Wednesday, October 29, 2008

What now?

It's quite scary to read the news nowadays since there will be a list of things people shouldn't eat due to melamine contamination. It used to be just milk but today Yahoo! News reported contamination on eggs as well! Perhaps the most direct step that people generally would take is to avoid China product. It won't be very easy. First of all, outsourcing and cheap labour and manufacturing cost has shifter HUGE number of product manufacturing to China. Second of all, what scares me even more is that melamine is NOT a common chemical tested in food safety surveillance. If China's farmers and egg producer can find way to add melamine into the milk and egg, what kind of assurance will there be to say that US product or Indonesia product or any other country products have NO melamine? After all, melamine IS NOT something that is tested for in food safety check. Hey, we can force the food safety surveillance to check every single chemicals anyway. Our food won't arrive on the table in a century since there is infinite amount of chemicals to test for! Since it's uncommon to test for the chemical, there is no way to say that US product is totally free from it. In fact, every government should actually really test their own products to check for such contamination.
The other possible worse thing that can happen is if undesirable and dangerous chemicals are to be found in clothes. It's getting more difficult to find clothes without writing "MADE IN CHINA" nowadays. You may think I am farfetched, but hey, melamine in egg is extremely remote few months ago.
Be careful of what you eat.