a whopping 90 percent of the groundwater in China’s cities is polluted.6 Furthermore, after decades of persistent pollution, China has also admitted the existence of “cancer villages,” where every other household contains someone dying of cancer, dotting the countryside.7 In May 2013, government tests confirmed that almost half of all rice for sale in the southern China city of Guangzhou was tainted with toxic heavy metal cadmium, thought to be due to pollution.8
China’s pollution problem has actually become so dire that the country’s government has attempted to order all foreign embassies to stop releasing data regarding pollution and air quality in the nation’s large cities in an attempt to censor the severity of this situation from the rest of the world.9
The fact that Chinese people have to suffer this environment is horrible, but with the globalization of the world’s food supply, China’s pollution issue and the resultant detriment to human health that comes with it is steadily spreading across the globe. Most people do not realize that a large portion of the world’s food is grown in China’s poisonous environment. China is the third largest source of U.S. food imports according to the USDA.10 For example, according to the consumer watchdog organization Food & Water Watch, an astounding 78 percent of the tilapia and 70 percent of the apple juice Americans ate and drank in 2009 was imported from China.11
The USDA released a report that same year regarding safety issues with Chinese food imports. The agency noted that the FDA has repeatedly refused these food imports not just on the consideration of environmental pollution, but also due to lax safety standards, unsafe food additives and labeling, drug residue contamination, and “recurring problems with ‘filth.’”12 However, as Food & Water Watch observed, the FDA inspects less than 2 percent of the food imported to America from China for safety. Of the imports that actually do get inspected, many fail to meet quality standards and are rejected. In 2012 alone, the FDA stopped 260 shipments of imported Chinese food coming into the United States because of heavy contamination with pesticides, bacteria, and/or filth.13
This perpetual lack of oversight, safety inspection, and regulation enforcement in China, America, and countries around the world has resulted in notable outbreaks of foodborne illness and death in both humans and animals. Perhaps most well-known in recent history, China’s 2008 melamine milk contamination scandal resulted in 300,000 Chinese children suffering urinary problems—54,000 were hospitalized and six infants eventually died.14 Melamine is an industrial chemical material used to make shatter-proof plates and other durable items. It is extremely toxic to the kidneys. But because its powder resembles powdered milk in both color and texture, powdered milk producers in China decided to simply substitute melamine for powdered milk and sell it to everyone.
Before long, melamine-tainted dairy began turning up around the world, and the European Union extended its Chinese dairy ban to include a total ban on all products for children containing any percentage of milk whatsoever, including chocolate and biscuits. Melamine was also found in other Chinese foods, including eggs from Chinese chickens who had ingested it in their feed. The year before, melamine-tainted vegetable protein in pet and farm animal food from China resulted in thousands of sick animals and dead pets in the United States, and a hog farm in North Carolina had to be quarantined when the chemical was found present in all of its hogs. Even though China banned melamine in 2007, it should not have been in milk or pet food to begin with.
Melamine is just one instance of the chemical tainting of foods coming out of China—a microcosm of a larger, systematic problem with China’s agricultural and food industry standards. Other Chinese food scandals run the gamut from utterly disgusting to nightmare inducing: pork laden with a phosphorescent bacteria that caused it to actually glow iridescent blue in the dark, garnering it the nickname “Avatar meat”; large portions of rice crops contaminated with aluminum and cadmium; tons of beans thoroughly drenched in poisonous pesticide; milk produced with leather-hydrolyzed protein; counterfeit jellyfish slices made out of sodium benzoate and calcium chloride; recycled cooking oil made from a medley of discarded animal parts or “edible” oil concocted out of chicken and duck feathers and even fox hair.15,16
The list goes on and on. A Chinese professor’s undercover investigation in 2010 found that an estimated 10 percent of all meals in China were being cooked with “recycled” cooking oil, the majority of which was being scavenged from drains underneath restaurants. His findings prompted the Chinese Food and Drug Administration to respond to the aptly named “sewer oil” scandal. Despite all of this, the Chinese food imports to the United States only continue to grow. The USDA even ever-so-quietly lifted an import ban on Chinese poultry in August 2013.
The issue in China isn’t just about a worsening breakdown of confidence in the global food supply, but also a pervasive problem with far- and wide-reaching consequences on the health of billions of people. China’s regulations and safety oversight are lax. Further, more and more foods labeled “organic” are being exported from China these days, even though there are absolutely no real guarantees that the Chinese organic guidelines are as stringent as they are in other countries; if China’s abysmally lax agricultural regulations are any indication, there is little reason to put any faith into anything coming from China with “organic” printed on it. The USDA’s own reports have admitted that food oversight in China is nothing like that of the United States.17 A comparative assessment of organic foods produced in both the United States and China published in the summer 2011 issue of the Stanford Journal of International Law concluded the “USDA Organic” label is ultimately misleading because, “the current regulatory framework is not only inadequate to the task of regulating domestic organics, but also incapable of ensuring the integrity of imported organics.”18 While China traditionally did use organic farming techniques, decades of heavy pesticide use followed the country’s socialization in the 1960s, prompting Senior USDA Economist Fred Gale to declare it is now “almost impossible to grow truly organic food in China.”19
There’s a reason the phrase “Product of China” is printed in such a tiny font on the food products that are labeled with it.
Arsenic in apple juice
Controversies surrounding the arsenic content in juices and rice have made their way into the mainstream media over the last few years. The prominent TV show host Dr. Mehmet Oz created a significant stir after releasing test results that showed what his team considered dangerous levels of arsenic in apple juices49—many were top brand name products typically found in grocery stores across the United States. Many established voices tried to discredit the claims made by Dr. Oz by preying on the public-at-large’s ignorance, focusing on the lack of differentiation between arsenic’s organic and inorganic speciation.
However, watchdog Consumer Reports followed up with confirmation that many juices—including those of the ever-popular apple and grape varieties—were indeed found to contain arsenic levels higher than the federal standard for drinking water, and the majority of this arsenic was inorganic and linked to potentially deadly health effects, including cancer.50 Approximately 10 percent of the eighty-eight samples, which included a variety of name brands, showed arsenic levels above the 10 ppb threshold.
Consumer Reports identified Denise Wilson, PhD, a professor at the University of Washington, as having conducted her own testing of apple juices in which she discovered high levels of arsenic, even in brands labeled as organic. Wilson stated, “We are finding problems with some Washington state apples, not because of irresponsible farming practices now, but because lead arsenate pesticides that were used here decades ago are still in the soil. Heavy metals like lead and arsenic just don’t go away.”
Concern was further elevated by the fact that more than 60 percent of juice imports come from China, where the use of arsenic-based pesticides may still be ongoing and regulations for foods are even shadier than those in the United States.
