Substandard
Foreign Foods in China
By LARRY
ROMANOFF – September 20, 2020
Let's
begin with a description of the practices of American food companies in the US,
important to Chinese readers since these practices have already been exported
to China and exist here. I'll focus here only on
meat production, the chickens and hamburgers you buy at KFC and McDonald's. The
Johns Hopkins Center and the Arizona State University in the US conducted a
joint study a few years ago on drugs, chemicals and other contaminants in the
US food chain, in this case dealing especially with poultry - the chicken you
buy in the supermarket and at KFC. They found dozens of banned chemical
substances in the chicken in supermarkets and fast-food outlets, in addition to
bacteria that had become immune to antibiotics. Here is a brief explanation of American best practices in chicken
production. This well-documented practice in the following paragraph was
originally posted online by an unidentified commenter, but I have been unable
to locate the author:
•Chicken
First, antibiotics
are fed to chickens to stimulate their growth, then the poisonous arsenic compound Roxarsone, which is a proven
carcinogenic, is added to the chickens' feed to make the chicken flesh the
right color of pink. But these chickens are bred in overcrowded and filthy
factory farms where they experience a great deal of stress which makes their
meat tough and not very tasty. So the chickens are fed Tylenol (a painkiller and relaxant), Benadryl (an antihistamine) and Prozac (an anti-depressant) to make them happy. But now that these
chickens are happy and sedated, they want to sleep all the time and not eat and
not grow fast enough, so the Americans give them high doses of caffeine to keep them awake all night and make them
eat.
So, the American "best practice",
which the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) fervently encourages China to
adopt, consists of this: first, we put the chickens into filthy, overcrowded
and stressful conditions, then we drug them until they are numb and don't know
they are suffering, then we drug them again to wake them up, then we drug them
again to make them eat and grow faster, then we drug them with more toxic
chemicals so their skin is the right color, then we drug them again to prevent
them from dying from all the other drugs and the diseases that fill their
cages.
But it's even better than this. What do you
suppose the chickens eat, besides the drugs and caffeine? Well, the capitalist
profit maximisation bible preaches that you cannot discard anything that might
produce revenue, so American chickens
are fed chicken and other animal excrement, ground-up animal parts, bones,
feathers, blood, leather, dead cattle, and various diseased animal content.
Normally a healthy chicken would die from such a diet, but this is the reason
for all the drugs and antibiotics in the first place - to keep the chickens
alive long enough to reach the supermarket where we ingest all these drugs that
are still present. I will deal with American food safety in much detail in
another article, but let's continue to enjoy American chicken a while longer.
On September 16, 2012, Health author Kathy
Freston, writing in the Huffington Post, made reference to a New York Times
article which detailed that half of all
chicken sold in the US was contaminated with fecal bacteria and feces.
Freston began with the following observations:
"Millions
of Americans are exposing themselves not just to the bacteria from a chicken’s
intestinal tract, but to everything else that comes in chicken feces. So
the Centers for Disease Control recommends extreme caution when handling raw
chicken, which includes meticulously cleaning and sterilizing kitchen surfaces
that are exposed to the meat. [Fecal bacteria] will cause most people to suffer
cramps, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting. Some people will spread the disease to
their families, while others will experience severe blood and kidney problems
which can lead to death. I’ve often wondered why we would want to eat something
that is so toxic, so I decided to go to the study’s source and ask Dr. Neal
Barnard for an explanation."
Her article then quoted portions of her
interview with Dr. Barnard. I'm including here a synopsis of Barnard's comments
and some direct quotes. Barnard stated:
"Fecal
contamination on chicken meat (in the US) is surprisingly common. Chicken
producers are required to inspect only one in every 22,000 carcasses, so
consumers really have no way to know what they are buying and eating. If you eat chicken, you are eating chicken feces
much of the time. The presence of E. coli (i.e. fecal) bacteria means feces is
on or in the meat. We wanted people to
understand that when they buy chicken, they are buying, chewing, and swallowing
feces in about half the cases. You’re eating dung. Chicken feces may also
contain roundworms, hair worms, tapeworms, insect larvae, fecally-excreted
drugs and other chemicals, as well as the more normal constituents of feces —
bile, undigested food, etc."
When asked by Freston about purchasing
organic foods in the US, Barnard replied by saying,
"Consumers might imagine that ...
"organic" products are safer, [but] our test results indicate these
assumptions have no basis. The so-called
"organic" brands were tainted with feces, too. Feces on meats occurs in all brands and all
stores at surprisingly high levels. If you buy chicken and bring it into
your home, you can easily contaminate your hands, knives, cutting boards, and
kitchen surfaces and very soon you end up infecting yourself with these
persistent germs." Barnard's comment on contamination bears some thought.
He is saying that the feces and fecal bacteria on the chicken meat will be
naturally spread to the kitchen surfaces and to anything the meat touches,
contamination which will not be removed by simple washing, but that to ensure
thorough disinfection, anything touching the chicken meat should be at least
sterilised with boiling water. Barnard
said further that his medical group had been trying for years to help consumers
understand that chicken in America was bad, "And if it’s the feces that
finally convince people to stop eating it, that’s good."
On being asked how the feces got onto the
chicken in the first place, Barnard replied, "Chickens are typically
raised in crowded conditions, so it is easy for feces to spread from one bird
to the next. In the transport boxes that carry them to the slaughterhouse, they
spread feces even more. And in the slaughter line, the intestinal tract is
mechanically ripped out of the body. So the chicken dung is splattering around,
contaminating the equipment, the workers’ hands, and everything else. And then,
right after slaughter, there’s the water bath. The part about the water bath is
particularly eye-opening:" He went on to state that after the chickens are eviscerated, they are inserted into a water bath
that is ostensibly for washing and cleaning the animals but in fact is designed
to permit the birds to absorb water and increase their weight. Note this:
"Chickens are very absorbent animals.
When you put them into the water bath to chill them, they gain a little weight.
Since chicken is sold by the pound, over a period of time it’s a substantial
financial difference to the company. The average broiler is about four pounds.
If you can add a quarter of a pound of water, that’s very important to the
profit. This "water" that Ms.
Foreman was referring to is the chill bath the chickens go into after being
eviscerated. It is sometimes referred to as "fecal soup"."
Barnard's observations on the 'fecal soup' do
not provide a full appreciation of the problem. Most poultry meat, including
that from chickens, is like a sponge and will absorb a surprising amount of
liquid. In a Carrefour supermarket in
Shanghai I see turkeys that were packed in Michigan in the US, with a label
stating the turkey "Contains approximately 18% of a solution to enhance juiciness
and flavor". That 18% of 'juiciness and flavor' consists entirely of
contaminated water, of the fecal soup, absorbed into the bird's flesh prior to
freezing. And it cannot be removed. Freston finished by reiterating that
the chickens were placed in water full of feces and that, rather than cleaning
the birds, the bath enabled the feces-filled water to be absorbed directly into
the flesh of the chickens where it could not be washed away. Barnard responded
by stating that is why slaughterhouses will never permit outsiders to see their
operations, because in effect it would make you sick to your stomach.
Few people, even in the US, want to believe,
or are even able to believe, how real and how serious this situation is. In
November of 2016, the USDA issued a warning about washing poultry; a warning
published the US media in preparation for the cooking of turkeys for
Thanksgiving. The reports stated, "Whatever you do, absolutely DO NOT wash"
the turkey. The USDA advised that rinsing a turkey "will not get rid of
unwanted bacteria ― that is virtually impossible", and that washing
poultry will simply increase the likelihood of spreading fecal bacteria
everywhere in the kitchen. The advice
was to simply take this bird, which has been soaking in a fecal soup, and
quickly insert it into the oven, because high heat is the only means of killing
the bacteria. You will still be eating the feces embedded in the turkey meat,
but now it won't kill you. The USDA further advised to thoroughly clean
with soap and hot water anything that touched the bird. This borders on being
bizarre, but instead of the US health
authorities banning the commercial production of this heavily-contaminated
poultry, they are ignoring the big agra farms whose methods are responsible for
the diseases, and are simply advising people on how to avoid serious illness
from eating this food.
•Beef
That's just American chicken. Let's take a
quick look at the famous American hamburger. Every time you eat an American hamburger, you are eating anabolic
steroids, antibiotics and fecal matter. As one writer noted, "You are
better off eating a carrot dropped in your toilet than eating American packaged
meat." Feedlot cattle are fed shredded
packaging, cardboard boxes, cement, and sawdust to put on weight. Cattle
that are processed for hamburgers have access to only filthy food and water,
and reports claim that until recently, they
were fed millions of dead cats and dogs purchased from animal shelters, and
that they still eat dead pigs, horses, and poultry. "Cattle are also fed chicken manure and excrement, which may contain
tapeworms, Giardia, antibiotic residues, arsenic and heavy metals. Federal
inspectors report that cattle that are visibly diseased, infected with measles,
tapeworms, and covered with abscesses are routinely slaughtered and processed
into meat." According to one study, of all the cows slaughtered for meat
in America, more than 25% are worn-out,
ready-to-die, dairy cattle, animals most likely to be riddled with
diseases, cancers, and antibiotic residues. I have seen reports claiming that
McDonald's relies heavily on these old dairy cows because they are cheaper,
lower in fat, and their use permits the company to claim "All-American Beef". It gets worse:
In 2013, the US government had to order a
recall of more than 8 million kilograms of beef that was contaminated with
animal excrement, and not only contaminated but covered with feces, in many
cases with "large chunks" of feces still adhering to the meat. This
condition is so common, and so serious, that
Physicians from an American medical
association petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration to have all
supermarkets either (1) label their meat products as "Feces-Free Meat"
or else (2) have the supermarkets attach "biohazard labels" to all
meat products in American supermarkets.
Nearly half of all chicken products sold in
the US, and marketed by national brands, are consistently contaminated with
feces, and in 2012, examinations proved that 95% of all chicken breasts sold in US supermarkets were contaminated
with fecal bacteria. From all this, food-borne illnesses in the US are at
epidemic levels, with between 75 million and 100 million cases each year of
contaminated food and illnesses from consumption of animal products. In other
words, about one-third of all Americans
seek medical attention each year from eating diseased American food.
I think it's worth noting that China has
never experienced 25% to 30% of its total population suffering illness from
food contamination even one time, much less consistently every year. But, with
luck, and with more American food and agriculture companies moving into China,
we will soon be able to share these American experiences. In fact, they're
already happening. But I have given you only a 'taste', if you'll excuse the
expression, of the food quality typical of American companies. In a later article
I will address at length the issue of food safety in the US and, after reading
that, I promise (a) you will never again want to eat any food product supplied
by an American company and (b) your fears about food safety in China will have
moderated substantially.
•OSI
and Husi
Moving to China, in July of 2014 we had the Jewish-American OSI
food-agricultural giant in China exposed for repackaging expired and dirty meat
on a massive scale extending for many years, complete with two sets of record
books for deceiving the authorities. Company officials tried desperately to
block the investigation, refusing entry to the plant by officials of the
Shanghai food and drug authority for a long enough time to destroy evidence.
Media reports said the authorities had to seize
and destroy millions of kilograms of diseased and dirty meat, in a scandal
that would eventually cover all of China. The Shanghai FDA also said Husi
produced more than 5,000 crates of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets, pork patties
and beef steaks that were all expired and moldy. The garbage was primarily sold
in China, the prime beneficiaries being
of course other American firms - KFC, McDonald's, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Burger
King, Papa Johns, Dicos, 7-Eleven and more.
These firms were selling their culinary
delights to infatuated Chinese who stubbornly refuse to believe that American
food quality is lower than China's. Even more depressingly, OSI was listed by
Shanghai's government as a "food safety model company".
It was a Shanghai Dragon TV report that
collected and aired all the information, showing the staff at Shanghai Husi
reprocessing meat that was rancid and had long since passed its expiry date,
and claimed the firm also forged the production dates of its meat products. The
TV video showed Husi workers picking up meat and hamburger patties from the
floor and inserting them back into the processing machinery, and another worker
handling expired beef and calling it "stinky". The TV footage also
showed employees mixing expired and fresh meat in new packaging, and were
overheard saying that if their clients knew what they were doing, the firm
would lose its contracts. This was not a small thing since Husi was supplying
so many thousands of US-branded restaurants. The Chinese health authorities
assigned nearly 900 investigators to inspect the company's many sites before
all the evidence could be destroyed. In Shanghai, many executives were arrested
and the entire operations of OSI and
Husi were shut down in China and not permitted to re-open. OSI claimed it
had lost nearly $1 billion, but my guess is they still profited handsomely
while their adventure lasted.
A spokesman for Yum Brands, the owners of KFC
and Pizza Hut, said they were "shocked" that OSI and Husi had
"illegal and dishonest behavior organized by management", and a
spokesman for McDonald's said the practices were "completely unacceptable
to McDonald's". I think we should talk about this. First, neither KFC nor
McDonald's are exactly strangers to their own 'illegal and dishonest behavior
organized by management', so I doubt anyone was really very shocked, and in my
view the only 'unacceptable' part was getting caught. And it wasn't only Husi
picking meat off the floor and selling it to customers; both KFC and McDonald's
have been often accused of the same, and worse. But it goes deeper. For my
part, I am a simple consumer and claim no particular expertise in meat or meat
products, but I have no trouble discerning the difference between meat that is
fresh and that which is nearing or past its expiry date. And I certainly have
no trouble identifying meat that is moldy or rotting, or that smells. The
management and staff of KFC, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, are dealing with
meat shipments 365 days a year, handling, washing and cooking all that meat,
and can identify bad product instantly. To claim otherwise is to lie. So, while
I can't prove my claim, I have no doubt in my own mind that all these American
fast-food restaurants knew precisely what they were selling.
Then, as always, comes the media spin. After having to destroy millions of
kilograms of stale or rotten meat, a Husi company executive said, "Our
company management believes this to be an isolated event." Or, even
better, Husi company manager Yang Liqun,
told Xinhua News Agency that "Husi has a strict quality control
system". But as one newspaper reported, "a preliminary
investigation by the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration showed ... that what
had been going on at Shanghai Husi was organized and planned, rather than based
on individuals’ discretion." It had also been occurring for a long time.
Several years prior, a former Husi employee exposed the company's supplying
expired meat to all the American fast-food chains in China, but nobody cared
even when he posted his revelations on the Internet. Rather than being
apologetic, the company was defiant. After
all the details of this enormous scandal were made public, Shanghai Husi placed
a statement in Chinese on the OSI China website saying that for the Shanghai
government "to define [our company's products] as 'questionable' ... is
totally without factual, scientific or legal foundation." Husi also
claimed in the media to be cooperating with the government's investigation,
while the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration was condemning them and urging
"more cooperation".
One reason this is important is that these
American practices are being imported into China and forced upon Chinese
producers. In 2013, it was discovered that a major chicken supplier in Henan
named Doyoo Group from Zhengzhou had
been selling sick, diseased, and dead chickens to KFC and McDonald's. Media
reports said "chickens were being raised in sealed enclosures which were
lit 24 hours a day at a constant temperature of about 36 C to maximize their
growth, which caused the birds to become sick, with many dying prematurely.
According to media reports, an official with Doyoo Group and employees of its
suppliers said many chickens raised on the group's farms had to be slaughtered
ahead of schedule after they became sick, with
all the sick ones supplied to fast-food restaurants like KFC and McDonald's.
A chicken farmer in Hebi surnamed Yang said
that of 17,000 chickens, 10,000 had died
after 30 days and the remaining 7,000 were so sick they were unable to eat,
but when he contacted Doyoo to express his concern, he was ordered to send the
birds for slaughter and they were later sold." Another employee at another
Doyoo farm said they raised 43,000
chickens but about 15,000 died at around 30 days and the remainder were again
too sick to be fed, so they were also all slaughtered and sold. Farmers
claimed Doyoo executives asked them to report sick and dead chickens "so
the chickens could be slaughtered without quarantine inspection", meaning a deliberate attempt to hide the evidence
from government health authorities, and claiming this occurred repeatedly.
Media reports said "there were no facilities to properly handle dead or
sick chickens at several farms that supply birds to the company. Instead, each
of the farms was equipped with a freezing room to store dead chickens".
And, in an act of defiance, the government website quoted an unnamed official
with Doyoo Group as saying that "as
long as the chickens are alive, they are not sick."
According to a media report, "The owner
of the farm in Gaomi told CCTV that the chickens have always been in inferior
health because they have to reach full growth in about 40 days.”Their hearts,
as small as the tip of the little finger, wear out from the speed," he
said. The chickens are fed large doses
of antibiotics all the time, the manager said, because cutting it off would
kill them immediately." The CCTV report also said that Liuhe Group and
its companies "faked feeding logs for chicken farms and issued quarantine
qualifications without doing any tests". In other words, they produced forged and fraudulent
quarantine certificates. CCTV also reported that the Yum warehousing and distribution
system was replete with not only practical issues but with fraud and
illegalities as well - missing inspection information, "non-standard"
quarantine certificates, and more. And then we have the lies. According to the
China Daily, Sam Su, Chairman and CEO of
Yum China denied that hormones were used in any of its chicken farms, and
that the antibiotics scandal was just "an isolated incident". KFC
issued a further statement that not only drew ridicule but that should have
been punished by a public flogging, attempting to escape responsibility by
stating, "If we find any illegal conduct by the suppliers, we will
definitely deal with it seriously".
•More
American Food Products
US
companies constantly send banned genetically-modified foods to China. This
occurs with pharmaceuticals, meat, fruit, vegetables, all kinds of consumables,
creating serious health and safety issues. Often, entire shipments of goods are
either returned or destroyed. Shipments
of US beef are frequently returned because they contain prohibited matter from
the brains and spinal columns of animals. These occasions are not accidents -
the US producers know what they're packing. Under political pressure from
the large food corporations, the US government permits the bulk of the dangerous
animal tissue to remain in the food supply and be exported to China, while
denying this is the case. But during regular inspections, the Chinese
authorities often found these prohibited animal tissues in US meat exports,
resulting in food producers both in the US and in 12 European facilities having
their licenses revoked. The Chinese inspection authorities regularly discovered
prohibited synthetic hormones and an excessive presence of antibiotics and
antibiotic residues, in meat from what would qualify as genetically-produced
animals.
The practice by American companies of
repeatedly sending banned meat products to China, those containing animal brain
and spinal column tissue responsible for the spread of 'mad cow' disease, and
those containing meats from GM animals and a wide variety of banned chemicals,
was so widespread that it finally resulted in Chinese authorities permanently banning all beef and beef products from
the US. The total ban was implemented in 2003 and is only now under
discussion for removal, having cost the Americans billions of dollars, and they
still haven't learned anything. The Chinese authorities finally offered to
discuss removal of the ban on American beef, but the Americans are demanding
the right to continue shipping to China the same product content that caused
the ban in the first place. Russia
claimed to have had the identical experience with American meat producers,
and recently, in frustration, banned all meat imports from the US - as China
did. China recently ordered the destruction of a shipment of thousands of US
oysters that were contaminated by bacteria and which had already caused
illnesses in other Asian countries.
China also had to repeatedly cancel shipments
of US fruits and other agricultural products contaminated by listeria, fecal
coliform or other bacteria, items which had already caused many deaths and
illnesses in the US. The banned additive clenbuterol, commonly known as 'lean
meat powder', has repeatedly been found in many shipments containing thousands
of tonnes of imported pork products from the US. Shipments of frozen ham from
the US have been found to contain clenbuterol and further contaminated with
mildew. None of these shipments are accidents. The Americans are fully aware of
China's food laws, and even more fully aware of what they are packing. As always, the Western media remain dead
silent on these issues, ensuring Americans remain ignorant of the facts.
The US media still constantly vilify China
for the discovery ten years ago of melamine in powdered milk, but were silent
when only recently China had to destroy almost 1,000 tonnes of substandard
imported Western milk products - including Nestlé products - with 70% of these
being baby formulas. Here is a (very) brief list of Western firms and their
substandard products either made by them in China, or imported into the
country.
Diseased meat at Wal-Mart. Chlorine, insecticides and pesticides in Coca-Cola - plus carcinogens at 14
times the level in the US, mercury in Sprite,
insect body parts and insect eggs in Cadbury
chocolate, chemical chickens, dead chickens, re-used cooking oil and
substandard hygiene at KFC. Pink
Slime, trash beef scrapings and ammonium hydroxide in McDonald's hamburgers, the banned carcinogenic dye Sudan I in KFC and Heinz products. Transgenic materials, excessive iodine and heavy
metal contamination in Nestlé baby
foods, toxic contaminants including arsenic, lead and cadmium, in various
Western-branded baby foods. Excessive vitamin B2 in Heinz baby milk;
substandard Western cheeses (Kraft),
mislabeled and consisting in large part of wood cellulose; noodles, biscuits
and baby formulas that had expired prior to shipping and contaminated with
fecal coliform bacteria and sulfur dioxide; baby formula contaminated with
ethyl vanillin and other flavoring additives in attempts to induce babies to
develop a taste for their brand and reject others. Free formaldehyde in Lux soap and Dove Shampoo, harmful mineral oil and formaldehyde in Johnson’s baby products, as well as in Unilever and P & G products, SK-II
cosmetics, carcinogens in Colgate
toothpaste. Samsonite
"Luxury Tokyo Chic" luggage handles with high levels of compounds
known to cause cancer and birth defects.
American ice cream brands including Dairy Queen, ColdStone, and Baskin-Robbins
have been found to contain alarming levels of bacteria, with DQ's Blizzard
series setting a new record with 10 times the permitted safety limit. Dairy
Queen was forced to close its stores for decontamination, but the media claim
was that the closures were merely "to do some checks", and that the
test results of 10 times the permitted level of bacteria "didn't mean
Dairy Queen has quality problems". This claim tied for a first-place award
with Coca-Cola's declaration that its chlorine and pesticides were perfectly
safe to drink, and with Starbucks
assertion that the toilet water was responsible for its unique coffee flavor.
One hour after CCTV exposed illegal operations in its Beijing branches,
McDonald's vowed to discontinue using the controversial ground beef filler
known as "pink slime", which consists of garbage beef scrapings
containing ammonium hydroxide, the chemical being necessary to kill the
bacteria in the slime. In a rather deceptive twist of words, the Western media
sanitised the affair by categorising the garbage filler as "beef
trimmings", which has a very different meaning to any Westerner.
McDonald's China said it would launch "an immediate and serious
investigation" into the case. To what end? McDonald's would hardly be
unaware of the ingredients it puts into its own products. The choice of words
by both the company and the media were meant to trivialise and dismiss China's
claims, implying that someone made a one-off mistake.
Danone
is almost as famous in China as Wal-Mart for violating food safety rules,
having been charged more than 20 times in the past few years, in two recent
events suffering the destruction of more than 200 tonnes of "luxury"
water brands for bacterial or chemical contamination. Moreover, Danone's Evian and Volvic brands of "luxury" natural mineral water have
proven to be neither natural nor mineral, but simply plain water, and luxurious
only in the range of pollutants contained - lead, arsenic, nitrite, free
chlorine, cyanide, coliform bacteria, mold and excessive levels of many other
bacteria. Recently, Danone's Dumex baby
milk powder was declared contaminated with melamine, and that infants in
several countries had fallen ill. Danone denied the claims but the jury is
still out on this one. In another category, IKEA ceased the sale of various
cakes imported into China from Sweden, after authorities discovered them to
have high levels of coliform bacteria, in other words, fecal bacteria - feces.
Not surprisingly, IKEA executives
claimed they "conducted tests" on the same batch of cakes but did not
find bacteria.
•The
American Way
North American food production was not always
as described above, but when Jewish investment bankers like Goldman Sachs and firms like Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, the hedge funds
and similar, became involved with American MNCs in big agriculture, their greed
and determination to maximise profits at all costs, inevitably led us to where
we are today. The result is that small farms and production facilities
disappeared and the food chain became dominated by Big Agra who established
what are called "factory farms", those places where poultry are
raised in small cages and fed a combination of excrement and medications and
where larger animals are housed in larger cages and also fed excrement and
medications. And that is why 25% to 35% of all Americans become ill every year
from food-borne diseases, this not limited to meats but including every variety
of American vegetables, fruits and nuts. Every year, the US experiences large recalls,
sometimes covering the entire nation, of vegetables that are contaminated with
the same E. coli, the same fecal bacteria, as are American meats.
Prior to the arrival of the Americans and the
Jewish investment bankers in China, agriculture was small-scale and these
so-called factory farms did not exist, with animals still being essentially
free-range, not subjected to stress and not fed unhealthy food or drugs and
chemicals. The arrival of the Americans changed all that, exemplified by Husi
and OSI as I noted earlier. American big agra companies came to China bringing
their vaunted "best practices" with them, and are slowly transforming
China's agricultural landscape for the worse. American restaurants and fast-food outlets like KFC, McDonald's, Starbucks,
Burger King, Pizza Hut, Wal-Mart will typically purchase only from these
factory farms because that is where the prices are lowest, virtually forcing
any Chinese firms to follow the pattern if they want to also become a supplier.
The Americans have an expertly-crafted PR and marketing program that presents
an entirely false picture of high standards and health safety when the blunt
truth is that they are almost inevitably at the bottom of the list by all
important measures, and this applies as much to companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi as to OSI, KFC and
McDonald's.
There is another factor for Chinese to
consider, that of food products imported from the US. If you are Chinese, do you believe that US food companies are saving
all their feces-covered meat and their fruits and vegetables contaminated with
fecal bacteria to sell only to Americans, while they save all their clean food
for shipment to China? You know that isn't happening. At best, the food
shipped to China is the same as that consumed in the US, and at worst is quite
a lot worse, which is why the Chinese health authorities seize and destroy so
many American food shipments.
Therefore, the first rule is to never
purchase any foods originating in the US. American chicken and chicken products
are the worst, followed closely by all other meats, then followed closely again
by fruits and vegetables. This rule includes both fresh and packaged foods. The
second rule is to never purchase or eat either fresh or packaged meats produced
by an American firm in China, since they inevitably will be sourced from one of
the factory farms to precisely the same standards of health and safety as
described in the opening paragraphs above. This means not only American-branded
meats in the supermarkets, but also to avoid altogether the American fast-food
restaurants and supermarkets since they will almost always source their food
from American or other factory farms and, as you have seen, will do so entirely
without regard to either public health or safety.
Too many Chinese are too eager to believe
that foreign food standards, especially American food standards, are much
superior to those in China and that American foods are healthier and safer than
those produced in China. They are not. When you purchase any American meat or
vegetable products or go to KFC and McDonald's, you are, more than half of the
time, "buying, chewing, and swallowing feces".
•Crabs
That Glow in the Dark
Most readers will recall the nuclear reactor
meltdown at Fukushima in Japan in 2011. Fukushima has not gone away, but
Americans are no longer aware of it because it has been totally censored in the
US, covered with a thick blanket of media silence. Few people are aware that
since the date of the meltdown those reactors have been discharging hundreds of
tonnes of intensely radioactive nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean every day,
and that the ocean currents have long since carried that radiation across the
Pacific to pollute the entire West Coast of North America, particularly the US
portions. There have been repeated reports of massive seafood die-offs and
other problems from the Southern US, but these seem to never reach the media.
With Japan, fishermen are "discouraged" from fishing anywhere on the
Eastern side of Japan because virtually the entire Northern Pacific has been
flooded with nuclear radiation. Japanese
authorities refuse to discuss the matter, and the American Jewish media have
imposed a news embargo on the topic.
I mention this for two reasons. One is that
all seafood originating in the Pacific East of Japan should be banned in all
countries, and consumers in every nation should exercise extreme caution in
purchasing any Japanese seafood. The other reason is that (in China) the Americans are heavily promoting their
Alaska King Crab and other seafood that originate in this same part of the
Northern Pacific and that are almost certainly contaminated with radiation. This
is one of the reasons for the publication ban; if the full details of Fukushima
were widely known, the seafood industry on the US' entire West Coast would most
likely collapse. The ban is therefore to protect Big Agra at the expense of the
public. Given the circumstances of Fukushima's continued spewing of radioactive
waste after five years, and the American ban on publicity and disclosure of
evidence, all seafood from the West Coast (Pacific) of the US should be
shunned. Canadian lobster is fine
because it originates in the Atlantic Ocean and cannot be exposed.
This
is a serious matter because both the Japanese and the Americans have been
shipping this seafood into China, through the Kwai Chung container terminal in
Hong Kong. The Hong Kong health authorities have for
years allowed the imports of heavily-contaminated seafood into the city,
apparently due to "deficiencies in safety controls" but in fact due to the political influence these large
international agra firms have over the Hong Kong government. The South
China Morning Post said the government relied on food importers taking the
initiative on food safety. But of course, the importers do nothing. There was
apparently only one instance where ten boxes of radioactive carrots were
intercepted, and HK authorities admitted
they had "no idea" if banned radioactive food were being sold in Hong
Kong or being re-exported to the Mainland.
Canada is also guilty in this, for all the
same reasons. Recently there were news reports of Canadian salmon and other
marine life exhibiting open sores, cankers, and all the signs of radiation poisoning.
The Canadian government's response was to cease all testing and blithely claim
there was nothing wrong and nothing to see, after which Canada's Jewish-owned
media imposed another news blackout and no further information has been
available since.
*
Larry
Romanoff is a retired management consultant and
businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting
firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a
visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in
international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai
and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and
the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com.
*
Larry Romanoff is
one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new COVID-19
anthology ''When China Sneezes''.
Copyright © Larry
Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai,
2020
