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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!
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!
Well, there is in fact a real threat here. A common parasite in fresh water fish in tropical countries is the liver fluke, a worm that lives part of its cycle in the human gut and is responsible, in cases, for cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the bile duct. The worm attaches near the bile duct and produces chemicals that create cancer so it can eat the by-products. Nice little beast. It's a slow developing cancer that kills suddenly because it has no symptoms until it reaches a late stage. It's one of the commoner reasons for death among 50-year old males in countries where it's endemic.
One assumes there's more resistance in populations that have been exposed to this parasite for thousands of years. Women suffer much less from bile duct cancer than men, so there's variation in individual vulnerability. But as Chinese fish is exported, and ends up in places like cheap sushi bars in Birmingham, the parasite ends up in thousands, perhaps millions of people who have little resistance.
Attack of the Killer Sushi.
I should know, I got bile duct cancer a year or two ago and since there were no antecedents in my family, this seemed the most likely cause.
If we started feeding fish on pig feces, it's a slippery slope (sorry!) to feeding them human feces.
Good news is a yearly de-worming should be sufficient to prevent bile-duct cancer, if anyone cared about this.
My blog
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.
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
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!
I shall launch my new brand:
Fish-It
Then they can't claim they weren't warned!