PAUL KRUGMAN: Fear of Eating

[kevinmc]

Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.

These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know, there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.

Now, those who blame globalization do have a point. U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing plants without the permission of foreign governments — and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement. And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when it comes to imports from China, where the state of food safety is roughly what it was in this country before the Progressive movement.

The Washington Post, reviewing F.D.A. documents, found that last month the agency detained shipments from China that included dried apples treated with carcinogenic chemicals and seafood “coated with putrefying bacteria.” You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and disgusting food ends up in American stomachs.

Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005, the F.D.A. suspected that peanut butter produced by ConAgra, which sells the product under multiple brand names, might be contaminated with salmonella. According to The New York Times, “when agency inspectors went to the plant that made the peanut butter, the company acknowledged it had destroyed some product but declined to say why,” and refused to let the inspectors examine its records without a written authorization..........

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/05/paul-krugman-fear-of-eating.html

[Cheney Killed Bambi]

1. “E. coli conservatives”

;-)

[Jim Sagle]

3. Sound byte of the century! The Dems could CRUSH the Pugs with that slogan.

[Cobalt-60]

2. Putrefying bacteria is great with a little Tabasco sauce

It'll put lead in your pencil, as my Grandfather used to say.
But seriously, these latest events have me ready to abandon the grocery store for the farmers markets, regardless of the price.

[undergroundpanther]

4. And to that mix of toxic chemicals and bacteria Genetic

modified Food ..That'll make ya puke for a month AND make you grow hair on your tounge.
YUM double churned ice cream with Genetically modified fish protien makes it so creeeamy. Ugh. I wonder if the Pout is imported ffrom China..Cheep cheep?


a protein cloned from the blood of an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish, the ocean pout.

Instead of extracting the protein from the fish, which Unilever describes as “not sustainable or economically feasible” in its application, the company developed a process for making it, by altering the genetic structure of a strain of baker’s yeast so that it produces the protein during fermentation.

This ingredient, called an ice-structuring protein, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is used by Unilever to make some products in the United States, like some Popsicles and a new line of Breyers Light Double Churned ice cream bars
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/26/dining/26cream.html?ex=1311566400&en=3bd2c5b1e7962c82&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[boobooday]

5. So they can wiretap anyone without a warrant, hold citizens indefinitely

without charges, but they can't get to the tainted peanut butter?

Wow.

[Blue State Blues]

6. But that's what gov'ment does

Government regulates CITIZENS, but it doesn't regulate CORPORATIONS. That would be wrong. There are profits to consider, after all.