My daughter visited China this past week. Pollution was so bad, one woman told her that a day there took 3 months off of your LIFE!
We assume somehow that things over there do not impact us over here. And a lot of people don’t understand the law of connectedness – i.e. “In as much as you do it unto the least of these you do it unto me” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or other words to that affect. The loss of bees, the loss of rain forest, the impact of global warming affect us all, even if we try to avoid looking at those connections.
But we are not immune to what happens over there – see below:
So now we have a bigger problem – importing the problems we have helped create in China:
Almost a dozen companies have found that they have used melamine-contaminated ingredients from China in their animal foods, either wheat gluten, corn gluten or rice protein concentrate. In the United States, more than 60 million containers of cat and dog food have been pulled from the market in the past five weeks.
People who bought pork from the American Hog Farm, a 1,500-animal facility in Ceres, Calif., between April 3 and April 18 are being advised not to eat the meat, California health officials said yesterday, although there have been no reports of illness in either people or the hogs. Authorities are tracking down all the purchasers.
Belatedly, after a couple of weeks of people worrying about their pets, it is becoming obvious that the food chain is in jeopardy.
Criminal Probe Opened in Pet Food Scare
There are several things to notice about this – the headline is misleading – it is actually people food that is now in jeopardy. God forbid we should actually have people thinking about the food they eat! The second is, why do we wait until tragedy strikes – isn’t that why we have an FDA? Oh wait, I forgot – the BushCo groups prides itself on doing zippo/nada for the people.
But there are several hidden layers here – what is happening to the Chinese people who also eat this stuff? How did it come to contaminate food stuffs? China is fast becoming a pollution disaster of major proportions but we don’t see it because we don’t get a lot of international news. There are a lot of Asian dishes that use this gluten – rice gluten and wheat gluten both.
Our great poverty at the moment is our inability to understand our connectedness with other countries and this is at a time when the world has shrunk to a remarkable degree. We have no news organization willing to give us (the average news consumer) that world view. We have no activism that spans the globe regarding pollution and the conditions that people are forced to live within. But we will see a rise of this kind of thing from here on out simply because it is part of what we are literally buying into. And we are not blameless – 350 million people smoke in China and where do you think that they got that from? And most of those toxic factories are supplying the US with goods and the reason they can supply us those goods so cheaply is the cheap labor and the lack of restraints on pollution. And we are buying into that philosophy and dystopia literally.
