Seafood Raised on Animal Feces Approved for Consumers

If you are a seafood lover and wish that you could eat more fish raised on pig feces, your dreams are coming true. Due to fierce competition in the Chinese tilapia industry, farmers are increasingly switching to feces instead of commercial feed. From the article: "At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety. 'The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,' says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China."

Comments

Re:God bless the free market!

[BadgerRush]

Before there was such legislation you could still restrict yourself to only purchase from companies that voluntarily got certified and voluntarily informed ingredients. No one were making you buy food from producers who didn't list ingredients.

There are several flaws in your hypothetical no-legislation scenario:

• - Companies can get "voluntary certified" by their own shell companies or other kind of fake/biased certification, and there is no way for the consumer to distinguish a serious/real certification from a fake/biased one.
• - Companies can "voluntary inform" an incomplete list of ingredients and there is no way for the consumer to know which product have a real collectively exhaustive list or just the ones the producer wanted you to know.
• - Competitors can band together to omit inconvenient truths together