If I were a lyin’ thievin’ polecat of a politician trying to get a toe-hold on the next elections, I would start this post by claiming that I worked my way through high school and part of college by working in grocery stores. While there, I worked my way up to managing a small store where I was also the butcher. So I know quite a bit about food, especially meat.
But this would be an exaggeration. I did work in the stores as claimed, but only for enough money to support my 1950 Chevrolet Power-Glide. My school expenses were never in jeopardy; my parents would have robbed banks to get me the necessary funds. Nonetheless, I learned quite a bit about the American food supply.
Among other things, I learned that if you fed your ranched mink off our cheap chicken–sometimes 9 cents a pound on week-end sale–your mink would eventually become sterile and you would go bankrupt. I also learned that there were a great many traditional butcher’s tricks for concealing the fact that unsold meat had aged quite a bit in your meat case.
So far as management is concerned, the most important point of selling meat–in selling just about anything I suppose–is the margin. The difference in a successful store and an unsuccessful store on the meat side was at that time as little as one or two percent on a net profit of perhaps 6-8% after your gross. We once made an older man ill by selling him outdated chicken which we had freshened up with one of those butcher’s tricks, in an effort to keep our percentage up.
Then, once I began living and working in China, beginning in 1979, I also learned quite a bit about the Chinese food supply. On one occasion, we were traveling by train, my family and I, and as often happened, the conductor had oversold our compartment so that where Christine, son Lewis and I thought we had three out of four berths, we found that we indeed had three berths, but the fourth had three Chinese in it, one of whom was dying quite noisily and messily of lung cancer. When he began coughing helplessly, his friends pressed cigarettes on him in the belief that this would open his air passages.
As no one could get any sleep, I began speaking with one of the Chinese, who said that he worked for a communal pig farm. I had recently read that some American farmers had experimented with feeding their pigs cellulose in order to bring them to market faster, but this turned out to be harmful to the consumer of the pork. My new Chinese friend wanted to know where he could get some of that cellulose, it sounded just the thing for his operation.
Recently, a series of events demonstrated to me that the situation has not changed much, and that in fact globalism is now causing bad food, driven by the greed of producers and wholesalers, to ricochet around the world. In 2008, you may vaguely recall, Chinese milk producers were found to be adulterating dried infant formula with melamine. (For a refresher see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal)
This hit China very hard; nothing is more sacred in China than the welfare of infants. Very staunch Communist Party members of my acquaintance were on the verge of mayhem at learning that their government was not protecting them.
After this event, the cachet of American fast food brands in China rose rapidly. Americans took more measures to protect the food supply, or so Chinese believed.
A year earlier, in 2007, Americans had become concerned with melamine adulterated foods as well. Chinese were selling melamine-contaminated pet food ingredients to American manufacturers and American dogs and cats were dying! (I cannot resist noting here that when the first group of Chinese scholars came to Lewis & Clark College in the early eighties as a result of our efforts, I asked them what they noticed first about the American homes in which they were living. “You treat your dogs better than your children,” was the response.)
At this point, what was later merely another indication of China’s awful political and economic system–poisoning their children!–then became a failure of the American food supply–at least the pet food supply–and hell was raised. It is true that the Chinese later severely punished their guilty, including two executions and a number of extensive prison sentences, but we apparently took this as merely another symptom of the failures of Chinese socialism, and no executives at virtually all of the major American pet food manufacturers who had been involved were handled the least bit roughly. At my store chain they would probably have been promoted for getting margins up.
But recently, we have gotten even with the pet-killing Chinese! As MLK pointed out, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” An American meat packer, OSI, has a “unit” in China, which repackaged outdated meat which presumably had been exported to China from American plants, and from there sold it to large fast-food firms in China, including McDonalds, YUM (parent of KFC and other firms which are very big in China), Starbucks, and others. Other Asian countries were also affected.
The interesting questions in this series of events will, of course, never be answered: For example, what is the relationship between American OSI and what Reuter’s News described thusly in its news story:
McDonald’s Corp and KFC’s parent Yum Brands Inc apologized to Chinese customers on Monday after it emerged that Shanghai Husi Food Co Ltd, a unit of U.S.-based OSI Group LLC, had supplied expired meat to the two chains.
CNBC states that the Husi group is owned by the American group. If so, there are other questions to be asked: did the American group know the food was outdated or did it become so in China? Was it in fact exported from America or simply “branded” as American in China for public relations purposes?
We will never know, I am quite sure, because neither country’s food supply nor its regulatory regimes can pass close inspection. So the issue will once again become one of shouting at each other “You’re bad!”
But Japan, Thailand, and other countries are taking the easy way out and simply boycotting American OSI; and perhaps all American meat imports as well?
And incidentally, the Food and Drug Administration loosened the inspection of chicken meat in 2012, laying off 20% of such inspectors and giving more firms permission to do their own inspection AND to speed up their production lines by 25%. The rules are currently under discussion to permit further loosening of the rules. (See http://www.alternet.org/food/why-fdas-latest-move-chicken-inspection-literally-full-sht) This will all be good for butchers–not that there are that many left–they won’t have to break the law to peddle old meat anymore, this work can now be done at the processing plant, as in China.
Chinatripper 