The more I look into the food import situation, the less I like it. Especially what consumables come out of China.
I like to keep apple cinnamon instant oatmeal on hand for a quick and healthy breakfast. Two packages of it with a bit of water and zapped in the microwave for 30 seconds and it is ready to go. I put a big glob of applesauce on it instead of milk or cream and it's really nice.
But now I hear that up to 50% of our apple products, such as applesauce, apple juice, and dried apples, come from China these days.
A apple a day might not keep the doctor away. It might do just the opposite. This worries me.
I love apples. I hope that I find out that there is applesauce I can buy that is safe, instead of filled with pesticides and industrial chemicals. But it's hard to find the information about where, for instance, Tree Top gets the apples it makes into applesauce. Or where the apples in the oatmeal came from. Instead of eating a healthy breakfast each day, am I simply poisoning myself?
What I already know about consumables from China:
Tainted seafood, tainted catfish, both with scary levels of bacteria and some with enormous amounts of banned antibiotics.
Cough syrup and toothpaste with diethylene glycol in it. The cough syrup killed hundreds of people in Panama and other places. The toothpaste was found right here in the US in the dollar stores, and many of the tubes were fake Colgate, and other brands.
Thousands and thousands of cats and dogs died from the melamine poisoning in rice and wheat gluten. In addition, fish, swine and poultry were all contaminated from the same feed ingredient and were out to market so fast that they were already consumed before it was discovered. Plus some of the fish were released into our waterways. So now we have people who have been secondarily poisoned and fish bearing loads of a poison that will now go into the environment.
China has long been the main source for fake drugs. Those drugs you buy on the internet? Many of them are fake, made of sheet rock dust and the paint for line striping on the highways. Not only are they fake and won't cure you, they might hurt you, too. And they have made their way into our own American pharmacies, since businesses use jobbers to find the best deal on the drugs. So the jobbers buy the fakes from China and there you go. I actually got several asthma inhalers that had NO medicine in them, and I'm sure they were fakes from China. I reported it to the Sam's Club pharmacist and he didn't care at ALL.
The list goes on and on and on. Wikipedia has a good list, with sources.
Food Safety Incidents in China
Also see this Washington Post article:
Tainted Chinese Imports Common
I would like to find a web site that tracks all the violations, especially of those consumables that are ingredients in food or drugs that are ostensibly labeled "Made in USA." We NEED to require that companies label where EACH ingredient originated.
It very well might mean our lives.
I never thought eating oatmeal would be so scary.