? How much time and effort went in that concoction that could have been spent on, say, building a chicken coup? Er, COOP. I don't want the government to get nervous. Sorry.
When you read that somebody is selling rice that contains cadmium, what do you think? I suppose that there are people out there who might think, "well, how do I know I'm getting enough cadmium in my diet?". But most of us think "I don't want that", and still others of us think, "I like my kidneys just how they are, and depleted bone density sounds like it would really suck". And yet somebody out there is selling rice, TONS of rice, that was likely grown on the site of a defunct factory riddled with cadmium.
Arsenic in soy sauce may in some cultures be some sort of a sign of respect, or a delicacy, or an aphrodisiac. But according to me and my EXTENSIVE knowledge of arsenic (which has been gained through REPEATED viewings of the Carey Grant classic "Arsenic and Old Lace"), arsenic ins soy sauce is poison, plain and simple. You put arsenic in something that you want to KILL someone. And yet, some dunderhead in China has put it in his/her soy sauce.
And as the article points out, that's just what's been uncovered. Who KNOWS how much gunk is going into the unregulated food being produced in China?
I've been on a crusade lately to find garlic that isn't grown in China. Garlic is EASY to grow, and grows nation-wide, and yet somehow it's cheaper to buy garlic from the other side of the world than from down the block. All of the grocery stores in my neighborhood (which is supposedly a hip, progressive neighborhood) sell Chinese garlic. That seems bizarre to me, and I shudder to think what rare metals are deposited in those bulbs that I use in just about every dish I cook.
Luckily, Peeled Snacks doesn't source anything from China. Nothing. Not our fruit, not our bags, not our boxes, nothing. And it's not an anti-China thing, it's rather a pro-quality thing. We did once buy a box of fruit from China, but never used any because it was inferior in a way that I won't describe in detail because you might be about to eat lunch. We haven't bought anything from China since, and won't be anytime soon.
It's too bad. Supposedly we've entered the "Chinese Century". Supposedly China will be dominating the economies of the world for a long time. And yet, that country doesn't seem to have the systems in place to insure that its population eats poison-free rice. Scary.