The news out of China seems to frequently include stories of fraud, incompetence and/or negligence that results in injury or death to third parties. Infrastructure collapses, pollution, and food safety are common examples. Of those, food safety is the one issue most likely to cause problems in other countries via the export of contaminated food products from China.
Assuming you live outside of China, how do you feel about eating food products that were imported from China?
My wife avoids them to the extent possible. A friend likewise once discarded juice he had bought for his son after discovering the “made in China” label on it.
There was a hoax email going around which claimed that Tyson was getting its chickens processed in China under disgusting conditions. Snopes.
While this turned out to be fake as Tyson had no plans to offshore its processing, it’s legal for American companies to do this under the guidelines of the USDA.
I rarely buy frozen foods, but you can guarantee I go over the packaging with a fine toothed comb to make sure that it says it’s processed in North America. I tossed a bag of frozen veggies that were from China that the wife had brought home.
I tend to shy away from processed foods made in China if I can. But as far as raw foodstuffs go, I doubt I could really avoid anything from China even if I wanted to. There are probably too many US manufacturers and restaurants using various Chinese vegetables and what-not to avoid, and they’re not required to label their products with the origin of their components as far as I’m aware. So a can of soup might be 40% US grown, 15% Chinese grown, and 35% Mexican grown, but it won’t say that on the can.
My guess is you’re most likely to encounter foods imported from China in Chinese restaurants or Asian grocery stores. But my wife has seen edamame (soybeans) in Whole Foods stores that appear to be packaged/sold by an American company, but are labeled as “product of China;” she steers clear.
I avoid food and children’s toys made in China. I especially avoid children’s art supplies – too many stories about crayons with lead and such. And I ate crayons as a kid. I only bought children’s art supplies sourced from the US and Germany. (There are other countries I might have bought from but that I never saw on the market, like Canada.)
There’s not a lot of food exported from China, but I’ve turned down apple juice and honey from China. I buy Chinese tea and “Chinese vegetables” (like lotus root) canned in China. But if I can find an American (north or south) or European source, I prefer those.
Most of the garlic sold in our markets is imported from China. I am not worried about health aspects, but locally grown garlic simply tastes much better. I don’t know if that is the variety or the processing and don’t much care.
I avoid honey unless I can verify where it came from because Chinese honey that would normally be banned in the US can be filtered and processed to hide its origin.
The tilapia I stated to buy last week was labeled “farm-raised and frozen in China” and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Surely there’s an someone closer to home growing or catching fish under American rules and regulations. Right?
I definitely avoid it, there are too many cases of Chinese products being unsafe for the sake of cutting costs. It is worth paying a little more for quality.
I read somewhere a few years back (sorry, no cite), that in some field or other, 70 percent of the quality complaints and recalls concerned Chinese products. The kicker was that 70 percent of all the products in that field were Chinese – in other words, the “Chinese products are unsafe and inferior” meme turned out to just be good old fashioned confirmation bias.
It’s not like you don’t see a ton of food recalls from American companies, too (and disproportionately “organic” and “natural” stuff). I’d like to see some evidence that the supposed additional lack of safety in Chinese products sold in the US (and subject to US laws and regulations) is actually real rather than just one of those things that “everybody knows.”
I will avoid any foodstuffs - for myself or for my pets - that are made in China, for the reasons you mention. Standards simply aren’t high there, and even those things they make specifically for export to the US often don’t pass standards and are rejected. I will buy other “made in China” items but only if there are no readily available alternatives.
It’s not an ethnic stance, though, and should their standards improve, I’d be happy to buy.
I buy quite a lot of Chinese foodstuffs including noodles, various dried meats, spices, canned eels, etc. I get them at an Asian supermarket that mostly caters for a local Chinese population (so many of the products are not specifically made for the export market to the west)
Who said anything about politics? My avoidance of made-in-China comestibles has nothing to do with their annexation of Tibet, or their brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, or any of that sort of thing. My concern is entirely with the (perceived) unacceptably high risk of such foods being contaminated/adulterated with hazardous chemicals and/or disease organisms.
Who said anything about politics? My avoidance of made-in-China comestibles has nothing to do with their annexation of Tibet, or their brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, or any of that sort of thing. My concern is entirely with the (perceived) unacceptably high risk of such foods being contaminated/adulterated with hazardous chemicals and/or disease organisms.