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8 | § ¶Cheap as Cheap Gets
-- China Imports Tainted Fish
Today, the news in CNN say that the FDA finds a widespread case of poisoned fish from china. Earlier in the month, they discover tainted toothpaste.
For a long time the US economy has enjoyed a long period of extreme consumerism and low inflation. Traditionally the more people buy of something (more “demand”), the more price rises for it (about the same “offer”). In an interesting phenomena, manufacturers have found ways of increasing “offer” and the margin earned at the same time by shipping the manufacturing to countries where manufacturing costs are lower. When lowering salaries, real estate and utilities costs is not enough, the next to suffer are quality controls. Nothing new there….
For a long time consumers have learned to tolerate cheaper quality as long as they can buy more. People have bigger and more of almost everything: clothes, shoes, electronics, furniture, house wares, etc. Under normal circumstances, lower quality on these items can only affect their durability (which still exceeds their use, since in a consumerist society they will be replaced very soon by a newer model).
Then cheap and inferior food starts appearing on our supermarkets. In our efforts to buy more and more of the same goods manufacturers look for lower quality food as well. As if US produced food wasn’t of bad enough quality and included questionable ingredients like genetically modified food, pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and radiation, we now have lowered the bar a couple notches lower. Tainted/poisoned food started to arrive from China and other countries. (Where “poisoned” is a relative term… Europeans believe that genetically modified food is almost as bad as “poisoned”, while the US is happy about it. US also tolerate radiation in food, which many people think as poison. Apparently China food manufacturers are tolerant about “poisonous” ingredients on their food as well, just not the same “poisons” we accept in the US.)
Can we trust food from other countries? Certainly. We always had. We can continue to do so. We may have to put into place stringent controls to assure that they do not contain any contaminants, but we can continue to do so. It increases variety in our diet and keeps costs down – for us, and for them, as we may be able to ship some of our extra food to them as well. However, we may have to recognize that there is a point where we can’t just keep cutting costs. We may be able to compromise on labor, real estate, and utility costs… but as soon as we make the production process less quality-focused (just as we have done with other products), we start to suffer.
Maybe this is a good reminder that we should try to buy a bit more quality, even if we must consume a bit less. We may even loose a bit of weight and have a healthier life.