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201k, Friday, March 02, 2007:

Why are nearly all the frozen organic vegetables sold in Whole Foods and Wild Oats from China?

Can't we grow vegetables here anymore? Is it really cheaper to ship frozen peas from China to Boston than from, say, western Massachusetts or New York?

And how, exactly, do we know that broccoli grown in China is "organic"?

Speaking of which, where, exactly, is this bucolic image of "Cascadia Farms" supposed to be:



...because most of their vegetables seem to come from China, too. Which is odd, considering that Cascadia Farms' parent company is named "Small Planet Foods." You can't actually get much farther away from here, planet-wise, than China.

Unless you decide to get organic vegetables from Uranus.

Oh, look: Small Planet's parent company is General Mills.

This might explain why Wal-Mart has announced it'll be selling organic produce in its stores. No doubt it's coming from the same place they get everything else.

Fast forward two months, and it turns out they aren't getting them from Uranus; they're getting them from coal mines:

April 30, 2007

Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China
By DAVID BARBOZA and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 -- As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets and the illness of possibly thousands of pets in the United States.

The link to China has set off concerns among critics of the Food and Drug Administration that ingredients in pet food as well as human food, which are increasingly coming from abroad, are not being adequately screened.

The pet food case is also putting China's agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China's food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

"It's true you can make a lot more profit by putting melamine in," said another animal feed seller here in Zhangqiu. "Melamine will cost you about $1.20 for each protein count per ton whereas real protein costs you about $6, so you can see the difference."

Evidence is mounting that Chinese protein exports have been tainted with melamine and that its use in agricultural regions like this one is widespread.

You can just hear it, can't you?

"No one could possibly have foreseen that turning the regulation of our food over to industry lobbyists would result in safety and wholesomeness being compromised for profit..."