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Check Chinese goods closer

  The expanding list of problem goods in recent months indicates an urgent need to strengthen the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s inspection capabilities. Just as important, the scares raised by Chinese food imports point to a basic need to cultivate multiple supply sources, thus reducing undue dependence on any one source.
   Unchecked, the escalating safety issues promise to undermine consumer confidence in imported foods, an expanding sector of the economy.
   --Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal

Quoted from Shadow

It seems that much of what we import from China is contaminated with something or another so it's time for stricter controls and inspections of all food stuffs coming from China, human and animal.

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"What was so troubling about all of this is how out of your hands it is," said Patrick Scheels, who owns Capital Painting. "The ingredients could be from anywhere."

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China halts imports of U.S. meat products
BY ANITA CHANG The Associated Press

   BEIJING — China has suspended imports of chicken feet, pig ears and other animal products from seven U.S. companies, including the world’s largest meat processor, in an apparent attempt to turn the tables on American complaints about tainted products from China.
   The American meat had contaminants including salmonella, feed additives and veterinary drugs, according to a list posted on the Web site of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine late Friday.
   The U.S. and other countries have cracked down on Chinese products since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found in April that North American dogs and cats were poisoned by tainted Chinese pet food ingredients. Since then, a growing number of Chinese products have been found to be tainted with potentially toxic chemicals and other adulterants.
   In recent weeks, Chinese authorities have been prominently announcing their own rejections of imports, including U.S. orange pulp, dried apricots, raisins and health supplements — apparently to show that they are not the only ones with food safety problems.
   The Chinese agency said frozen poultry from Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson Foods Inc., the world’s largest meat processor, was contaminated with salmonella.
   Frozen chicken feet from Laurel, Miss.-based Sanderson Farms Inc. were tainted with residue of an antiparasite drug, and frozen pork ribs from Wichita, Kan.-based Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. contained the leanness-enhancing feed additive ractopamine, the agency said.
   Frozen pig ears from Kansas City, Mo.-based Van Luin Foods USA Inc. were found to contain ractopamin, frozen chicken feet from Atlanta-based Intervision Foods was tainted with salmonella and frozen pork from Atlanta’s AJC International Inc. was tainted with ractopamine, the agency said.
   Both stewed chicken feet and pig ears are popular dishes in China.
   Sausage casing from a seventh company, listed by the Chinese agency as “Thumph Foods,” was also found to contain ractopamine, according to the Chinese agency. It was not clear whether it was referring to Triumph Foods of St. Joseph, Mo.
   Mark Klein, a spokesman for Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc., disputed the Chinese inspectors’ fi ndings that his company’s products were tainted and said Cargill hoped to resolve the issue by working with U.S. and Chinese officials.
   “We’re proud of our products and our processes, and we’ll be delighted to talk about them with all concerned,” he said.
   Cargill is the parent company of Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., which as of 2005 was the ninth leading pork producer in the U.S., according to the National Pork Producers Council.
   Libby Lawson, a spokeswoman for Tyson Foods, said the company knew nothing about any tainted product.
   “We’re disappointed with this news from China and are investigating these claims, as this is the first we’ve heard of this development,” she said.  

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China not only nation exporting tainted food
BY TRACI CARL The Associated Press

   MEXICO CITY — Mexican cantaloupe irrigated with water from sewage-tainted rivers. Candy laced with lead. Chinese toothpaste is not the only concern for U.S. consumers wary of the health risks posed by imported goods.
   Producers in other developing nations are big violators of basic food safety standards, even as they woo consumers with a growing appetite for foods like pickled mangoes from India and winter-season fruits and vegetables from Mexico.
   On Wednesday, President Bush established a high-level government panel to recommend steps to guarantee the safety of food shipped into the U.S. and to improve policing of those imports.
   “The administration is concerned about the safety of imported products that Americans eat and use,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said.
   China, already under suspicion as the source of tainted toothpaste, contaminated fish and toxic medicine, had the largest number of violations in the past 12 months, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejecting 1,901 shipments of food or cosmetics. But India and Mexico weren’t far behind, with inspectors rejecting 1,787 and 1,560 shipments, respectively.
   The biggest reasons? Foods that are unapproved or contain poisons and pesticides. Some are simply dirty, with inspectors finding that the shipment “appears to consist in whole or in part of a filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance or be otherwise unfit for food.”
   And those are just the problems that are caught. FDA inspectors only have the money and resources to check about 1 percent of the 8.9 million imported food shipments a year. Many of those inspections target problem products from problem nations, like Indian relishes or Mexican cantaloupe.
   The FDA banned all cantaloupe from Mexico in 2002 after four salmonella outbreaks traced to the fruit killed two people in the United States and hospitalized at least 18 others.
   While some Mexican cantaloupe exporters have regained the FDA’s trust by adopting cleaner irrigation methods, Mexican melons are often contaminated by sewage-laced water. In June alone, the FDA rejected six shipments of Mexican cantaloupe, 4 percent of the 139 total shipments from Mexico, because of salmonella.
   Mexican green onions were blamed for a 2003 outbreak of hepatitis A in Pennsylvania that was traced to the Chi-Chi’s restaurant chain. Four people died and more than 600 people were sickened.
   And three Mexican candy manufacturers, including two subsidiaries of Mars Inc. and Hershey Co., agreed last year to lead testing and annual audits after The Orange County Register found that California state and federal regulators knew spicy Mexican candies could cause lead poisoning in children, but did nothing.
   Candy makers are still major violators, making up at least 15 percent of the FDA’s June rejections for Mexico after inspectors determined that shipments were filthy, unsafe or contained pesticides.
   In the same month, FDA inspectors determined that four shipments of oral electrolyte solution — used to treat dehydration in children with acute diarrhea or vomiting — contained unsafe coloring and false labeling.  

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Attacks on food from China take on racist tone
BY JEFF YANG Special to The Washington Post
Jeff Yang is the “Asian Pop” columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, and a global strategist for Iconoculture.

   The French delight in preparing food; the Italians adore eating it. But no people on Earth are so engrossed in food as the Chinese, for whom it is not just craft, pleasure and sustenance but the fundamental building block of society. In the West, acquaintances greet one another with “How are you?” The Chinese ask, “Have you eaten?”
   So for the Chinese, tainted food is more than a health hazard — it’s a kind of sacrilege. As one Chinese shopper told National Public Radio, “People here think food is as important as the sky. If there’s something wrong with the food, it’s as if the sky is falling.”
   Nevertheless, China has been portrayed as a nation blind to hygiene and blissfully unconcerned about recent reports of food contamination. That’s troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there’s “something kind of racist” about culinary xenophobia: “Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people.”
   And this, in turn, spells danger. What one might call “food libel” has long been an aspect of a larger fear of China. The association of Chinese with dubious edibles has insinuated itself into our cultural consciousness in seemingly trivial ways: in schoolyard taunting, in sitcom gags about takeout food, in standup monologues about puppy chow mein.
RAISING STAKES
   But when the stakes are raised, as they have been by recent scandals, such jokes turn deadly serious. The fringes of the pundit set have already been intimating that these tainted-food incidents are deliberate. In May, the conservative news organ WorldNetDaily. com asked, “Is China Trying to Poison Americans and Their Pets?” The nativist drumbeat has since only pounded louder, suggesting that China has been waging a secret biowarfare campaign to destroy the United States from deep, deep within — planting WMDs in the Wal-Mart cart, if you will.
   Yellow-peril imagery has been oozing from the extreme margins into the mainstream. Recently, the Utah-based health food company Food for Health International even became the first to take this “China equals menace” theme to market, instituting a new label and ad campaign promoting its products as “China-Free.” There’s talk about calling the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing the B.Y.O. Olympics.
   The leading customer-advocacy blog Consumerist.com came up with a catchy nickname for the fiendish assault on American shoppers: “The Chinese Poison Train is still out there, lurking on a container ship headed our way,” editor Carey Greenberg-Berger warns in one May post. “Nobody knows when it will strike again.” You can imagine the silent-movie tableau: the fiendish Chinese Poison Train bearing down on the hapless American consumer, tied to the tracks by a nefarious evildoer with a Fu Manchu mustache.
   Of course, serious problems exist in China’s massive food-export complex, which is the source of the vast bulk of additives such as xanthan gum and ascorbic acid, as well as 12 percent of the world’s fruit and vegetables and about half of the global supply of farmraised fish. But many of these problems have stemmed from China’s embrace of capitalist ethics, unrestrained by the government oversight present in more established industrial economies.
   Ultimately, the reasons Chinese goods make up such an enormous part of the U.S. shopping basket are the same as those behind our undocumented-immigration quandary: Companies want higher profits, and consumers want lower prices. If Chinese sources were stripped from the food-industry supply chain, corporations would simply turn to other low-cost exporters, with comparably poor safety records.
   FDA records show that China isn’t even the leading source of contaminated imports to the United States. India and Mexico have exceeded China in “refused food shipments” over the past year, and the leader in rejected candy imports was a country with an otherwise antiseptic image: Denmark. Domestic food sources also aren’t exempt from scandal: Remember the California spinach scare last year? And last month, another Californiabased company recalled more than 75,000 pounds of hamburger distributed in the western United States, the latest in a lengthy series of tainted-meat incidents — all from American suppliers.
EASY TARGET
   But the media’s obsessive focus on China is an easy one — as easy as the old playground singsong slur that starts “Me Chinese, me make joke” and ends with a tainted Coke. Pointing the finger at Asian imports was the default PR strategy for U.S. auto manufacturers in the 1970s because it was easier to blame nameless foreigners than to address the industry’s real problems.
   Asian Americans have already seen the fruit that grows from such toxic soil: Twentyfive years ago last month, Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American man in Detroit, was killed by two disgruntled autoworkers who accused him of being part of a conspiracy to “take away American jobs” before beating him with a baseball bat. Bitter fruit indeed, and a dish we’d rather not see served up again.

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Products for Developing and Conditioning Show Calves

Sunglo Show Cattle Explosion  Purchase Online

Sunglo Show Cattle Explosion is for increased weight gain, improved feed efficiency and increased carcass leanness in cattle fed in confinement for slaughter during the last 28 to 42 days on feed.
Show Cattle Explosion Brochure

Advantages:

Added whey, milk and barley

7.5% fat

Provides a convenient method to use Optiflexx™ to show calf rations

Optiflexx™ may improve the ribeye area up to 0.5" (Elanco research findings)

Add to current ration

One 25 lb. bag will feed on steer at 3/4 lb. per day for 33 days

Feeding Directions:

Each pound of Show Cattle Explosion contains 573 mg of Ractopamine HCL

Mix into a complete diet and feed so that each animal receives 0.157 - 0.75 lbs/head/day of Show Cattle Explosion

This will supply 90-430 mg/head/day of Ractopamin HCL

Optiflexx™ is a trademark of Elanco Animal Health

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pork ribs from Wichita, Kan.-based Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. contained the leanness-enhancing feed additive ractopamine, the agency said.
   Frozen pig ears from Kansas City, Mo.-based Van Luin Foods USA Inc. were found to contain ractopamin, frozen chicken feet from Atlanta-based Intervision Foods was tainted with salmonella and frozen pork from Atlanta’s AJC International Inc. was tainted with ractopamine, the agency said.
   Both stewed chicken feet and pig ears are popular dishes in China.
   Sausage casing from a seventh company, listed by the Chinese agency as “Thumph Foods,” was also found to contain ractopamine, according to the Chinese agency. It was not clear whether it was referring to Triumph Foods of St. Joseph, Mo.

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Mexican cantaloupe irrigated with water from sewage-tainted rivers