Seafood Raised on Animal Feces Approved for Consumers 386
If you are a seafood lover and wish that you could eat more fish raised on pig feces, your dreams are coming true. Due to fierce competition in the Chinese tilapia industry, farmers are increasingly switching to feces instead of commercial feed. From the article: "At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety. 'The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,' says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China."
Chinese regulators are like Honey Badger (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't give a fuck. Why do you think all their shit (accidental pun) is so cheap? Whatever it takes to squeeze a nickel even if it means killing some workers or customers.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Where are we consumers informed of this? Does your local Wal-Mart store have badges on the bags of frozen tilapia that says which ones were raised on shit and which ones weren't?
The free market dictates that consumers shouldn't hear about this because that would impede the demand for the product and thus drive the prices and profit ranges down.
Re:And suddenly I have zero appetite for seafood.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the answer to that is a firm Yes!
Mad Fish Disease? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, first we had Mad Cow Disease, which proves fatal to humans if you get it. For those too young to remember, it was caused by "enriching" cow feed with ground up sheep offal in order to recicle the waste, increase the protein content of the feed and increase the profit to the farmer. This caused the bugs to get into the cows brains and turn them to mush. Called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the cow flavor, Kreutzfeld-Jakobs syndrome in human flavor, basically turns your brains into a bloody sponge full of holes, then you die inevitably, be it cow or human.
Wait for the upcoming Mad Fish Scare. Just remember every time your MacFish stick or burger tastes like shit.
Not actually approved (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
"Ngoc Sinh has been certified as safe by Geneva-based food auditor SGS SA, says Nguyen Trung Thanh, the company’s general director."
"SGS spokeswoman Jennifer Buckley says her company has no record of auditing Ngoc Sinh."
In other words, the article claims that Ngoc Sinh Seafoods Trading & Processing Export Enterprise is using repulsive and unsafe practices, and lying about having been inspected. Bloomberg is accusing them of a crime. The Slashdot headline, on the other hand, converted this into "Approved for Consumers" - accusing a different group, the regulators, which appear to be innocent.
Nothing strange about this (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/mad-cow-disease-california_b_1450994.html [huffingtonpost.com]
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/impacts_industrial_agriculture/they-eat-what-the-reality-of.html [ucsusa.org]
http://www.treehugger.com/health/chickens-fed-caffeine-banned-antibiotics-and-prozac-often-without-the-farmers-knowledge.html [treehugger.com]
Yummy!
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:5, Insightful)
consumers are as much to blame. They vote with their wallets and they choose price before everything else repeatedly. It's not like the shitty quality of average junk from china was not known for decades, yet it still has no problem finding the buyers.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the price is almost the only information consumers can base there decision on. That, and the packaging design.
The only way to get more information is to legislate. The food industry would be happy if they could sell processed shit wrapped in
a nice box, without bothering with involving fish at all.
Everyone eats shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Our oxygen is plant shit, the co2 is other peoples shit, your vegetables grow on shit, your meat eats shits, you cook it on farts, you walk on shit and some of us consider clothes made from shit to be the height of luxury.
It is a shitty world and it worse for those who believe in homeopathy.Water has memory? Oh good, so does it remember having been pissed out billions of times over the lifetime of the earth? And if water has memory, why doesn't it remember the time it was beer!
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:4, Insightful)
They buy quality/brand names when it matters or when they can afford it. If people only cared for the cheapest products available, there wouldn't quite be a market for organic free range cage free free trade products made without high fructose corn syrup. There wouldn't be such large lines for Apple products (ok this is more a case of status symbol but it doesn't take away from my point too much).
Typical American attitude... (Score:5, Insightful)
That practice is dangerous for American consumers
but the rest of you can go fuck yourselves ;)
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:5, Insightful)
The free market requires that consumers must here about this, because the free market relies on an informed consumer. The free market is designed to drive the prices and profits down; that is the entire point of a free market - that multiple vendors compete for the patronage of consumers in a fair manner, by offering the best products for the most attractive price.
If you're not getting that, then you're not in a free market.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know why food products provide accurate lists of ingredients on the packaging in the first place?
That's right; legislation.
Fish shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:4, Insightful)
Forgot to mention, rich Chinese buy most of the food imported from Australia for a reason.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:3, Insightful)
Also true. I wasn't suggesting the US was a free market. I'm just saying people who are blaming the "free market" for the sorry state of the US' consumer rights are picking the wrong target.
Re:Typical American attitude... (Score:0, Insightful)
That practice is dangerous for American consumers
but the rest of you can go fuck yourselves ;)
Uh, what? We're not exporting it to anybody. You assholes constantly bitch about Americans pushing other nations around, and here we are letting you make up your own damn mind about what you eat, and NOT telling you what's good or bad for you, and we get this attitude? Go fuck yourself.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you know why food products provide accurate lists of ingredients on the packaging in the first place?
That's right; legislation.
Before there was such legislation you could still restrict yourself to only purchase from companies that voluntarily got certified and voluntarily informed ingredients. No one were making you buy food from producers who didn't list ingredients. It was your choice to buy from them. You could always go and pay 5x more for the good stuff. And, if in doubt whether it actually was the good stuff, contract a well known specialist to provide you professional assurance on whether it actually was or wasn't the good stuff.
Nanny State is this: nanny. It forces everyone to spend more than they'd want to on premium stuff they don't care about or that have lower priority for them even though, given the choice, they'd prefer to buy the dirt cheap crap instead and deal with the consequences of applying their own free will, as the responsible adults they are and should be.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a power balance.
The suppliers who want to sell, versus the consumer with the money.
If it pays to cheat, then cheat you will...if you don't your competitors will and you'll be out of business anyway.
This is why we need laws. Because market darwinism favors the aggressive nasty people who can *get away* with stabbing their competition in the back.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:5, Insightful)
So we should all hire private investigators any time we want to try a new brand of food, or every other week to make sure that food companies are still making "the good stuff" in an ethical way?
People already do have the choice to buy dirt cheap stuff if they want. Just because the ingredients are on the packet doesn't mean that a lot of people won't chose based on price. I know that's what I did when I was a student. Now that I don't really need to care about the cost of food, I just base my choices on things like protein content and sugar content.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't be silly. Consumers are people, and the vast majority of us on the planet have finite income and have to spend money carefully. Choosing the cheaper of X options is sensible when you have all the information (fashion sheep excluded).
People will gladly pay more for something that doesn't have "raised on shit" on the packaging. So why isn't the truth displayed? Because the tiny minority of rich people that hide behind corporations, do not have to worry about food prices and don't care if people become sick and die if it means they get to keep ever increasing profits.
Put the facts on the packaging and the consumer you deride so much, will kill product that are unfit for consumption.
Re:God bless the free market! (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you know why food products provide accurate lists of ingredients on the packaging in the first place? That's right; legislation.
How will that help? "Oh look, this tray of tilapia contains... tilapia. And this can of mushrooms contains... mushrooms and preservatives."
Neither will tell you that it was raised on manure.