With the continuing stories of contaminated or mislabeled food coming from China, many people have actively sought to avoid Chinese products. The United States Department of Agriculture (long the enemy of the consumer and friend of agribusiness) has come up with a solution: Chinese chicken imports will be sold without telling people that they are from China. In an apparent effort to bring our standards to Chinese levels, the Administration is also planning to hand over key inspection posts to industry.
The U.S. had been fighting with China for banning our beef in 2003. We banned chicken from China during an avian flu outbreak, but China got a favorable ruling from the World Trade Organization forcing us to open our borders.
We therefore have to allow Chinese chicken to be sold here. However, we seem to have gone even further in allowing China to hide its country-of-origin. Here is how it works. The Chinese chickens are raised in the U.S. and Canada and then “processed” in China. By using this loophole, soup companies, restaurants, and other companies can hide the fact that the chicken comes from one of the most notorious sources of food in the world.
On top of this wonderful news, consumer advocates are objecting to a plan by the Obama Administration to replace USDA inspectors with employees of poultry companies. This is meant, you guessed it, to save money at a time when the Administration wants to start yet another war. After all, why have government inspectors when we can use the money for a couple of cruise missiles fired at Syria?
Moreover, if you cannot trust poultry companies to report on themselves, who can you trust? The answer, it appears are those paragons of food quality, the Chinese.
Juliet is seeing an Johnny Winter wild turkey! Keep your eye out for Edgar.
Blouise, Thanks. I’ll give that info to my butcher and see if it works in Wisconsin.
nick,
We experienced the exact same governmental agency egg problem with our butcher and his supplier. The way we found around it was to “order” the eggs from the farmer who then “delivered” them to our butcher for us. It was all paperwork but only took a moment.
Off Topic, but it is breaking news:
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Revolution-in-Mental-Health/141379/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
A Revolution in Mental Health (or is it replacing the DSM with RDoC)? Here is a brief excerpt, taken from the article:
Cuthbert and his team began the Research Domain Criteria project four years ago, and from the start it’s been grounded in incremental, built consensus, arrived at primarily through workshops.
The agency has identified five primary “domains” of mental function, which are subdivided into lower-level systems, like the fear response, that have some known tie to behavior and a brain circuit. These domains can be simply stated: one for keeping the brain up and running; one for social processes; one for storing and using information; one for moving toward positive rewards, like food and shelter; and one for avoiding harm, which is where the fear circuit resides.
This is rather abstract, so let’s take major depression, as defined by the DSM, as an example. As an RDoC-style researcher might describe it, multiple mechanisms are at play in a severely depressed person, and they vary from patient to patient. There may be dysfunction in the neuroendocrine system; in reward-seeking activities; in emotion regulation; in neurotransmitter systems; in cognition; in epigenetic controls. Many of these mechanisms are still poorly understood at a basic level, let alone in how they may connect to a circuit of dysfunction and illness. Cuthbert wants to give scientists permission to start exploring those connections.
If you start thinking about mental illness in the RDoC way, the dimensionality of it begins to click. We are all in its dimensions, our brain circuits shaped or misshaped by our genes and lives. Take anxiety. I’m a fearful driver, but perhaps not to the point that a clinician would diagnose me with specific phobia. But I’m certainly on that spectrum. I feel it each time I take to the road.
“The DSM doesn’t really say much about what’s normal, it just says what’s abnormal,” Cuthbert says. If mental illness is on a gradient, “it’s not that you’re healthy until you’re sick and have a disorder, in the sense that you’re healthy until you have the flu, and then you have the flu.” But “because our disorders were defined in an era when we didn’t know what our basic functions were, how to measure them, they naturally sound clinical.”
“But what’s the opposite of being depressed? There isn’t one. What’s the dimension of that? So you’re ‘fine.’ There’s no measure of what’s it mean to be fine and to be depressed.”
The defining image of RDoC, then, is not two buckets, one full of the healthy, the other the ill. It is a grid. Down the side run the domains and their dimensions. Across the top go the means of probing them: through genes, molecules, cells, circuits, physiology, behavior, self-reports, and “paradigms.” (Lang’s fear-conditioning through imagery is a paradigm.) The grid puts the lie to any notion that RDoC is all biology and no psychology, Cuthbert said at the May meeting.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “If you think about it the way I think about it, actually the DSM is sloppy in both counts. There’s no particular biological test in it, but the psychology is also very weak psychology. It’s folk psychology without any quantification involved.
“What we really need to do is elevate both.”
Every scientist I talked with for this article supported those elevation efforts—which, of course, is not the same as saying they had no criticisms of how it’s gone.
There are fears that in seeking to steer the science, even in an attempt to save it, the agency could miss promising work couched in DSM terms. According to David Barlow, a Boston University anxiety researcher who supports NIMH’s goals, the agency has been too aggressive. “They’re turning down most applications that kind of focus on DSM categories,” he said.
NIMH insists that’s not the case; its introduction of RDoC is gradual, and it’ll continue to finance each research style for the foreseeable future. Its leaders recognize that many scientists work at entire institutes devoted to one DSM disorder and can’t easily change their frame. (Such centers are a great example of what psychologists call “reification”: how the building of institutes or the filing of insurance claims has made the DSM’s diagnoses “real.”) And, of course, nothing has changed about the money NIMH puts into basic research—about half its grant budget.
The threat also remains that in searching for better answers, researchers could alienate doctors and clinicians, the people who deal in the traditional mental disorders every day. Imagine bringing a new treatment to the FDA, says Hyman, the institute’s former director. For the next decade or two, it’s likely that treatment would have to be framed in DSM terms. They must work hard to find a way for next-generation research to be translated back into the old diagnoses.
“As flawed as the DSM is, we have no substitute for the clinical realm for insurance reimbursement,” Hyman says. “We won’t have anything better for a very long time. While the criticisms are germane, we blow it up at our peril.”
The relationship between the institute’s dimensions and the DSM’s disorders will be complex, but not confrontational, which is why so much discussion of Insel’s blog post struck a false note. RDoC will never seek to supplant the DSM. It will never be “released,” because it will never be done. It is a database, a framework, shifty by design. Only a decade or two from now, if Insel and Cuthbert are successful, will the DSM change, shaped by the research they financed.
During his May presentation, Cuthbert displayed two photos. The first was a Frank Lloyd Wright house, immaculate in construction, tailored, down to its tables, before it was ever built. That’s the DSM model. Next, a picture of steelworkers eating lunch up on a skyscraper’s unfinished beams. That’s RDoC, he said. Cuthbert likes to think of himself as one of those guys, up on the girders.
Now I am swearing off turkey:
“We recently ordered and recieved 15 turkeys. They are awesome. I never knew turkeys were affectionate. They all come running to the fence when they see us, and if we go in the run they want to be held and stroked. They love to fall asleep on our laps! They have awesome personalities. They are only 4 weeks old.” [they will taste great no doubt]
I love on my egg layers. I don’t get attached to the meat birds. We have wild turkeys, including an albino, roosting less than fifty yards from our house.
OS:
Bison is excellent and so is elk.
I have a friend who raises chickens out in Warrenton, VA.
I used to get peeps from Murry McMurry’s for eggs.
http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html
I used to keep about 6 for eggs, my wife has been talking about getting a couple of pigs and a calf but I am guessing after 6 months, they would be pets. No not my wife’s, mine.
Once you start talking to them, its really hard to eat them.
Which in turn, Juliet, is too much money in electoral and legislative systems.
Bingo, Gene.
Help a brother, please. My comment was eaten and it wasn’t free range.
Rabbit is the leanest meat, and sweeter than pork. I have come over to free range, no cage, etc. However, I won’t buy it unless I know the farmer. Organic is a scam unless you know the source. Living in a farming state, knowing the source is easy. Big city folks have it tougher. However, the govt. makes it difficult for local farmers. The woman I buy eggs from used to also have her eggs @ the local butcher shop for folks who didn’t want to drive out to her farm. The state Ag Dept. made her stop. Too much govt.!!!
It’s not really “too much government.” It’s too much Big Food. They’re the ones lobbying for all the restrictions on real family farms. Government is just the tool for whoever has the most influence.
Bron,
Check with Juliet. Bet she can help keep you in chicken. Rabbits too.
As for me, we have a local meat market way out in the country. You literally have to know where you are going to find it. Great fresh meats at good prices in a really ugly cement block building. Local farm raised meat of all kinds. None of it has ever been outside our county.
My youngest has a taste for venison and bison. She won’t eat rabbit because she had a pet rabbit at one time. She only meat she uses when making meat loaf, or a pasta sauce, is bison.
I buy all my meat from our local butcher who, in turn, buys all his from local growers … have been doing so for decades.
We seldom order meat when eating out as the quality we are used to getting at home just can’t be matched by any restaurant no matter how high-end.
fuk, I am going to have to become a vegitarian now.
I aint eatin nuttin comin out of China.
Anyone with half a brain will give up eating chicken. Even if it is inspected by our fearless inspectors from the Department of Agriculture.
Maybe it might be an opportunity for locally grown / processed companies to advertise “Grown & Processed in Oregon” or whichever state. That way it offers an additional incentive to buy their product from consumers who are concerned about the supply chain.
My wife resided in West Germany when the Chernobyl reactor blew it’s stack. For the entire time afterward before she had enough and moved to the US, the “Herkunftsland” (Country of origin) labels on food was absolutely important to consumers due to the fallout patterns and uptake propensity of food products. In fact, Herkunftsland labels were even placed on displays of raw vegetables.
I don’t buy any food product that had entered China, better to be safe than sorry.
Juliet, I spent my summers on a farm for about the first 12 years of my life. They ate what the raised. I could never get with the program of killing the small critters though My grandma tried to teach me to do it repeatedly. I saw it done regularly and ate them that same evening. The fact remains that if I had to kill my food I’d just starve. If you do it and raise your critters humanely, good on you. That’s smart and respectable.
Lottakatz: My chickens are the happiest little creatures you ever saw. I spoil them with dried meal worms, fresh greens, fans for the coop, bottles of ice water to snuggle with in the heat, etc. They have free run of the place. When it’s time for them to be dispatched, my husband and a friend of ours slaughter them quickly and humanely. If I had to kill them, I’d stare, as well. In fact, I finally gave up beef after I saw some of the calves pastured next to us playing with my son’s soccer ball. I expect I’ll end up some variety of vegetarian, before it’s over. I’m the meantime, though, my family and I will do our level best to only eat clean, humanely raised meat.
For what it’s worth, chickens and rabbits are the easiest and least expensive meat animals to raise. They can share space. And, if you get the right breeds, they require less care than a house pet.
The rats we smell are the top level executives who move back and forth between Big Pharma and the FDA and between Big Food and the USDA. It’s truly like putting the fox to watch over the henhouse.
Btw, I take delivery on my locally-raised, forest-foraged hog in about three weeks. At $1.89, hanging weight, I consider it a bargain.
Elaine: “Question: Who is going to be around to assure that only chickens raised in the US and Canada will be processed and exported back to the US if there is no USDA inspector on site???”
Bigfatmike: ““The recalls in North America, Europe, and South Africa came in response to reports of renal failure in pets. Initially, the recalls were associated with the consumption of mostly wet pet foods made with wheat gluten from a single Chinese company.””
_________
Back when cats started dying from the Melamine contaminated cat food I started doing some reading, I had a cat die of an unknown illness during that time and I fed my kitties canned food. There were some things that were frankly amazing.
* aside: at nearly the same time China and japan were having a major diplomatic row wherein Japan was threatening to ban all food imports from China. China had been selling soy sauce in Japan that was made not with fermented soy but fractured protein from, among other things human hair and medical waste. It was a SERIOUS situation. *
What I learned was that there are no US government inspectors doing food or drug inspections in China even when plants exported primarily to the US or had American investors – it was a violation of China’s national sovereignty. (That actually made sense.) Contractor performed product inspection as a business was a very big business in China in order to satisfy the need for independent inspection but most of the business was done by Chinese inspection companies. The possibility for corruption was a concern.
Since then I have read that many frozen dinner brands have components that are from China and frozen vegetables are also a good market for Chinese export.
I don’t eat any seafood anymore – the only seafood I would buy was North Pacific caught fish and since Fukushima has been leaking into the Pacific for the last two years the better half and I have given up on fish.
Google Pacific Ocean currents and click on images, find a nice large map – the currents run right along the Japanese coast and up to the Alaskan Gyre, most get caught by the big Pacific Gyre but just follow the arrows. Depending on the map you look at the large and small circular currents have different names/designations; I’m going with “gyre” as they were labeled on one of the maps I looked at because “gyre” is a really cool and descriptive word.
We also don’t eat frozen dinners or frozen vege or anything but local frozen ravoli and sauce. The better half and I do eat a lot of rice, I don’t even want to think about rice…
We do eat chicken. This is going to be a problem.
We need a uniform labeling standard for imported food -ALL imported food no matter the brand or stated of processing, and it should contain the country of origin. People should know where the carrots in their frozen dinners come from. .
Self policing as been the norm in the food industry for years, it sucks but there it is. The latest move to cut the number of food inspectors is just to cut the number EVEN MORE. That trend stated a good while ago.
RWL.
I have a very good friend that owns a food factory…. His response is the FDA is BS….. I think they are on the receiving end of the governments generosity to Monsanto….
AY,
Right! What is the government trying to do? Is this another form of social control by infecting millions of people with diseases (hoping that they die)? I don’t see any other reason for not disclosing info about what’s in our food?
rafflaw, that corporate rat smell emanates from capitol hill.
It is the lobbyists Eau de toilette and congress is addicted to it.
Reblogged this on News You May Have Missed and commented:
Playing Chicken With Consumers: The U.S. Moves To Allow Chinese Chicken To Be Sold Without Origin Labels In U.S. While Handing Over Inspections To Industry