Tainted milk
I imagine most of you have read or heard about the tainted milk in China. Some of the most respected milk companies here have been found to have a harmful chemical (Melamine) in some of their products with the biggest issue being milk powder for babies. The chemical is especially harmful for babies and more than 50,000 babies have been hospitalized with kidney stones being a common symptom. The company with the most pervasive tainted products knew about the problems before the Olympics and kept it quiet until after the Olympics and only then addressed the problem because an affiliated company in New Zealand learned of the problem and blew the whistle on them. I regularly consume milk from one of the companies that was found to have limited problems. The milk companies blamed the problem on suppliers who apparently added the chemical to boost the nutritional test results of watered down product. The small amounts of Melamine that I may have consumed are supposedly not enough to harm adults. The issue came to light about a month ago but just in the past 10 days the small grocery store on campus has been out of almost all liquid milk. I went to the big grocery off campus this morning and found Nestle milk available. More than 95% of the milk here is sold at room temperature in cardboard cartons as China doesn’t have the infrastructure for storing and transporting cold milk. The taste of the milk here is barely tolerable to me and I buy the best quality stuff available. I read a translation of a blog written by someone in the film industry in China and she said that if the government paid as much attention to food safety as they did to monitoring the film industry there would be no tainted food problems. According to the blog, the government must approve all movie scripts, script changes and the final cut of the movie before it can be released for distribution. The Premier recently said that the government was also accountable for this problem and had been lax in supervision and management. I know there are risks galore here when it comes to eating. I watch the locals and if the locals are eating something I figure it’s probably okay. I try not to eat too much of anything unless I know for sure it’s safe (such as American company products). I especially stay away from fish. I’ve been pretty lucky and haven’t had any major illnesses except 1 case of extremely overactive bowels which required medical treatment.
It’s surprising how frequently in my daily life here that I’m reminded of my business career in the states. Pretty much every day I consume Coca-Cola Company products such as Coke and Minute Maid orange juice. I often see and sometimes dine at KFC or McDonalds which are customers of Henny Penny Corp., the equipment manufacturing company in Ohio where I worked for 5 years. I also often see and consume Nestle products (Edy’s and Dreyer’s Ice Cream merged with Nestle several years ago). I was recently reminded of my time at the hotel company in Orlando when a few weeks ago I saw the owner of that company on CNN. He is the owner of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan that was bombed.
I recently saw an article on the internet talking about a simple news quiz that was given to some Americans. The questions were 1) which political party is in the majority of the House of Representatives, 2) who is the Secretary of State, and 3) who is the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Apparently, only 18% of the respondents got all 3 right. I got all 3 and the answers are democrats, Condoleezza Rica, and Gordon Brown. What I find interesting about this is how little attention most Americans pay to world events. I doubt very many Americans could name the President or Prime Minister of China but I think most Chinese could name the U.S. President and many could also name the Secretary of State. The news on Chinese tv including the Chinese language stations has a lot of coverage about events in the U.S. such as the presidential race. I’ve been surprised by how much coverage U.S. events get on the news programs here. Of course, sometimes the coverage is tilted towards propaganda.
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