Cheap So-Called 'Organic' Food from China: A Bad Idea

* China's Hair-Raising Condiments, & Other Agribiz Atrocities
By Kerry Trueman
The Huffington Post, May 1, 2007
Straight to the Source

When we welded our wagon to China's economic engine, did we sign on to an environmental train wreck?

I'm glad the Chinese government's hired clean tech trailblazer William McDonough's design firm to create a green blueprint for six new cities and a village--who better to help China bind its ever-widening carbon footprint than McDonough, the internationally influential green architect and designer who turned Ford's River Rouge factory green and helped Nike create a biodegradable sneaker?

But China may have misinterpreted his "Waste = Food" concept. I'm pretty sure McDonough doesn't advocate putting pulverized scraps of plastic in pet food, or making soy sauce out of human hair (not to mention lard out of sewage.)

The premise of McDonough's environmental manifesto, Cradle to Cradle, co-written with Michael Braungart, a former Greenpeace activist turned sustainability scholar, is that every product we make should be non-toxic and biodegradable, or else endlessly recyclable. It's a utopian vision for a garbage-and-pollution-free future.

Maybe McDonough's tilting at wind turbines, but his ground breaking, earth saving designs have been hailed by environmental activists and not-so-crunchy corporatists alike. Steven Spielberg reportedly wants to do a documentary about McDonough's heroic eco-endeavors.

And Chinese officials recognize the need to tackle the problems their overheated economy poses for the planet. In fact, while we fume about all the greenhouse gases China's spewing, they may actually leave us in the dust when it comes to cutting carbon emissions.

But while the Chinese government may be leaning green, its business sector has been caught red-handed pumping up its profits by dumping chemicals into our food supply. The confirmation that melamine has been routinely added to animal feed to cut costs makes you wonder what else they might be putting in the food they're shipping to our shores.

The other day we asked our friend Sue, who's been to China several times, whether she would trust Chinese produce that's labeled organic. "No way!" was her emphatic response.

And yet, more and more of the organic food we buy in the U.S. is coming from China. Supposedly, our food manufacturers have to rely on imports because American farmers simply can't grow enough organic produce to meet the ever-growing demand.

I accepted this notion at face value until my friend and fellow NYC Food Systems Network colleague Christina Grace, a farmers' market maven, pointed out that it really comes down to the fact that Big Food would rather cut corners and buy cheap from China than support America's small family farms.

After all, it's a terrific boon to the corporate bottom line to be able to do business with suppliers who can manufacture their products without the added expense of such niceties as worker safety or environmental protection.

Of course, here at home, the agencies entrusted to protect us aren't doing such a bang-up job of things, either. It doesn't help that the FDA's budget keeps shrinking even as food imports rise. Welcome to Small Government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Food.

The USDA's going to compensate the pork producers for the millions of dollars they'll lose when they euthanize those 6,000 melamine-tainted hogs. Bereaved pet owners, on the other hand, will get nothing.

So taxpayers get stuck with the bill for Big Ag's habit of salvaging substandard pet food and feeding it to the pigs. The dead dogs and cats? Just collateral damage. You know, like all those Iraqi civilians.

http://www.organicconsumers.org/article ... e_5019.cfm