Veggie IEDs: Imported Veggies Tainted With Dangerous Banned Pesticides–Long Term Cancers Waiting For Consumers (Pictures)

Out of about 500 people at the April 23 banquet in Wufeng, 286 went to the hospital. Doctors at the No. 3 Xiangya Hospital in nearby Changsha, capital of Hunan province, blamed pork contaminated with clenbuterol, a steroid that makes pigs grow faster and leaner. Consumed by humans in excess quantity, it can cause heart palpitations, nausea, convulsions, dizziness and vomiting.

“It was as though he was poisoned,” said a villager named Dai, whose husband was hospitalized for five days.

To eat, drink and be merry in China is done at a risk: Weddings increasingly end with trips to the emergency room. During the May Day holiday weekend, 192 people from two weddings elsewhere in Hunan fell so ill they had to be hospitalized.

Since 2008, when six children died and 300,000 were sickened by melamine-tainted baby formula, the Chinese government has enacted ever-more-strict policies to ensure food safety, including a directive last month from the Supreme Court calling for the death penalty in cases where people die as a result of tainted foods.

It hasn’t helped. If anything, China’s food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre.

In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie. Experts pointed to phosphorescent bacteria, blamed for another case of glow-in-the-dark pork last year.

Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded “like landmines” after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.

Such incidents cut to the quick of the weaknesses in China’s monolithic one-party system. Chinese authorities are painfully aware that people will lose confidence in a government that cannot give them assurances about what they eat. They are equally aware that tainted foods could cause what communist authorities fear most: social unrest.

“Food safety concerns the people’s interests and livelihoods, social stability and the future of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is how the Supreme Court put it in its notice last month accompanying the announcement of the death penalty.

The government’s efforts are looking frantic.

Propaganda posters put up in recent weeks in Beijing restaurants show a clenched fist about to smash into a man in a chef’s toque with the message, “Crack down on illegal additives!” MOREHERE

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Michael W. Vella

China’s role in the production of America’s food supply has been receiving increased scrutiny with in-depth documentaries investigating America’s food sources and congressional debates over a Chinese company’s potential acquisition of America’s largest pork producer. 
China is the third largest agricultural importer into the United States, but regularly tops U.S. headlines for widespread food contamination issues.[1] Not too surprisingly, plaintiffs’ attorneys have also been focusing attention on purported food safety issues involving Chinese imports, and these imports appear to be the target of a growing litigation trend. Chinese suppliers and their American sellers are currently defending against several class actions based on allegedly contaminated and mislabeled food imports from China. By taking U.S. food safety laws into account at the manufacturing and production stages, and by utilizing best practices that include compliance with new proposed regulations, Chinese and American companies can decrease their litigation risks while continuing their practices of importing food products from China. morehere