We were originally surrounded by invisible dangers, but now we unfortunately see them, and it’s at the dinner table. In China, food dangers are becoming an increasingly noisy topic in the public eye. Moreover, the resulting thinking on the ethical issues of social justice and the review of our various lifestyles cloaked in fashion also kicked off.

How many people would decide to become a vegetarian because of fear?

At least, this is how veteran American journalist Nichols Fox gradually became. That was what happened in the last ten years or so of the last century. At first, this decision was made simply because she was picky about taste. The meat products she once loved so much no longer tasted delicious and could no longer stimulate her appetite. . But years later, when she learned the reason was that they were contaminated, she decided to pursue the truth. Her blockbuster environmental book, Food and Germs: The Shocking Truth About Contaminated Food Chains, made the public aware of the emergence and evolution of the nightmare that surrounded their lives - the "mad cow disease" outbreak in the mid-1990s. For the first time, I had a shocking and detailed understanding. In the book, Nichols Fox paints a shocking picture: mad cow disease and related Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Japanese salad greens heavily contaminated with Escherichia coli, the Gulf of Mexico affected by Poison-infected oysters...

Our surroundings were originally full of invisible dangers, but now we unfortunately see them, and they are on the dining table -

"In order to improve the health of dairy cows To increase milk production, people feed them hormones and high-protein feed. After the cows under excessive production pressure become sick, people immediately apply antibiotics. Then, when these cows originally had an average life span of 20 years, they died in just a short time. When they become old and sick within a few years, they end up being used as raw materials for hamburger patties. "When those frozen hamburger patties are processed in fast food restaurants, they are always placed directly in the oven. One area is heated so that the temperature of that area drops rapidly, which is not enough to cook the inside of the patty.

Nichols Fox draws a shocking conclusion to the public: Humanity is losing control of the food supply chain, and the most common daily foods such as fruits, eggs, meat, hamburgers, and ice cream are being produced. Every step of the process may be contaminated and kill people.

This is not a distant American past. In the years since this book was published, the dangers from food have not diminished at all. At the same time, in China, a country that is "shifting from mainly solving food supply and demand safety issues to mainly solving food quality and safety issues," food safety issues are becoming an increasingly noisy topic in the public eye.

What are we having for dinner tonight?

The danger comes from pesticides. Chinese residents’ daily dietary intake of various pesticides is often dozens of times higher than that of developed countries such as the United States, Japan, and the European Union. The intake standards for the pesticide 666 alone in China are 84 times that of the United States and 15 times that of Japan. According to statistics, 38% of agricultural products have harmful residues exceeding national standards, and the proportion of vegetable pesticides in some areas is as high as 80%.

The danger comes from counterfeiting. In 2003, more than 30 types of inferior milk powder with almost zero protein content were discovered in Fuyang, Anhui Province. After eating this "hollow milk powder", more than 100 babies in rural areas around Fuyang became short limbs, thin bodies, and large heads. Big-headed baby, 12 babies died from severe malnutrition caused by this milk powder. On the evening of May 11, 2004, in Guangzhou, 58-year-old Duan, a villager from Meitian Village, Zhongluotan Town, Baiyun District, and a migrant worker from Hunan also died one after another due to drinking low-quality bulk liquor. But this was just the beginning of a series of deaths. By May 17, when a State Council joint investigation team composed of the State Food and Drug Administration, the Ministry of Health, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and other departments arrived in Guangzhou to investigate, the Guangzhou fake wine poisoning incident The death toll has increased to 11.

Dangers come from various unsafe factors in the manufacturing, processing, and packaging processes.

Eels fed with contraceptive pills, bamboo shoots smoked with sulfur, vermicelli produced by the "suspended white block" method, tofu skin dried by the manure pit, ham soaked in dichlorvos, chicken wings and chicken feet containing a large number of preservatives...only hormones are added to the feed One of the hazards caused is that Chinese girls have their menarche earlier than the average age of about 14 years ago 20 years ago, to about 10 years old now. More data show that the fertility of Chinese people has decreased, and one in every eight couples is infertile. The average sperm count of Chinese men is only more than 20 million, which is a decrease of 60% compared with the average number of more than 60 million in the 1940s.

The danger even comes from the food ingredients themselves. Just two years ago, most Chinese were unaware of genetically modified foods, but a lawsuit starring Shanghai consumer Zhu Yanling and Nestlé quickly brought it to the forefront. People immediately realized that genetically modified food is no longer a high-tech achievement that seems far away from daily life. It has already become the raw material ingredient of daily foods such as salad oil and soy products, silently and unlabeled.

Today, we live in a world ravaged by pesticides and poisons. Due to cross-infection in the biological chain, disease-causing factors remain in almost all of our food - pork and beef contain hormones, fruits contain preservatives, fish are contaminated with mercury, and chickens and eggs contain carcinogens... So, today What shall we eat tonight?

How to dispel food myths

The father of one of the victims in the "Fuyang Milk Powder Incident" also opened a small store selling daily groceries and food. They also sell milk powder, some from wholesale markets and others delivered directly to your door by promoters. Later, in an interview with the media, he said that he had never suspected that it was fake.

To avoid danger, we must first break the myth of "safe food" that we have believed in for a long time, and stop trusting our food without thinking. But the real question is where does the general public get this ability to “disenchant”?

The myth of “safe food” is built in part through dazzling television ads, which remind us day after day of the serious harm done to our bodies while reinforcing it with ulterior motives. confidence and reliance on them; on the other hand, as developed countries have formed relatively complete food safety supervision mechanisms, people have slowly relaxed their vigilance and lost the ability to intuitively identify food quality. In a foodborne outbreak caused by contaminated chocolate milk in the United States, many victims said they drank the milk even though it tasted strange, while in developing countries a lack of adequate information was a key factor, e.g. In China, although the Ministry of Agriculture has also issued relevant regulations stipulating that genetically modified foods should be labeled with specific labels, very few companies have actually implemented them. A survey shows that 65% of Chinese consumers do not know whether there are genetically modified foods currently on the market.

No one can definitely prove whether genetically modified foods, once regarded as myths of food technology, are the "Pandora's Box" of modern life! But fortunately, after years of heated debate, the world has reached a basic understanding of this issue, that is: first, the safety of genetically modified products is indeed uncertain; second, regarding genetically modified products, As with food, humans must treat it with great care and caution.

Whether genetically modified foods should be strictly labeled has also triggered a heated debate in China. Many people believe that genetically modified foods are technological weirdos that should be wary of, while others defend them and believe that the dangers of genetically modified foods are not It has not been fully scientifically proven, but its benefits are obvious (such as high yield, high nutrition, etc.). "Remember," one sternly warned, "it was years before the dangerous consequences of DDT and the grinding up of animal carcasses for cattle feed were revealed."

Some of the more far-reaching effects may not yet be known. Not all can be seen clearly, but it will extend for generations. Persistent organic pollutants, such as DDT and hexachlorobenzene, or POPs for short, refer to chemicals synthesized by humans that can persist in the environment, accumulate through the biological food chain (web), and cause harmful effects on human health and the environment.

Among the 9 POPs banned as pesticides by the Stockholm Convention, 5 products were once produced on a large scale in China, and 4 of them are still produced and used in small quantities today. Experts say, "Even if the production and use of POPs is stopped in the near future, these substances will not be detected in the human body until the seventh generation at the earliest."

Safety and health are not just food standards

“What is lacking in modern people’s dietary life is awe and respect for the significant correlation between food and health.” Nichols Fox reminds us that as history advances, humans and food The relationship became increasingly distant. With so many intermediate links including food producers, processors and distributors, our relationship with food has become increasingly alienated, and there are so many types of food to choose from. The combination of the two makes people gradually forget to keep their diet safe. , health and stability are so important.

Fox also quoted Waltner Teves in his book "Good Food and Germs": "When we eat, we are selecting a part of the natural environment and making it relevant to us. Just as sex is an important link in human relationships, food is an important component of human relationships with the environment; in the white-headed alliance between humans and the spiritual biosphere, food and drink are just like daily pleasures. . Messy and inappropriate eating habits and indiscriminate food selection are as full of dangers as chaotic sexual relationships."

If the emergence of AIDS has changed the course of the "sexual liberation" movement, it has long been the case. The food safety crisis has brought about another change in lifestyle. More and more people are becoming vegetarians. The British Vegan Association once announced that since the news about mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was announced, the number of people joining the ranks of vegetarians in 1996 hit a record high.

But in this struggle between man and the great disaster of his own creation, becoming a vegetarian is only a way of defense. Establishing complete regulations and standards, supervision mechanisms and standardized industry production methods is building city walls. The driving force to change the current situation must come from consumers who are extremely dissatisfied with the status quo and determined to regain control of the situation and obtain safe food. Nichols Fox points out: "We should ask: What feed did the cow that produced this milk eat? What was the life history of this fish? Where was this head of lettuce produced? This chicken was air-cooled Or is it water-cooled? ”

We should also ask: Is the cooked food sold in supermarkets really as fresh and hygienic as it claims? Is the water used to make this tofu clean? In what container was it brought? Are the fillings for this mooncake from last year? What ingredients does this bag of milk powder contain? As for bulk blended liquor, it would be better to disappear from now on.

Ask, keep asking, when we break the deathly silence at the dinner table with our noisy questions, this dangerous world can stop and listen to our demands.

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