Who's
Watching Your Back?
Kathy
Rhodes
Who’s
watching your back? Or more to the point, who’s watching
your front? More precisely, your stomach. Who is watching what
you eat? Let me summarize succinctly—NOBODY.
You
say with puffed chest, “Humph, we live in the United States
of America. We’ve got the FDA to protect us and keep our
food supply safe.” Well, hold on to your britches, folks.
The FDA inspects one percent of all the food shipments that come
into this country. Let me repeat—ONE PERCENT. Combine that
with some other pertinent statistics, and gulp, there’s something
rotten in the state of Denmark and in the United States
of America.
In
this age of globalization where the reality is that “the
world is flat,” food imports in the United States are big
business. In 2006, they totaled $64 billion—a 33 percent
increase over 2003. No country is increasing its food exports
faster than China. China is America’s leading supplier of
garlic and garlic powder, apple juice used as a food sweetener,
sausage casings, and cocoa butter. China is the third largest
supplier of food and animal feed to the United States, having
sent $2.3 billion worth of agricultural products in 2006, double
that of 2003. The growth of that trade in 2007 to-date is an astounding
34 percent.
Applying
a little loose logic, if we had foodstuff items totaling a whopping
sixty-four billion dollars coming into our ports last year for
distribution to the American public, and only one percent got
inspected, that means that $63,360,000,000 worth of food items
came right into our country uninspected and landed on our dinner
plates.
But
it’s not just food. China is the world’s largest producer
of antibiotics, responsible for 80 percent of the world’s
supply of some forms of penicillin. And what got me started on
all this in the first place was a fact I read somewhere the other
day—a fact that bothers me a lot. Ninety percent of all Vitamin
C is manufactured in China. There’s only one factory left
in the West, and it’s in Holland.
Face
it, China owns us. And face it, if China gets mad at us, they
could wipe us out by lacing the Vitamin C with a poison that will
make every person who downs a morning multivitamin drop dead.
Or they could withhold penicillin. Or for goodness sakes, simply
withholding food would bring us to our knees.
This
morning, I rolled my long silvery Centrum with its 60 mg of C
between my fingers, then dropped it back in the bottle. Not today,
I thought. I was afraid of it. But what about tomorrow? It's like
Russian roulette. What a potentially powerful punch this pill
the size of a bullet could pack!
Face
it, I repeat, China owns us. They produce our manufactured goods—from
tennis shoes to toasters to TVs—and they feed us. We’ve
come a far piece from Grandpa’s farm, with its slaughtered
hogs and cows and chickens, and the vegetable garden behind the
smokehouse. Our meals today are a global affair, with ingredients
arriving from the farthest corners of the earth, more and more
from China, where their own government authorities have acknowledged
that the food chain is rife with substandard and hazardous ingredients.
Don’t
go perusing your food cans and packages for that MADE IN THE USA
label. Pardon my French, but that don’t mean shi—, uh,
squat anymore. Do we know where the individual ingredients in
each processed item came from? I think not. We have absolutely
no clue. As it stands now, manufacturers are not required to list
the country of origin on their products, so we can’t even
make selective purchases.
We’re
so dependent on and involved with China now that it is in our
interest to allow the imports to keep on coming in as quickly
as possible, even though they jeopardize our safety and health.
In
the first four months of 2007, FDA inspectors refused 298 food
shipments from China. Mostly, the reason for rejection listed
was “filthy,” the official term used when inspectors
smell decomposition or gross contamination of food. If you loosely
apply the One Percent Rule here, it suggests that 29,800 shipments
of possibly decomposed and contaminated food went straight to
our grocery stores, into our shopping carts, into our pantries
and refrigerators, into our stomachs.
The
FDA “refusal reports” showed: juices and fruits rejected
as “filthy”; prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved
for human consumption; frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran,
an antibacterial that can cause cancer; swordfish rejected as
“poisonous.”
In
February, border inspectors for the FDA blocked peas tainted by
pesticides, dried white plums containing banned additives, pepper
contaminated with salmonella, and frozen crawfish that were filthy.
In
April, 107 food imports from China were detained at U. S. ports,
including dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical,
frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics, scallops and sardines
coated with putrefying bacteria, and mushrooms laced with illegal
pesticides. In addition there were 1000 detained shipments of
dietary supplements, toxic cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.
China
is not certified to sell any meat [beef, chicken] to the United
States because its slaughterhouses and processing plants do not
have food-safety systems equivalent to those here. But that doesn’t
stop them. Each year hundreds of thousands of pounds of prohibited
poultry products are seized, shipped in crates labeled “dried
lilly flower,” “prune slices,” and “vegetables.”
It is unclear how much of the illegal meat slipped in undetected.
I don’t know whom Big Brother is watching, but it’s
certainly not our food supply. (Or maybe this is why He spends
so much time worrying about avian flu.)
If
you think all that is revolting, consider this. Last year, under
pressure from China, the USDA passed a rule allowing China to
export chickens that were grown and slaughtered in North America
and then processed in China (huh?), a rule that quickly passed
through multiple levels of review and was approved the day before
Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington for a visit.
And the U. S. government is close to certifying the Chinese to
export their poultry legally. (Don’t tell me China doesn’t
own us!)
The
recent pet food scare opened some folks’ eyes to potential
problems. I buy a premium food for my dog—30 bucks for a
ten-pound bag. On the package, Royal Canin states PRODUCT OF THE
USA. But even so, they were buying an ingredient from China, and
a few of their varieties were included late in the recall. I called
company headquarters in Missouri to inquire about my dog’s
particular venison and potato variety and let it be known emphatically,
“I do NOT want my dog eating any food from China!”
I was told the company had changed its policy and was no longer
purchasing from the Giant in the East.
Pfff,
of course, when I made that call, I did not realize the scope
of the situation—that daily I am ingesting food and supplements
from China and that nobody is watching what comes in and
that nobody is watching what goes into my body.
©
Kathy Rhodes
Kathy
Rhodes is editor of Muscadine
Lines: A Southern Journal.