OK, now even the Chinese don't trust Chinese food ...

[eppur_se_muova]

Wealthy Chinese begin farming after food-safety scares (BBC)

By Martin Patience
BBC News, Beijing

Juggling their iPhones with spades, a group of young professionals are getting their hands dirty - digging vegetables.

During the week, they are teachers, PR consultants, and computer programmers. But at the weekend, these city slickers return to the soil.

"We're worried about food safety," says He Liying, explaining why they grow vegetables.

They toil under the summer sun - not always efficiently - at a co-operative farm called Little Donkey on the outskirts of Beijing. It has about 700 fee-paying members.

It is one of dozens of farms which have cropped up across the country catering for China's middle classes, which are increasingly concerned about food safety.
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14387817




Should I trust a quote attributed to someone identified as "He Liying" ?

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. Might be the attempt at phonetic

transliteration.

But for the record this is familiar...

[tabatha]

3. And I don't trust China press.

[marasinghe]

4. they'd have less of a problem, if they paid decent prices & wages to their farmers.

with their 10,000 year history & tradition of agriculture -- i'd rather trust the peasants with my food, than either my IPhone-juggling self, or my human-juggling government.

this is what you get, when you treat your food producers -- who sustained your civilization through millennia -- as a lower strata of society, than your own, desk-sitting, conditioned air breathing, designer garment wearing, pampered self.

[David__77]

5. There are plenty of affluent people in this country who go for organic food.

You'd think from all the media reports in this country that China is the only developing country with a food issue. They used to say, "eat your food, they're starving in China." Now, apparently there's no starvation but there are safety issues. An improvement, I'd say. Upton Sinclair exposed these things in the US when it was too a developing country at a similar level of per capita income to China presently.

It's a good sign that Chinese people are expressing concern about workplace safety and food safety, etc. It's a sign of an increasingly economically developed country. I just don't get the negative attitude toward China as compared with other developing countries.

[TexasTowelie]

6. Re: Negative attitude toward Chinese

Maybe because they are proving themselves to be better capitalists than we are in the US?

[Old and In the Way]

7. They've been at the game for thousands of years.They were 'communists' for 50.

It's mind boggling to see what they've accomplished in 20 years....it will be mind boggling to see what they do in another 20. Of all of the countries I've been to, none have had the collective energy of the Chinese. Everyone is hustling to make a buck there. People my age there know what real starvation and grinding poverty was....they are determined never to go back there again.