Posted on 07/22/2007 6:41:36 AM PDT by JACKRUSSELL
That loaf of Sara Lee bread on the grocery shelf in San Jose was made with flour from U.S. wheat. But the Illinois-based food giant uses honey and vitamin supplements from China.
While Paul Newman's daughter uses California figs in cookies made by her Aptos organic food company, she turns to Mexico and Austria for other ingredients.
And even though a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman described Crest toothpaste "as a truly American product," it uses additives from China and Finland.
Recent reports of tainted imports from China have focused new attention on a little-known trend: In today's global economy, more food items are being produced in this country with some ingredients from other lands. But the FDA inspects less than 1 percent of all food imports - and that means consumers must trust food makers to guarantee the safety of their products.
"It's not just the stuff that says `Made in China.' It's the stuff in the stuff that says `Made in the USA,' " said Elisa Odabashian of Consumers Union, a non-profit consumer advocacy group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine. "We're importing more and more of our food and we're inspecting almost none of it."
William Hubbard, a former Food and Drug Administration associate commissioner who is advocating for a beefed-up food safety system in the United States, agreed.
"It's not which foods contain these ingredients, but which foods don't contain them," he said.
You may not know it from the label. Food makers aren't required to disclose the source of what goes into most products.
Some major food makers won't even talk about it. Campbell's and Kraft use ingredients from around the world, although representatives there refused to say which countries supply them.......
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
I thought salmonella is more of a food-preparation problem, rather than an ingredient problem.
Bump for later reading
I agree.
Despite outcry, many Americans can't live without China goods
In the wake of the scare, Utah-based vitamin maker Food for Health International started labeling its products "China-free.""We did this to improve the level of confidence in the people taking vitamin supplements," said executive vice president Gary Kolman, who noted that China makes about 85 to 90 percent of the world's supply of synthetic vitamin C and a high percentage of other vitamins.
A good business decision, I expect the stock will be rising.
Sad to say. The only way this will stop is enough companies that use China ingredients that make people sick will have to be sued.
Names drawn across the news and lawsuits will at least make these companies cautious about buying from China. At the very least they may have them tested before use.
IOW, he re-lables as "China-free", even though the stuff is still made in China.
I am not an expert in commercial food preparation, but, yes, I believe that salmonella is indeed a food preparation problem.
However, for ingredients that are added after all cooking of a product (such as these suspect spices), I believe that a foodmaker is largely limited to using ingredients as they come from the supplier, and thus would be subject to the skill (or lack of skill) in food preparation of the supplier.
In particular, if contamination comes from a spicemaker, then companies that use those spices as finishing for their own products I believe are subject to the food preparation techniques of that spicemaker.
Well, I have no way of proving/disproving the veraciy of the statements made by Food for Health International. Maybe they're lying, maybe they're not.
'China-Free' Supplements Available
Published on: July 9, 2007
Capitalizing on the recent concerns about food products from China, a whole food nutritional supplement and emergency disaster kit company is adding "China-Free" labels to all its products and noting it in all its promotional literature.
Food for Health International is the first company to actively promote its "China-Free" ingredients and products. It has always used organic and natural ingredients in their vitamin and health shake products but President Frank Davis wants the world to know that none of these ingredients come from China.
snip
It makes you feel like your living in a crap shoot, helpless until somebody dies to prove the bad link! We have a farmer’s market ... one day a week. Useless. Certainly we can’t grow and produce everything that we need to survive. Being very careful and reading every label there is that is out there but it’s an unhappy feeling that what you eat on Tuesday could be in the news on Friday!
If given a choice, I will breathe second hand smoke, rather than knowingly put in mouth any food product from China.
For later.
Damned Congress.
This a golden opportunity for a food manufacturer, supplier to advertise and make ‘China Free’ products. Preferably all USA ingredients. None from a foreign country.
With designer water, designer coffee, chocolate, etc. the money to buy more expensive USA products is there.
Offer it to us.
I used to take a multi-vitamin daily. Plus other supplements.
On learning that China has cornered the vitamin market, I haven’t since.
No Asian seafood for me.( I recently saw salmon, ‘Caught in Alaska, processed in China)
I’ll be looking for the ‘China Free’ vitamins.
The recent tainted peanut butter problem, which resulted in several deaths, was traced to a US warehouse where leaking air conditioning caused contaminated water to drip into the peanuts. How many people each year are sickened if not die from food poisoning caused by poor restaurant sanitation and food handling? Some food ingredients like spices have been imported for hundred of years. The problem isn’t importation its inspection.
True. Obviously, conditions in some domestic manufacturing plants are as suspect as those in Asia. But at least they are closer to home and a bit easier to police.
They waste time on the Iraqi defunding crap they should find the time to tackle this.
Send the Dems and RINO's to China for a few weeks and see how they feel when they get home.
What we really need is a master list of all Communist Chinese products.
For your ping list!
Check out the three graphics of ingredient sources in the article. Very interesting!
Good idea but the problem is they do not have to disclose it on the labeling/ingredients, everyone is at risk unless you grow and or raise all your own food.
As usual it will take a bunch of deaths here before Congress does anything about it.
The point is that this Commie Chinese junk has been flooding in here for years and nobody noticed that it was bad? The CC leaders executed the guy who was overseeing the exports. His American counterpart is probably sailing around the Chesapeake Bay this afternoon. That’s the problem!
bttt
Excellent points
Yesterday I did a ‘google image’ search, using two words:
Chinese pollution - then I tried: Chinese river pollution
You cannot believe the pictures that came up. China holds the record of 16 cities out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world!
It is disgusting that any company would even consider purchasing ANYTHING from China.
I agree...and I expect we'll start seeing more of it.
There is a big difference between deliberate tainted food and accidental tainted foods.
I'd say the problem is testing -- of foreign ingredients -- not by the FDA, but by the US food processors who are importing this stuff.
Note the contradictions in the following:
From the San Jose Mercury News story:
The company's procurement experts visit suppliers around the world to ensure they follow health and safety rules, Goldman said. It requires suppliers to test and certify that ingredients meet specifications spelled out in purchasing contracts. Sara Lee also does its own testing.
From the MSNBC story about the Veggie-Booty salmonella:
Atlantic Quality Spice & Seasonings of Edison, N.J., said it had received assurance from its suppliers that all its ingredients were salmonella-free.
The company has tested other products made with some of the same ingredients used to produce the seasoning, and the results have been negative for salmonella, said Stan Gorski, president of Atlantic Quality Spice & Seasonings.
What these food processors call "testing" is random sampling of some batches, not of every foreign shipment, as Sara Lee and others would have you believe.
There is also no current requirement (as there is in Europe), under the FDA rules, that there be a paper trail back to the original suppliers/growers. The pet food poisonings were a great example of that -- as was a NY Times article that graphically portrayed the forging/changing of documents for the Chinese anti-freeze sold as glycerine to Panama (that killed several people).
If manufacturers don't even have to document the source of their food additives/ingredients, the door is wide open to all kinds of shenanigans/substitutions -- in spite of their PR assurances about quality control.
Wouldn't a master list of SAFE products be much shorter and easier to maintain? Sadly ... made in the USA is all I want to buy!
It’s real simple. American companies who use contaminated ingredients will take the hit. The ones who survive will be the ones who are damn careful about where they get their ingredients from
My guess is that the hot dog chili sauce, that was recalled , produced in Pa also had Chinese ingredients
You are right. Lawsuits will cut into the increased profit from using imported substandard ingredients . It may be cheaper just to keep their stuff China free
My 80+ yr old mom called and told me she got a great bargain on frozen shrimp at a local chain.
I told her it was Chinese . She had no idea.
I asked if she did not wonder why shrimp had become so cheap? She had never thought about it.
This woman traveled in China many years ago and saw the fish farms, she had stopped eating fish recently knowing that much of it is from those very fish farms.
I had to tell her to ask for “free range” shrimp, if she wanted US shrimp
It may be a couple years down the pipe, but the lawsuits from the tainted wheat gluten used in pet foods is going to send a really strong signal to companies sucking up to the ChiComms.
It's too bad simple patriotism didn't work, now a bunch of ambulance chasers are going to get rich...
I am not a fan of lawsuits, but in cases like these, we can all guess, all these companies make more using these ingredients.
In some ways, it may be hard to get ingredients from safe places anymore, heaven knows very little comes from the US.
These companies now SHOULD be responsible for testing all of these things prior to use. That alone will raise the cost of doing business with countries like China.
Standards here are dropping everyday. The US is becoming a third world country for profits sake. A whole lot of accountability is the only way to change the outcome.
Those ambulance chasers have to love it. The best thing the victim will get is hoping the lawsuits will change something.
You might want to pass this on to your dear momma. There is an organization called The United States Freshwater Prawn and Shrimp Growers Association, that was formed in 2002.
Here is their official website:
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