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

[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".