Time to Go Kosher

On Thursday there was a story about how Chinese parents spend exorbitant amounts of money the world over trying to buy non-Chinese baby formula for their children. On Friday there was a story about how the FDA plans to put the companies that import food in charge of making sure that they're safe. And last May there was a story about a Chinese company buying out a major pork producer in the United States. The combination of these three stories is very unsettling.

Why are Chinese parents desperately avoiding buying Chinese baby formula, and even foreign baby formula imported by Chinese companies? Because the profit motive in China is so strong, and the regulatory environment so lax, that they dare not trust their babies' lives to the honesty and integrity of Chinese businessmen.

More specifically, in 2008 Chinese baby formula producers boosted the protein content by including toxic melamine to fool the chemical tests. Six babies died and hundreds of thousands became seriously ill. These adulterations have continued despite two people being executed and three receiving life sentences in the scandal.

How has China responded to the parents' attempts at getting pure food for their children?

[... C]ustoms officials in Hong Kong are enforcing a two-can, or four-pound, restriction on travelers taking it out of the territory — with violators facing fines of up to $6,500 and two years in prison.

Officials in Hong Kong are treating baby milk smugglers like criminals who traffic in more illicit kinds of powder. In April, the customs police held a news conference to announce that a two-day “antismuggling operation” had resulted in the breaking up of three “syndicates,” the arrest of 10 people and the seizure of nearly 220 pounds of formula worth $3,500.

The Chinese demand for baby formula has caused shortages in countries from the Netherlands to New Zealand.

And this is all because communist China has become a capitalist paradise. There's almost no government regulation of industry: it's a laissez-faire Randian utopia. The selfish me-first mentality that Libertarians claim is the source of everything that is holy has Chinese parents scrambling across the planet to make sure their babies aren't poisoned.

And now the FDA thinks it's safe to allow companies to take responsibility for the purity of imported food. This is a very bad idea. Just four months ago the biggest American honey packer was caught laundering Chinese honey, saying that it had come from third country. China has been dumping honey on the American market and is notorious for adulterating it with rice syrup, beet sugar and corn syrup.

For years my wife and I are have been avoiding food imported from China -- which can be hard because so many companies lie about the country of origin. We have absolutely no faith that the stuff China produces is safe to eat, just as the Chinese people themselves.

Another thing to note is that nearly all vitamin supplements on the American market are made in China. They've driven all the other suppliers out of  business with low prices. That, combined with the general dubiousness about the efficacy of vitamin supplements in the first place, has caused us to abandon taking vitamins all together. You should get all your nourishment from the food you eat, not pills made in China.

So I'm not particularly happy about the prospect of companies being their own watchdogs, considering that so much of the food they import will come from China. The first thing Walmart will do is spin off the import arms of their business so that they can avoid responsibility if they get a bad batch of food. They'll  cut the "independent importer" loose, let it go bankrupt and sacrifice a few underlings. Then they'll keep on demanding lower and lower prices from their suppliers, which means it'll only be a matter of time before kids start dying all over again.

I'm even less happy about the prospect of American meatpackers being bought out by Chinese concerns. Chinese companies are notorious for processing diseased animals into food they sell to consumers, dumping thousands of dead animals into the rivers that supply their drinking water, and China is the breeding ground for some of the worst flu outbreaks in recent years. China is also the source for a deadly pig virus that will may kill up to a million piglets in the US and Canada this summer.

I've never been a big fan of pork. But with Chinese companies getting in the American pork industry, there's never been a better time to go kosher.