This article closely follows another article I reported on a short while ago which also had to do with chinese imports, especially agricultural ones. This article reports on a U.S. health inspection team that is visiting China in order to investigate first hand the quality of the foods they are exporting to the United States. This inspection team was sent in because of a growing number of complaints about the safety of Chinese imports. Recently several Chinese products with unsafe chemicals, including pet food, toys, toothpaste, and fish, were found in foreign markets, including American ones.
This discovery of products containing dangerous chemicals is very serious because of the amount of goods that we import from China, which is staggering but which I don't have the exact numbers for. Also, as one of my blogs last week detailed, food imports, and foods from other places but which contain ingredients from China are very hard to track and/or account for, because the world lacks an international monitoring agency to watch over all of these issues. This is an issue that worries me a little bit, because even though we have an effective food safety monitoring system here (FDA), it's much harder to monitor all international food. This, coupled with a lack of even identifying effectively what foods come from where, creates a kind of troubling situation. Do we know the food we're eating is safe? While I believe that an international agency should be formed to moniter these types of things, I also acknowledge just how hard such a program would be to initiate.
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Yes what a shame. I am not from China, but from Taiwan. Honestly, I am just shocked about the awful situation with the FDA lately. I've heard about how some restaurants would use filthy raw materials from garbage filters such as cardboards and utilize them within the pork stock to make meat buns (as seen in dimsum cuisine). I think they did it as a way to save up money since they probably cannot afford such supply and are trying to run a snake oil business! I'm going to visit China for touring within two weeks, and I'm afraid I will be avoiding the restaurants or even products selling in the merchanidiser stores--it will be especially difficult for a vegan however since there aren't many vegan friendly places in China. I'm frightened about the fact of going there. I am going there because my family wanted to visit for fun, so it should be interesting, but risky for me.
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