Tainted Food

[forsyth]

So the FDA is testing all sorts of food we get from China to make sure it wasn't shipped over in bags that used to hold pesticides and that sort of thing now, after the pet food and reports from South Africa and so on.

The question is though, why are we importing so much food from China? Especially things like wheat, which grows perfectly fine in the US. I can see importing foods that grow better elsewhere, but why stuff like wheat and corn where we grow so much the government pays farmers to throw it out?

Comments

[shadwing.livejournal.com]

Easy cost.

Farmers have to charge more in the US in order to break even, and believe it or not it's cheeper to import from China than by locally. Though after all this madness about pesticide tainting that could change. We also export much of our grain outside the country since it is considered to be some of the best in the world.

The losses, thanks to one batch of tainted wheat, can destroy the company so it might be worth it to pay more for local grains where it's easier to track where it came from and what was used on it.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Oh, I figured that it was nominally cheaper to import from China. That doesn't mean it's actually cheaper. Especially since we pay farmers to dump grain, and subsidize them to grow it in the first place, and that's why high frutcrose corn syrup is in everything. There's just not really any good reason to import wheat or corn type stuff from China. Not even soy, probably.

Of course, the giant agribusinesses who grow much of our grain claim Americans don't want the jobs farming, but it turns out that Americans just don't want the jobs for the less than minimum wage starvation pay the companies want to offer.

[shadwing.livejournal.com]

The grain that is dumped is actually stuff that 'fails inspection' if memory served and I know that much of the stuff that farmers export they get a higher price for them selling in the US.

I used to work for a Grain Company (can't ya tell) and I know that several large farming groups exported 70-80% of their yield overseas since they got a better price for it over there. Smaller farmers can't compete with the size of yield nor the overall quality of the larger groups so they end up having to trash most of their yield or selling it as animal feed for a lower price.

[kail-panille.livejournal.com]

More to the point, the stuff that was tainted wasn't exactly wheat, per se. It was wheat gluten, which means it had to be processed, which means... yeah. Cheaper labor in China.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Shipping wheat across the Pacific to China to be processed and then shipping the results of that back makes even less sense. It's not like we don't have factories or expertise here, which makes shipping it that far a ridiculous waste.

But I think it's wheat gluten and stuff that came from crops grown in China, which makes slightly more sense, except for the part where we're buying food from China and not hiring enough people to actually inspect the food coming into this country, six years after the anthrax letters (never found the guy, either) and all the threats of "terrorists".