And in scary food news

[solarbird]

dogemperor has been following the Chinese-import gluten/contaminated food story closely, and it's now confirmed that it's in the human food chain. Latest post here, news ticker post here.

The whole story has been rather worse than you'd think, if you only listened to, say, national news on the radio, so you may wish to read up.

Comments

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

This makes me happy that I'm vegetarian. But at the same time it makes me concerned about the processed substitutes I eat.

This is not good.

[solarbird]

There have been a variety of reasons we have been shifting more and more of our food purchases towards at least USDA (and better, where available) organics. A big one is soil conservation - organic farming practices conserve and build soil, green revolution practices deplete it pretty rapidly - but there are others, as well. One good side-effect of that in this case is that we should be outside this loop - as far as I can tell so far, anyway.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

If the FDA follows the precedent set in previous incidents where they slipped up and allowed a contaminant into human food (Remember the tryptophan debacle?) they'll now ban pork.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

I may never finish this book (around page 120 or so he says "the rest of this book deals with the economics of neighborliness", and being sorta anti-social and also somewhat put off by the overall cheeriness--tho it's probably the exact right tone to take w/the people who most need to actually pay attention to the book), but you would probably really like the sections on trying to eat locally and the *actual* efficiency of organic as opposed to factory farming. Oh, the book title. Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy".

Also, books on natural rearing of cats & dogs (also sometimes known as feeding raw, w/regards to diet), or what the hell, Levy & Billinghurst are good authors on this subject. We haven't fed pet food since our first two canines were both less than a year old.

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

Oh shit, it might be in formula.

[solarbird]

Yeah, that would be real bad.

[banner.livejournal.com]

What I cannot understand, is why are we importing this stuff from china? We produce more food than China does, and we have surpluses (China doesn't and must buy wheat and such from us).

[banner.livejournal.com]

I started reading those links until I got to the spot where it was 'All Bush's Fault'. At that point I stopped reading and considered everything prior to be highly suspect, probably false. Bush is not to blame for every wrong or ill in the universe, people who immediately claim he is are most likely crazy, and I can't take anything they say as reliable or even worth listening too.

So if you're going to quote sources on this, please leave out the ones who suffer from BDS. I can't take them seriously, anymore than I can take Dobbs, seriously.

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

Because even though we have surpluses, the gluten is cheaper from China. Almighty dollar prevails.

[solarbird]

Links back to original articles are not affected particularly much by the person forwarding them. I would suggest evaluating them on their own merits. Or you can ignore the whole thing; it's only a very small part (so far) of the food supply that has been contaminated, and the odds accordingly are very much on your side.

Were you feeding a child, on the other hand, I might suggest otherwise.