"In China, what you eat tells who you are"..."Chinese government officials have exclusive suppliers"

[WinkyDink]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-elite-farm-20110917,0,681885.story?obref=obnetwork

Organic gardening here is a hush-hush affair in which the cleanest, safest products are largely channeled to the rich and politically connected.

Many of the nation's best food companies don't promote or advertise. They don't want the public to know that their limited supply is sent to Communist Party officials, dining halls reserved for top athletes, foreign diplomats, and others in the elite classes. The general public, meanwhile, dines on foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests.

"The officials don't really care what the common people eat because they and their family are getting a special supply of food," said Gao Zhiyong, who worked for a state-run food company and wrote a book on the subject.
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THE FUTURE OF US ALL.

[Angry Dragon]

1. Let them eat mud pies as we eat cake

[LeftyMom]

2. That happens here too. Compare the quality of food at stores in poor neighborhoods with middle class

and upper class neighborhoods.

[RZM]

3. Same kind of thing was true in the USSR

Connected officials got to shop in well-stocked special stores, while the regular folks didn't.

Interesting because China isn't even really communist anymore, but those special perks for well-connected government officials remain the same. Really this has been true for a long, long time. Class and dietary habits have always been linked. It's often pointed out that the English words for 'pork, beef, and mutton,' all come from Old French, while 'pig, cow, and sheep' are Old English words. After the Norman elites came over in the 11th century, it's clear who was raising the animals and who was eating them.

[valerief]

4. Just like here and not in the future. Right now. nt

[ixion]

5. Yep, exactly.

If you can afford it, you can eat well. Otherwise, you eat processed food product poison.

[truedelphi]

6. Quite interesting article.

And many parallels to life here in the USA.

Several years back, the item grabbed a few headlines in a few SF Bay area newspapers, when the last grocery store in a poor San Jose neighborhood went elsewhere.

This meant that anyone seeking produce or fresh meat had to hop two or three buses, or else be able to afford a car. (Transit inside the SF Bay area cities is a joke, for the most part.)

Our poor eat McMuffins for breakfast, Pizza Hut for lunch and a bag of chip and a coke for dinner.

While the wealthier among us eat organic.

The middle class sees larger and larger amounts of money going to the grocery bill. It used to be, in the fifties and sixties, that the middle class spent a mere 11% of their paycheck on food. It is at least double that now.

[Distant Observer]

7. I grow my own veggies. So does Mrs. Obama. I like it that China's officialdom does the same.

[WinkyDink]

11. Do you really picture the Chinese PTB tending vegetable patches? That is not what is going on.

Man, "Distant" is right.

[Rex]

8. Same with America.

McDonalds or a $5,000 per plate dinner?

[Fumesucker]

9. Sorry, you can't get McDonalds with food stamps... n/t

[Rex]

10. Yeah but that dollar menu feeds millions a day

perhaps more. I hear that in some places they did away with the dollar menu, too many homeless people where coming in the stores and scaring away the good paying customers.