Naivety about food

This may be my last entry for a while. I really should be setting up trenches and digging into books for my upcoming exams in September and going to general outpatient clinics next month. So it will mean less time looking at Japanese race queens and US cheerleaders in the foreseeable future.

I also want to keep up my monthly rate of whining about not having a girlfriend.
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In recent weeks, there has been two major news stories about contaminated food. In Germany, nearly 2000 people were infected with E. coli from tainted vegetables. I'm not here to speculate which vegetables they were since nobody seems to know the source. Taiwan has been embroiled in a food fiasco recently, with harmful plasticisers being put in a variety of products, from food to skin products.

I marvel at the naivety of people who think this shouldn't happen in today's society. I like to say to those people to wake up, since this has been happening every since we started mass producing in the middle of the 20th century.

With an ever increasing population and the need to cut costs in production, multinational companies will find any way to cut corners, even if those mean less quality assurance. To boost the food production, society has been injecting all sorts of chemicals into animals and vegetable to maximise the yield. Unfortunately no food can escape a contamination scandal.

The first food contamination scandal I can remember was when eggs in UK were contaminated with Salmonella bacteria in the late 1980s. This carried on into the mid nineties, with the BSE scare which made everyone go vegetarian for a little while.

China are not exempted from this kind of controversy. Everybody who lives in Hong Kong generally thinks the quality assurance is China is very poor. How can you account for the fact that most pirated goods come from China. The mainland has been embroiled with the melamine dairy product scandal and a ton more scandals since. Generally, I don't really buy anything from China, even if it is dirt cheap.

From feeding animals antibiotics and chemicals so they can grow bigger to pesticides on vegetables to heavy metal contamination in fish and seafood, everything we eat has something we don't want in it.

You just have to accept - do you want cheap food or do you want quality assurance. You can't have both.