Saturday, October 11, 2008

Thinking of health... what about your food choices in the stores?

So what, exactly, can we eat?

It's a question I'd never expected to spend much time thinking about.
I thought those issues were in the past history of America. Well, we are repeating that history in China.

Now I think about it regularly. Media reports of the recent tainted baby milk powder disaster in China hint at the most severe damage: At last tally, eight infants have died and tens of thousands of others have suffered ill health (kidney stones) after consuming milk laced with melamine, an industrial chemical, that tests out as protein. It is a cheat. Don't put protein in your product, put poison.

It was the same cheat used on Cat and Dog food from China.
It is the reason that I avoid food products that contain food ingredients from China.
Look on the label. At least here in the USa, we have to tell you where it came from....


But it's hard to capture the social element of this tragedy -- what happens when people can no longer trust that the food they're eating is safe.

Not sure whom to trust: Buying milk in
Shanghai, Sept. 22.
For one thing, you suddenly start spending a lot of extra time reading labels in the supermarket. Shortly after this scandal came to light, I found myself scrutinizing an array of cans of condensed milk at the local grocery store. In the U.S. I might have grabbed whichever brand my eye happened to fall on first. Not here. I stood there for a minute or two poring over the various labels for the right combination of brand name and country of origin. The choice came down to a well-known Western brand that had been manufactured in Qingdao, China, or a brand I'd never heard of from Thailand. Thailand won.
I later saw reports that some of the same Western brand's other dairy products had tested positive for nondangerous trace levels of melamine. The company has said such a minute amount of chemical could find its way into any food product, no one has been reported sick, and condensed milk isn't on the list of problem products. I still had a comfortable sense I'd made the right choice anyway.
Signs of the safety scare are everywhere. One acquaintance reported pouring soy milk over her breakfast cereal because all the supermarkets were out of foreign cow's milk on shopping day. Over the past month, I've received several emailed lists of foods that are supposedly safe or supposedly dangerous.
And all that is nothing compared to the worry in China itself, a fear of which we see only passing glances here. One friend recalls standing in a Hong Kong post office on a recent afternoon. She saw an elderly lady mailing 10 large tins of milk powder to mainland China -- a sign of the lengths to which parents are going to obtain safe baby milk.
Some people I know have been much more careful for much longer than others. The same friend who recently had to resort to soy milk in the mornings started changing her food-shopping habits years ago, after a local television station uncovered alleged safety problems with Chinese food imports sold in street markets. After years of enduring ribbing for buying costly Japanese eggs, she suddenly finds she doesn't need to defend such extravagance to her friends anymore.
Note here the expense. I and my friends are fortunate -- extremely so -- to be able to afford paying up to twice as much for, say, cream from France as we would for the locally made equivalent. Many other Hong Kongers are able to do the same. So while concern and frustration here are high, anger and panic are under control.
Not so in China. Chinese parents who can afford to, pick Western brands. The greatest toll is on the families who can't. These parents knew there was reason to be careful. A milk-powder adulteration scandal in 2004 (the protein was removed) claimed more than a dozen lives and sickened hundreds of babies with malnutrition. This time, parents had thought milk powder they bought in a store under what they believed to be a reputable brand would surely be safe. Now that it's not, whom can they trust?
Which is why Beijing's failure to clean up its food-safety act is so much more pernicious, and disgraceful, than at first it appears. This milk has poisoned thousands of infants with melamine. It also poisons the society at large with fear.
Mr. Sternberg is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Asia.

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