July 13, 2007
Filthy Food? Blame China.
UPDATE!
Was the cardboard steam buns story a hoax ?
Was the cardboard steam buns story a hoax ? Anyone who has lived or traveled in China on a budget and taken chances eating from street vendors or dicey restaurants knows that a certain amount of mystery comes with your dish.
Usually what is not readily identifiable you simply eat around but sometimes you are hungry enough to ingest something that doesn’t really resemble food in the normal sense of the word. A plate of meat and veggies in Xi’An once worked my jaw with the meat’s leather like consistency and odd tastelessness but it did me no harm. After reading this expose about steam buns in Beijing made from pork-flavored cardboard I wonder if the meat was indeed leather, perhaps left over bits from a belt factory?
The cardboard steam buns highlight a blizzard of reporting on food safety problems inside China and with Chinese food exports. Many Americans are discovering that Chinese imports fill up both sides of the WallMart super center and make up a growing share of daily groceries. The meme on China food is that the problem is not the USA’s incompetent food inspection services (spread across numerous regulatory agencies and extremely understaffed) but with – you guessed it – China!
Beijing is responding in its usual heavy-handed way: the party boss of the Chinese equivalent of the USA Food and Drug Administration was executed and the national government is putting in place new regulations, outlawing classes of chemicals, and promising to publish daily reports of food safety during next year’s Summer Olympics.
In Washington, Anti-China blowhard Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) has added China’s “filthy” food imports to his list of all things bad and Chinese. Schumer’s response is to call for an “import Czar” to join the ineffective battalion of “czars” sitting in Washington offices and fretting about foreigners.
So would it surprise you to know that China is NOT the number 1 source of bad food imports? For the year ending June the FDA rejected the greatest number of shipments from India followed by Mexico according to the New York Times today. Indian food including shrimps and spices contained potentially lethal salmonella while a variety of Mexican food imports were considered “filthy.” China was number three on a list of the top 10 rejected source countries that included Denmark and Italy.
And the most serious case of food poisoning this week happened not in China but at the Taste of Chicago street fair where over 100 people are sickened and 10 hospitalized from possibly salmonella tainted cucumbers and hummus from a Persian food stall.
Labels: china, food fda, imports, salmonella, schumer, tainted, toxic
# posted by Sinomania! : 7/13/2007 03:50:00 PM
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**So would it surprise you to know that China is NOT the number 1 source of bad food imports? For the year ending June the FDA rejected the greatest number of shipments from India **
trust the yanks [excluding you of course] to single out china for condemnation, like when some senators or congressmen bleating about child labour in china when countries like india has the world's largest child labour population.... etc etc
trust the yanks [excluding you of course] to single out china for condemnation, like when some senators or congressmen bleating about child labour in china when countries like india has the world's largest child labour population.... etc etc
Thank you for sharing this information and Very good looking blog.very informative article.
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