From the NY Times (may require free subscription): The former chairwoman of one of China’s biggest dairy producers pleaded guilty to selling fake milk powder.
SHANGHAI — The former chairwoman of one of China’s biggest dairy producers pleaded guilty on Wednesday to selling tainted powdered baby formula and acknowledged for the first time that the company knew of the problem months before alerting local officials to what has become one of the country’s biggest food-safety crises, according to the state-run news media.
Since September, when the scandal became public, investigations have shown how widespread the problem of tainted milk is in China, with watered-down milk being doctored with a chemical used in plastics and fertilizer to falsely raise its protein count. The chemical, melamine, can cause kidney stones and other ailments, and the tainted formula sickened nearly 300,000 children and killed 6.
This kind of thing doesn’t happen to Locavores! Raw local milk—Woo Hoo!
Watering down milk and tainting it with melamine to offset the reduction in protein count isn’t necessarily a raw vs pasteurized milk issue so much as criminal behavior on the part of the milk sellers in China. Seems to me that the “locavore” living in China next door to the dairy that was tampering with the milk might have been at some risk.
Speaking of raw milk though, how safe is it? See http://www.foodsafety.wisc.edu/consumer/fact_sheets/FACTrawmilk1.pdf.
I’ll join in that WOO-HOO!!! Loud and clear, this is just another highlight of eating locally and supporting our farmers. While there might not be *no* chance of us suffering from the food, there is an infinitely *less* chance of it when we know our small farmers and their safe, sustainable practices. And that’s a great thing 🙂
Biblioholic: I didn’t mean to imply tainted milk was a raw vs. pasteurized thing. What I meant to imply was the rest of the story that goes along with being a locavore that chooses to drink raw milk, and that is that the work involved in finding local sources of foods also includes vetting. I meant to imply that I know the farmer or know someone who knows the farmer, but rarely more than two degrees of separation. By going raw, I can only go with a small local family farm. They live or die and feed their families by their reputations. I know that my milk comes from Jersey cows who have never been given growth hormones or antibiotics. As a locavore, I have a relationship with my farmers. I know them. They know me. Our hands actually touch in the trade.
So, if the local dairy in China is counting on his reputation to make the next sale and feeding his milk to his own children, I doubt that the locavore living next door is getting tainted milk. Seriously, I suspect that the tainting happens later in the industrial chain.
As for the safety of raw milk, the reality of our time is that no matter where you’re getting your food, you have to do the vetting. Don’t count on the FDA. Check out the Campaign for Real Milk at the Weston Price Foundation. Click the icons on the left to progress through the story.