The Chinese Saga of Olympic Shame Continues.... "Made in China."
becoming the most alarming words in the English language -- Do You Know
Who Your Next Meal Is Coming From?/Washington Post

Do You Know Who Your Next Meal Is Coming From?

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2007; D01

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2007/07/14/PH2007071401164...
Photo Credit: By Luis Romero -- Associated Press Photo

"Made in China."

Suddenly, they're the three most alarming words in the English language.

Go to any big box store, supermarket, toy shop: When you weren't paying
attention (but enjoying the bargains), everything became Made in China,
or made with stuff that's made in China, or made with
stuff-that's-made-with-stuff that's made in China.

Nixon shook hands with Mao; deals were cut; investments invested.
Beijing got the 2008 Olympics; Shanghai got hundreds of glittering
skyscrapers. Now some of our American flags are made in China, and half
of our garlic, and something like 40 percent of our apple juice and 19
percent of our honey and 70 percent of our toys and 80 percent of our
Vitamin C.

Also, diethylene glycol. That's the industrial antifreeze found in
toothpaste imported from China.

And nitrofuran, malachite green, gentian violet -- all three of which
are known to be carcinogenic -- and fluoroquinolone. These are
antimicrobial agents used by the Chinese aquaculture industry,
triggering a ban by the Food and Drug Administration late last month on
five types of Chinese seafood.

And of course, melamine. That's C3H6N6for those wanting the molecular
makeup. It's an industrial plastic that found its way into canned pet
food in the United States earlier this year, triggering the recall of 60
million cans.

"These commodities are flowing in our society essentially unchecked,"
says former FDA associate commissioner William Hubbard. "We're gambling.
Because no one's looking at this stuff!"

Not many people, at least. The FDA says it has 625 field inspectors
eyeballing food across the country; they manage to scrutinize about 1
percent of imports. But the number of inspectors has dropped in recent
years even as an increasing percentage of our food -- about 13 percent
by one recent estimate -- comes from foreign countries, many lacking
strict regulation. China has millions of small producers making food and
chemicals for the global market. "As a developing country, China's food
and drug supervision work began late and its foundations are weak," said
Yan Jiangying, the candid spokeswoman for China's food and drug agency.
"Therefore, the food and drug safety situation is not something we can
be optimistic about."

And now this: Buns stuffed with cardboard.

"A hidden camera followed the man into a ramshackle building where
steamers were filled with the fluffy white buns, called baozi,
traditionally stuffed with minced pork," reports the Associated Press,
summarizing a Chinese television news program. "It showed how cardboard
[!!!!!] was first soaked to a pulp in a plastic basin of caustic soda --
a chemical base commonly used in manufacturing paper and soap -- then
chopped into tiny morsels with a cleaver. Fatty pork and powdered
seasoning were stirred in as flavoring and the concoction was stuffed
into the buns."

The Chinese government has vowed to crack down on shady operators. It
has to salvage the image of the China brand. The public relations
strategy includes both defense and offense: Just yesterday, China banned
meat imports from seven American companies, citing contamination by
salmonella and chemical additives.

One might detect the pungent scent of a trade war brewing.

The former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu,
discovered last week that it's an extremely bad time to get blamed for
any of China's food and drug safety problems. He had been convicted of
taking bribes in exchange for helping drug companies evade regulation.
Sentenced to death in May, he confessed his crimes in a written
statement, vowed to return the bribe money, and pleaded for leniency. He
proved unpersuasive; the government announced Tuesday that he had been
executed. We can only imagine what he was given for his last meal.

Now, pull way back for the panoramic shot: This is a complexifying world
in which no single person can grasp more than a tiny scrap of the
economic and social systems that sustain us. We can no longer read the
code. We don't know the origin of the thing we hold in our hand. We know
only that it has a funny aftertaste.

We have become end users of stuff we don't understand that comes from
factories we've never seen in cities we've never heard of full of people
whose language we don't speak and whose names we can't pronounce.

"There's a world below our level of awareness that affects everything we
do -- the quality of food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes on our
back," says Robert Clark , a professor emeritus of government at George
Mason University. "They're delivered by systems that are so complex,
most of the people who are actually in the system don't understand them."

Consider the pet food calamity. One of the country's biggest pet food
companies, Menu Foods, decided it needed a new supplier of a single
ingredient: wheat gluten. It turned to a Las Vegas company named
ChemNutra that specializes in importing food and drug ingredients from
China -- stuff like potassium sorbate, L-Cysteine USP29 and L-Glycine
USP28 .

ChemNutra bought wheat gluten from something called Xuzhou Anying
Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., in Jiangsu province. The
gluten from Xuzhou Anying was contaminated with melamine, the industrial
plastic that ChemNutra believes was intentionally put into the wheat
gluten to make it appear to be higher in protein. By the time U.S.
inspectors reached the manufacturing plant in China, it had been closed
and scrubbed clean. The melamine played a role in sickening or killing
an unknown number of pets across the United States.

"There but for the grace of God go people," says Hubbard, the former FDA
official. "That same kind of contamination could have killed 4,000 or
5,000 people."

More bad news for the China brand: A New Jersey company recently
recalled 450,000 potentially defective Chinese tires. And fireworks made
in China reportedly malfunctioned at half a dozen different Independence
Day events in Northern Virginia, with one errant shell injuring 11
people in Vienna. There's obviously the danger here of consumer
jingoism: The demonization of "Orientals" has a long history. In the
post-World War II era, "Made in Japan" meant, for a long time, cheap
merchandise. It was a pejorative term, until the Japanese started
cranking out cars and televisions and consumer gadgets that were
flat-out better than ours.

Merchandise from mainland China didn't start arriving until 1980. The
country has recently seen an economic boom built on exports. But many of
us do not know much about China other than that it's where our shirt
came from, and that it has a Great Wall. Historians will say that China
invented paper and gunpowder and the compass and fireworks and a bunch
of other cool stuff, but many Americans think of the Chinese inventing
ways to counterfeit Hollywood movies. We know that there are something
like 1.3 billion Chinese, but we'd be hard-pressed to name a single one
of them. Who among us, today, can name China's president, or prime
minister, or Supreme Leader, or whatever he's called? Here's a stumper:
Is China still communist?

Of course there are people who are highly informed, such as George Mason
University government professor Frances Harbour, who was so disgusted by
the working conditions in Chinese factories that she tried to boycott
anything made in China. Her boycott lasted about a year before she gave
up. She realized that China wasn't the only country with sweatshops. And
she found it hard to go without Chinese merchandise.

"I would have had to make my own clothes, practically," she says.

The problems with foreign imports have put a spotlight on the FDA.
Democrats in Congress have assailed the FDA for being lax on food
safety. "Food safety at the FDA is a stepchild," charges Rep. Rosa
DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut. "It is nothing about prevention.
It is all about after-the-fact."

The FDA has created a new position, the assistant commissioner for food
protection. That would be David Acheson, who says he wants to think
strategically, identify the biggest risks, try to do more than just play
defense.

"Simply putting more inspectors at the ports isn't the answer," he says.
"We need to move further upstream, looking at what is euphemistically
called the whole life cycle of food."

Acheson points out that several of the biggest food safety scares of the
past year were entirely domestic: spinach, then lettuce, then peanut butter.

"Whatever is propped up as the latest crisis is what everybody focuses
on," he says. "We can't afford to do that here. We can't afford to say,
food safety is all about China."

The ultimate consequences of free trade, of open borders, of the
ubiquity of the shipping container that goes right from boat to truck to
train to all over the place, remains an unknown. If you're a big-picture
guy like Clark, you see the world as a vast petri dish.

"We've been moving around the planet for about 50, 75 thousand years,"
Clark says. "As we move, we carry with us large animals . . . cattle,
horses, pigs, dogs . . . and they all bring their own little companions
with them. The horse brought us the common cold. Cattle bring us
smallpox. The big difference is the speed with which it all happens now.
The speed has increased so fast, and to such a high degree, that it does
become a genuinely novel condition on the planet."

The experiment is underway. No one's in charge.

And what you don't know can hurt you.

2007 The Washington Post Company