An Asian might have touched my food on CNN

[RB TexLa]

Lady griping about how hard it is to know if a product was touched by an Asian.

:puke:

[meegbear]

1. Touched By An Asian ...

where have I heard that before.

[napi21]

2. That's just a dumb comment. I do however think it's very suspicious

that the meat producers are pushing back so hard against country of origin labeling! What are they HIDING? I don't buy the BS about it being too expensive either! They already have to track each animal from birth, in the event of some illness, so it should not be a BIG LEAP to slap on another label!

As a consumer, I'd like EVERY food product I buy have a label that lists the country of origin of all the ingredients. I also include PET FOOD in that statement! It's not that every US source is guaranteed NOT to be contaminated, but at least the decision what to buy would be MINE!

[unpossibles]

3. there's a great article about the racism in the recent Chinese food scare

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301712.html

The French delight in preparing food; the Italians adore eating it. But no people on Earth are so engrossed in food as the Chinese, for whom it is not just craft, pleasure and sustenance but the fundamental building block of society. In the West, acquaintances greet one another with "How are you?" The Chinese ask, "Have you eaten?" So for the Chinese, tainted food is more than a health hazard -- it's a kind of sacrilege. As one Chinese shopper told National Public Radio, "People here think food is as important as the sky. If there's something wrong with the food, it's as if the sky is falling."

Nevertheless, China has been portrayed as a nation blind to hygiene and blissfully unconcerned about recent reports of food contamination. That's troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there's "something kind of racist" about culinary xenophobia: "Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people."

And this, in turn, spells danger. What one might call "food libel" has long been an aspect of a larger fear of China. The association of Chinese with dubious edibles has insinuated itself into our cultural consciousness in small and seemingly trivial ways -- in schoolyard taunting, in sitcom gags about takeout food, in standup monologues about puppy chow mein.

But when the stakes are raised, as they have been by recent scandals, such jokes turn deadly serious. The fringes of the pundit set have already been intimating that these tainted-food incidents are deliberate. In May, the conservative news organ WorldNetDaily.com asked, "Is China Trying to Poison Americans and Their Pets?" The nativist drumbeat has only pounded louder ever since, suggesting that China has been waging a secret biowarfare campaign to destroy the United States from deep, deep within -- planting WMDs in the Wal-Mart cart, if you will.

<more at link>

Also saw this on Yahoo:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070719/ap_on_re_as/china_cardboard_buns;_ylt=AgusL6Cog6BIbr2g_qXOSSfMWM0F

Beijing's cardboard-stuffed buns a hoax

BEIJING - A freelance reporter for a Beijing television station has been detained for faking a hidden camera report about street vendors who used chemical-soaked cardboard to fill meat buns, local media said.
<more>

[Marrah_G]

4. It is absolutely silly that we are buying food from China anyway

With the exception of things native to there, the fact that we get so much food items from China is disturbing. As a country we should process and sell our own food here. We are more then capable. Unfortunately it's somehow cheaper to ship the base foods there to be processed.

As a people we need to pressure our supermarkets to carry locally grown foods and pressure the congress to make it more cost effective for companies to keep food production here.