Another "inconvenient truth".

This is what happens when an "advanced" society becomes too dependent on a third-world one. Three cheers for the Chinese gulag!

To quantify the "this", the first word in Gordo's comment: a hunderd or so dogs, out of several hundred million, die. I expected scare quotes around "dependent" would have been more appropriate than those around "advanced".

Here's a phrase you don't see too often;

"Sudden Adult Death Syndrome".

Our vet confirmed that my old cat Sammy, although very old and with failing kidneys, was fatally sickened by tainted cat food. Both cats ate a little and were sick, the older died.
I have to ask, why the heck are we buying this sort of thing from China?

David, you apparently missed the report last Thursday that six thousand hogs, in seven states, destined for the food supply were being fed melamine-contaminated feed. 345 of those hogs are actually in the food system. A poultry-feed mill in an either state was shipped the same melamine-contaminated ingredient (rice protein concentrate, imported from China) as the hog feed.

I quoted "advanced" because we're not as advanced as we like to think we are. Please do your research before you attack me again. Thank you.

I've done my research: we're far more advanced than you think we are.

And just to make sure I'm not falling afoul of any of Al's rules -- which societies do you think are more advanced than ours, or at what point in the past was Canada more advanced than it is. Or Western society. Because I can stroll over to No Frills right now (well, in two hours) and get bacon for 3.50 or go a little further to Pusateri's or Whole Foods and get it for 15. Whatever I choose. And I've got a reasonable level of certainty that neither will kill me. Or is your point that we should have less choice, that our government should be protecting us from risks it hasn't seen before, either by inspecting the hell out of everything or just banning it outright? Cause when there's no choice, I don't see the outcomes being that great either

You are getting so good at this.

$3.50? Really? I am so shopping in the wrong stores.

As is routine with CPC supporters, you're going off on an irrelevant tangent, David. The issue here is melamine and your dismissal of "a hunderd or so dogs, out of several hundred million" dying. You didn't realize that this had gotten into the food supply, so you dismissed the risk out of hand.

Bah, there's no point in trying to change a close mind. Forget it.

Quitter. You are not getting good at this. The Quatloons to the challenger!

Al, the old me would pound my head against the wall until I passed out. Battling a closed mind simply isn't worth the effort. I've publicly proven David wrong twice, why bother to continue?

I think you have argued bt not yet proven. You have suggested his concern for pets is not what it ought to be. That is not yet proof of the principle. I think you have proven the food supply point in the sense that you have backed it up. But have you yet proven that the harm follows the adulteration?

I think you need to get back in there.

Bwahah Quatloons for me -- more bacon for supper. BTW Gordo: your points were (a) that we're not an advanced society as we think we are (b) we're dependent on China. Perhaps there's a different comment you wrote in your head. Nice drift into an irrelevant political attack though. Do forget it.

cm: Bacon always goes on sale; you have to shop early in the morning though. Equity back usually gets this cheap, but it's mostly fat. Maple Leaf occasionally gets cheap too, when it does, there's usually a per-customer limit.

David, I think (a) was your point not Gordo's, though this is a tyographical matter. I think he says was stating we are not "as advanced" and you are saying "an advanced". And our Chinese dependency is a simple truth.

But what no one has gotten into is why we should as a nation have standards for the feeding of household pets. I understand spending millions of regulatory dollars on the pretection of human food chains - but why pet food chains?

Alan, I could care less about David's interests in other people's pets. My point was that the problem with the pet food supply had turned into a problem with the feed stock food supply and, therefore, <i>our</i> food supply.

Re: regulating pet food suppies: they're the same system as feed stock food supplies. The same companies, the same mills. Rex can east something nasty in his morning kibble, it's even money that it's also going into the pig or sheep feed that's fattening up our dinners.

See that is a very good point and well made. David?

Some people say 'GO VEG!'.

Thank you, Alan. I do make them on occasion.

Gary, I was thinking of you as I wrote it ... :-)

No (a) was definitely one of Gordo's points, and I would claim, key: that there's something fundamentally and systemically wrong with our society, and this particular incident is just further proof.

My belief is that this incident is rather trivial in the big scheme of things and calls for little more than minor adjustments of the type that are routinely made to systems that involve 100s of millions of consumers, not some sort of radical reorganization of the food chain. We're at the "noise floor" for solving problems there -- push something in in one place and something will pop out somewhere else. If one as an individual is uncomfortable with parts of that chain -- for example, suppliers from China -- options are freely available to you. However, from any sort of risk and cost analysis point of view, extreme actions are not required. If you want to ban supplies from China, or pedantically inspect for currently unknown chemical risks, well just realize that that's money and resources taken from the system where it may be better spent improving quality of life.

Apropos of nothing...

Maple Leaf bacon, "regular style", was $2.99 at Dominion this morning

I need a TO bacon watch blog.

So... if the food supply is contaminated, but we have the choice to buy non-contaminated local pork for $15 or possibly-contaminated cheap pork fed on foreign feed for $3, then basically we're saying that it's OK that the rich can uncontaminated pork while the poor can sod off. Possibly because of their bright eyes and clear skin and just generally nice demeanor the rich just get everything. Lucky guys.