Slashdot Mirror
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."
They don't give a fuck. Why do you think all their shit (accidental pun) is so cheap? Whatever it takes to squeeze a nickel even if it means killing some workers or customers.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Where are we consumers informed of this? Does your local Wal-Mart store have badges on the bags of frozen tilapia that says which ones were raised on shit and which ones weren't?
The free market dictates that consumers shouldn't hear about this because that would impede the demand for the product and thus drive the prices and profit ranges down.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I think the answer to that is a firm Yes!
Ok, first we had Mad Cow Disease, which proves fatal to humans if you get it. For those too young to remember, it was caused by "enriching" cow feed with ground up sheep offal in order to recicle the waste, increase the protein content of the feed and increase the profit to the farmer. This caused the bugs to get into the cows brains and turn them to mush. Called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the cow flavor, Kreutzfeld-Jakobs syndrome in human flavor, basically turns your brains into a bloody sponge full of holes, then you die inevitably, be it cow or human.
Wait for the upcoming Mad Fish Scare. Just remember every time your MacFish stick or burger tastes like shit.
From the article:
"Ngoc Sinh has been certified as safe by Geneva-based food auditor SGS SA, says Nguyen Trung Thanh, the company’s general director."
"SGS spokeswoman Jennifer Buckley says her company has no record of auditing Ngoc Sinh."
In other words, the article claims that Ngoc Sinh Seafoods Trading & Processing Export Enterprise is using repulsive and unsafe practices, and lying about having been inspected. Bloomberg is accusing them of a crime. The Slashdot headline, on the other hand, converted this into "Approved for Consumers" - accusing a different group, the regulators, which appear to be innocent.
If you've eaten industrial meat, you've eaten something fed by crap (literally or otherwise):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-greger-md/mad-cow-disease-california_b_1450994.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/impacts_industrial_agriculture/they-eat-what-the-reality-of.html
http://www.treehugger.com/health/chickens-fed-caffeine-banned-antibiotics-and-prozac-often-without-the-farmers-knowledge.html
Yummy!
consumers are as much to blame. They vote with their wallets and they choose price before everything else repeatedly. It's not like the shitty quality of average junk from china was not known for decades, yet it still has no problem finding the buyers.
Obviously the headline is misleading, this is Slashdot.
The basic point of TFA is that many of the practices of Vietnamese fishermen have the potential to spread disease to Americans. Also, while the FDA inspects only 2.7% of imported food, 1380 loads of seafood from Vietnam have been rejected for "filth and salmonella" in the last five years.
I went into a restaurant where they serve this. When I red the menu I shouted "bullshit!"
The waiter said "Would madam like a large portion or a small one?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, but the price is almost the only information consumers can base there decision on. That, and the packaging design.
The only way to get more information is to legislate. The food industry would be happy if they could sell processed shit wrapped in
a nice box, without bothering with involving fish at all.
i agree that the precise characteristics of the product are unavailable, but it doesn't require a rocket scientist to read the ingredients from time to time (yet nobody does it) or to know that the junk food is made of junk and is bad for you or that the chinese crap == shitton of nasty pollution and no worker rights whatsoever pretty much by definition.
Ignorance is a bliss and most people choose to be oblivious.
Our oxygen is plant shit, the co2 is other peoples shit, your vegetables grow on shit, your meat eats shits, you cook it on farts, you walk on shit and some of us consider clothes made from shit to be the height of luxury.
It is a shitty world and it worse for those who believe in homeopathy.Water has memory? Oh good, so does it remember having been pissed out billions of times over the lifetime of the earth? And if water has memory, why doesn't it remember the time it was beer!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When there's no other comprehensible information available, it's only natural they choose based on price first. The packages don't say fish raised on goose shit, now do they? In some cases, large producers have lobbied (with some success) to either prevent labeling food that avoids a controversial practice or they lobby for a definition that could apply to nearly anything sold as food including ground glass so they can slap the meaningless bullet point on their packages too.
Even brand name is now worthless information, much of it is just the cheap stuff re-badged and sold for more these days.
They buy quality/brand names when it matters or when they can afford it. If people only cared for the cheapest products available, there wouldn't quite be a market for organic free range cage free free trade products made without high fructose corn syrup. There wouldn't be such large lines for Apple products (ok this is more a case of status symbol but it doesn't take away from my point too much).
That practice is dangerous for American consumers
but the rest of you can go fuck yourselves ;)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The free market requires that consumers must here about this, because the free market relies on an informed consumer. The free market is designed to drive the prices and profits down; that is the entire point of a free market - that multiple vendors compete for the patronage of consumers in a fair manner, by offering the best products for the most attractive price.
If you're not getting that, then you're not in a free market.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
A few years ago on a whim I bought some generic branded local supermarket Stop & Shop seafood and came up with an upper body skin rash for a month. Later looked at the label and the stuff was made in China. Later found that there was a bunch of seafood enriched with some kind of a protein additive causing such bad allergic reactions to people that show up as an upper body skin rash just like I had. I had and still have no seafood allergies at the time and ate and still eat tons of seafood at restaurants weekly and sushi of all kinds, never have any bad results.
Last few weeks I tried to expand my home diet to include more seafood and looked at my new super market chain called Kroger and found that all of their generic fish was imported from China, including freezers full of tilapia and other fish. I could not find any non-generic seafood in this store that wasn't from China. Decided not to buy any this time around after I learned my lesson the last time. I had to travel to their competitor HEB to find some non-Chinese seafood and luckily found some Alaskan salmon at a hefty price.
I wish America would get it's shit together and wake the fuck up and stop importing food from China because of the horrible abuses of the environment that that country is perpetrating in the name of capitalism and profit and complete disregard for environmental and human safety as long as their shit infested products sell.
China will cut its own dick off in the name of profit and sell it to anyone willing to buy a small fried spring roll.
Do you know why food products provide accurate lists of ingredients on the packaging in the first place?
That's right; legislation.
No, no, no, you've got it all wrong!
The free market is about freedom for corporations; to sell whatever crap they want, however they want. If corporations cannot maximise profit by colluding to artificially maintain high prices and low wages, then the market is clearly not free!
Your seafood's always been eating fish shit. Your vegetables are grown in shit. I'm sorry this is a shock to people.
I shall launch my new brand:
Fish-It
Then they can't claim they weren't warned!
Forgot to mention, rich Chinese buy most of the food imported from Australia for a reason.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The origins of cooking likely had little to do with disease; you don't start having the problems at the scales we see in modern times until you've had domestication and keep them in more confined areas than they'd have been in nature. (which is basically, all farming, not just the factory stuff).
The early advantage of cooking is that it although it may destroy some nutrients (hence the raw food movement), it makes others more available for human absorbtion, so there's a net gain. This is what's attributed to human's large brains -- they're rather costly in terms of energy, but cooking lets us spend less time eating for the same nutrients.
And I say this as someone who's not allowed to give blood, as I'm an increased likelihood of Mad Cow. And I should mention that just bringing to a boil isn't enough for some food borne illnesses (eg, botulism or other spores), particularly if you're at an elevation significantly above sea level.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Anyone with a dog has probably seen it eat, literally, crap.
Personnaly, I don't eat dogs ... just sayin' ...
Anybody who has spent any time on a farm can tell you that cows eat a lot of their own shit, literally. And I'm not talking about large, industrial farms either, I'm talking about free-range cattle. I remember once watching a cow grazing on some tall grass, while another cow was shitting all over the first one's head and of course the grass it was eating.
Pigs are even worse, they eat damn near anything. Chickens are, too.
I'm not claiming what the article is talking about is safe. I'm saying that people need to stop being reactionary and screaming "OMFG the animal ate shit so by extension I'M eating shit too!" and go find out exactly what's going on and if it's even something to get worried about.
It's a power balance.
The suppliers who want to sell, versus the consumer with the money.
If it pays to cheat, then cheat you will...if you don't your competitors will and you'll be out of business anyway.
This is why we need laws. Because market darwinism favors the aggressive nasty people who can *get away* with stabbing their competition in the back.
So we should all hire private investigators any time we want to try a new brand of food, or every other week to make sure that food companies are still making "the good stuff" in an ethical way?
People already do have the choice to buy dirt cheap stuff if they want. Just because the ingredients are on the packet doesn't mean that a lot of people won't chose based on price. I know that's what I did when I was a student. Now that I don't really need to care about the cost of food, I just base my choices on things like protein content and sugar content.
which is totally what she said
You can eat raw steer manure and live. (Well, at my farm you could, I would hesitate about CAFO waste.) Bird shit is chock-full of dangerous pathogens, you don't want the chicken coop anywhere near where the other critters live. Fresh air, sunlight, and happy composting organisms are used to convert nasty poop back into wholesome dirt that will grow safe edible food. Always wash your hands after you touch a bird. Wetlands- nasty, stinky swamps, are where water gets cleansed of pathogens and purified so that normal fish can live in it. Tilapia can live in warm, nasty water, but it would make them unsafe to eat.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I love how the moderators freak out when they can't find that "-1 Criticizes my ideology" mod so they just pick "Offtopic" or "Overrated" instead (when the post is neither).
In this case it's because there's no "-1 evil fuckbag" moderation option. If someone posted a long spiel about the joys of butt-raping 8 year old boys, or why Hitler was right about the Jews I would expect it to be modded down too.
I always find it amusing when serious Randian/"libertarian"/extreme rightwing free market cheerleaders are surprised that some of their ideas disgust people.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I remember a Dirty Jobs episode where Mike Rowe was at a fish farm that recycled their water.
They used tilapia/carp to eat the poop.
Here's a clip of the show on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGoR4dbE1os
Regardless, stay away from fish harvested by Chinese. They are either grown in poorly maintained farms, or fished from endangered parts of the ocean where fisheries are nearly depleted.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Yes, but there are safe cycles and unsafe cycles.
The reason very few cultures eat the meat of carnivores is that the closer the physiology and biology of two animals, the higher the chance of the same micro-organisms infecting the two animals. I had to explain this to my mother once, to explain why cow dung is a good fertiliser, but cat shit should be kept out of the compost heap.
If you're going to farm an animal that can harbour parasites than can also infect humans, you need to go out of your way to ensure that they don't come into contact with those parasites.
That doesn't mean "don't feed them shit", but "be selective in which animals' shit you feed them". Which basically means ruminant shit.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
voluntarily informed ingredients
Because an international mega-corp would never lie to consumers, right? If you're under 40 you have probably never heard of the 'truth in packaging' laws, or the reasons why they exist. Things were bad enough that even the frelling Chamber of Commerce joined with consumers groups to lobby for the legislation.
If you're over 40 and still believe this libertardian garbage then your blinders are on so tight you're probably beyond hope. Not sure why you think that everyone can afford to contract with a lab to analyze their corn flakes to see if they're made with mercury or contain measurable amounts of pesticides. You must belong to a distinctly higher income class than the rest of us.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin