Pet food, peanut butter, spinach, hamburgers just to name a few of the things that have caused sickness and death.

It can happen to anyone because we all eat. It can happen in organic or junk food.

I read this yesterday and although I knew that much food comes from across the seas it is disturbing

The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Concern widens over food exports
By Christopher Bodeen
The Associated Press
Published: Saturday, April 14, 2007

SHANGHAI, China - The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef's nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China's chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.

In recent weeks, scores of cats and dogs in America have died of kidney failure blamed on eating pet food containing gluten from China that was tainted with melamine, a chemical used in plastics, fertilizers and flame retardants. While humans aren't believed at risk, the incident has sharpened concerns over China's food exports and the limited ability of U.S. inspectors to catch problem shipments.

''This really shows the risks of food purity problems combining with international trade,'' said Michiel Keyzer, director of the Center for World Food Studies at Amsterdam's Vrije Universiteit.

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Just as with manufactured goods, exports of meat, produce, and processed foods from China have soared in recent years, prompting outcries from foreign farm sectors that are feeling pinched by low Chinese prices.

Worried about losing access to foreign markets and stung by tainted food products scandals at home, China has in recent years tried to improve inspections, with limited success.

The problems the government faces are legion. Pesticides and chemical fertilizers are used in excess to boost yields while harmful antibiotics are widely administered to control disease in seafood and livestock. Rampant industrial pollution risks introducing heavy metals into the food chain.

Farmers have used cancer-causing industrial dye Sudan Red to boost the value of their eggs and fed an asthma medication to pigs to produce leaner meat. In a case that galvanized the public's and government's attention, shoddy infant formula with little or no nutritional value has been blamed for causing severe malnutrition in hundreds of babies and killing at least 12.

China's Health Ministry reported almost 34,000 food-related illnesses in 2005, with spoiled food accounting for the largest number, followed by poisonous plants or animals and use of agricultural chemicals.

Small farms ship to market with little documentation. Testing of the safety and purity of farm products such as milk is often haphazard, hampered by fuzzy lines of authority among regulators. Only about 6 percent of agricultural products were considered pollution-free in 2005, while safer, better quality food officially stamped as ''green'' accounts for just 1 percent of the total, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Over the past 25 years, Chinese agricultural exports to the United States surged nearly 20-fold to $2.26 billion last year, led by poultry products, sausage casings, shellfish, spices and apple juice.

Inspectors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are able to inspect only a tiny percentage of the millions of shipments that enter the United States each year.

Even so, shipments from China were rejected at the rate of about 200 per month this year, the largest from any country, compared with about 18 for Thailand, and 35 for Italy, also big exporters to the United States, according to the FDA's Web site.




I think I can be wary by trying to buy locally produced foods but that is not possible with everything. Washing stuff doesn't take out disease nor does cooking with some nasty things.

Do you think that bad people are doing this on purpose? We have speculated everything from somone in China got mad when their pet was killed
World Briefing | Asia: China: 50,000 Dogs Killed In Rabies Scare - New York Times
so they poisoned the pet food.
Maybe field workers were mad at their bosses so they pooped on the spinach.
Maybe the cows were fed something they shouldn't have been or the hamburger was processed even more filthily than most ground meat.

Who knows and maybe we will not ever find out.

But what are you doing in light of all this?

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The political system is broke and it's a joke.

I look at the labels very carefully. You may be buying "made in the USA" but, it may be made here with "grown in China" products. I notided this on Apple Juice, too.

I think the best protection is to really look at those food labels.

__________________
Doing the right thing isn't always the same as doing the easy thing.

grow and preserve your own !

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Always be a first rate version of your self instead of a second rate version of someone else.[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.

I truly believe our food supply is safer now than it ever has been historically. Even things you grow yourself have the potential to be contaminated our spoiled in some way. But how likely is it really? How many of us personally know anybody hurt by our public food supply? When you hear things on the news, it often seems much more widespread than it is. If you buy from a variety of sources and use some care reading labels I think that is all you can do. Because of recent events, some elected officials are looking into what more can be done as far as inspection. Perhaps writing to your congressman would be a good idea. There are plenty of bad things that can happen, but worrying too much isn't good either.

I was just reading the May issue or Redbook magazine, and there is a really good article in there about this very issue. Also, there is something in another section of he magazine about a chemical found in many of our cleaning supplies 3,4 DHB or something. I'll feeling under the weather now, but, when I feel up to it, I'll post the exact name. Anyway, it is not good to breathe in, and has been banned in Canada.

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Doing the right thing isn't always the same as doing the easy thing.

I know some things for sure: When I grew up in the 60s and 70s people did not get sick from food and that is mainly because the regulations and enforcement have become lax. It has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican (dam* I wish I could blame someone LOL) the last administration and this one both have been hand in hand with different food industries.
The FDA says they cannot even recall foods I heard I think on Today this a.m. the companies have to recall it voluntarily themselves.
Squeak has the right idea. I have to seriously start growing my own. It's just taking the first steps of making a place in the yard the animals can't get to and then getting the organic clean soil and doing it.

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The political system is broke and it's a joke.

I tried my own garden last summer, and I am not up for it this year. I HAD to spray my tomato plants, no getting around that. We really enjoyed the fresh food from the garden last year. This year, I'm growing tomatoes and basil in a 5 gallon container.

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Doing the right thing isn't always the same as doing the easy thing.

Ok, the ingredient is called 1,4-dichlorobenzene (1,4-DCB). I looked on my cleaners and toilet cleaner....none of them really list ingredients.....that's odd.

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Doing the right thing isn't always the same as doing the easy thing.

we grow all our veggies and we get a beef from a local farmer each yr. we buy very little foods in the store.
i can and freeze all the veggies we grow so there is enough to make it till the next growing season + some to share with clients.

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