hat do they call Chinese food in China? Food!

—Jay Leno

While that joke is pretty funny, the phrase “Chinese food” has taken on far more serious implications now that China is supplying America with more and more of its fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat—not to mention vitamins and prescription drugs.

For our refrigerator, China is the largest exporter of seafood to the United States, a key supplier of white meat chicken and the world’s third largest tea exporter. Chinese farmers also provide 60% of our apple juice concentrate, 50% of our garlic, and significant amounts of everything from canned pears and preserved mushrooms to honey and royal bee jelly.

For our medicine cabinet, China likewise produces 70% of the world’s penicillin, 50% of its aspirin, and 33% of its Tylenol. Chinese drug companies have also captured much of the world market in antibiotics, enzymes, primary amino acids, and vitamins. China has even cornered the world market for vitamin C—with 90% of market share—even as it plays a dominant role in the production of vitamins A, B12, and E, besides many of the raw ingredients that go into multivitamins.

These statistics should disturb all of us for one simple reason: Far too much of what China is flooding our grocery stores and drug emporia with is pure poison. That’s why Chinese foods and drugs always rank #1 of those flagged down at the border or recalled by both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority.

Just why does China keep sending us food and drugs that can sicken or kill us? Sometimes the poisons that show up in its food and drug supply chain are the accidental result of factors such as shoddy production methods, unsanitary processing, or soil toxicity due to a polluted environment. At other times, ethically challenged and morally degraded Chinese “black hearts”—a term used by their own countrymen—purposely contaminate our food and drug supply simply as a way to boost their profits.

Whether it is by accident or by intention, the first thing you need to know about this particular Death by China is that it’s nothing personal. Indeed, Chinese farmers, fishermen, food processors, and pharmaceutical peddlers are just as likely to poison their own people as Americans, Europeans, the Japanese, Koreans, and other food and drug consumers around the world. To get just a small acid taste of the truth of this statement in your mouth, consider this “what’s in your wok” fact: Fully 10% of all the restaurants7 in China rely on so-called “gutter oil” for their cooking oil.

Gutter oil is a fetid stew of used oil and waste collected from the traps and drains of commercial kitchens, and it’s chock-full of a potent liver carcinogen known as aflatoxin mold. China’s guttersnipes sell it at the back doors of many restaurants for a mere one-fifth of the price of new soy or peanut oil. Besides being carcinogenic, this mashup of moldy oils and every possible type of food debris can be a sudden death sentence for anyone with serious food allergies.

China’s Serial Melamine Killers

Disgusting though this gutter oil scam may be, it pales in comparison to China’s serial melamine murderers. These murderers have struck down numerous victims on both Chinese soil and around the world, and the often futile attempts to catch them graphically illustrate just how difficult it is for either the Chinese government or American regulators to guarantee safe food and drugs when murder for profit is in play.

As for the murder weapon itself, melamine is actually a quite valuable chemical—when it is not being surreptitiously added to food. Combine it with formaldehyde to produce melamine resin, and you get a durable plastic used in products like Formica and dry erase boards. Toss in some other chemicals, and you can use melamine either as a fire retardant, fertilizer, or “super plasticizer” for making high-resistance concrete. But add melamine to products like chicken feed, pet food, milk, or baby formula, and there is no faster way to destroy a pair of kidneys.

Just why do China’s black-hearted entrepreneurs add poisonous melamine to our food products? It’s because melamine’s high nitrogen content mimics correspondingly high protein levels. Such “Chinese protein adulteration,” as it has come to be infamously known, thereby fools food inspectors into grading the food with a higher protein content. Because melamine is substantially cheaper than actual protein, this means big bucks for the perpetrators—no matter how high the body count.

Who Killed Fluffy? What Happened to Fido?

The world first learned of Chinese protein adulteration in 2007 when a wave of melamine-tainted pet food killed tens of thousands of cats and dogs in Europe, the United States, and South Africa. And it wasn’t just pets that were affected. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, 3 million Americans consumed chicken or pork raised on feed laced with melamine.

And now hear this: If you lost your otherwise healthy pet to a mysterious illness or kidney failure during that time period, chances are it was a “Death by Chinese Poison.”

Predictably, when the crisis first broke, the Chinese government stonewalled and even refused to allow foreign safety inspectors in to evaluate the problem. It was a different story, however, when the next melamine scandal crashed on China’s own shores.

It’s Nothing Personal, Part Deux

“I’ve completely lost confidence in milk powder8 made in China,” said Emily Tang, 31, a civil servant from the southern city of Shenzhen, who has a 3-year-old daughter.

—Bloomberg BusinessWeek

In 2008, almost 300,000 Chinese babies fell ill and 6 died after 22 Chinese dairies conspired to add melamine to the milk and baby formula supply. According to Zhao Huibin, a dairy farmer in Hebei Province: “Before melamine, the dealers added rice porridge9 or starch into the milk to artificially boost the protein count, but that method was easily tested as fake, so they switched to melamine.”

In this particular case, black heart adulterers didn’t even use pure industrial-grade melamine. Instead, they relied on the cheaper—and even more toxic—”scrap melamine.” No wonder many of the children who recovered from the acute melamine poisoning have been left with significant kidney damage.

What’s particularly chilling about this episode is that it came fully a year after Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had authorized an additional $1.1 billion and sent several hundred thousand inspectors to examine food and drug producers. As The New York Times opined on the implications of this abysmal regulatory failure:

The dairy scandal raises the core question10 of whether the ruling Communist Party is capable of creating a transparent, accountable regulatory structure within a one-party system.

And here’s a little laugh-out-loud addendum that answers that question while underscoring a fundamental difference between free and open societies and a ruthlessly totalitarian China. In 2010, former journalist Zhao Lianhai went to prison after a sham trial in which he was denied the ability to present evidence.

Zhao’s “crime” was not poisoning people. Rather, he was convicted of “inciting social disorder” for his efforts to publicize the melamine murders after his own son was sickened. And that’s one more reason why the People’s Republic of China will never be able to guarantee us safer food products. Unlike democratic nations where the right to free speech and freedom of assembly are sacrosanct and help shine a bright light on deviant behavior, China sweeps everything under the rug—and any and all protesting voices into its gulags.

China’s Heparin Homicides

Now, lest you think China’s melamine scandals might be old news, forget about it. To this day, melamine-contaminated products keep popping up precisely because it is so profitable to use the kidney-buster as an additive.

Lest you also think that China’s trick of using contaminated “fillers” like melamine to boost profits is limited to foods, forget about that, too. As China’s “heparin homicides” graphically illustrate, unscrupulous Chinese entrepreneurs are also busily poisoning our drug supply.

Heparin is an anticoagulant drug used in everything from heart surgery and blood transfusions to intravenous therapy and kidney dialysis; and it is actually made from the lowly mucous membranes of pig intestines. In fact, that’s how China has gotten into the heparin manufacturing act: As the pork capital of the world, the Dragon has a seemingly endless supply of pig guts.

To cut costs and boost profits, Chinese manufacturers surreptitiously add a cheap but deadly heparin-mimicking agent called “overly sulfated chondroitin sulfate.” This particular poison triggers severe, and sometimes fatal, allergic reactions—from low blood pressure and shortness of breath to vomiting and diarrhea.

Now here’s what’s particularly nasty about this bait and switch: The heparin contaminant is so close in chemical structure to actual heparin that it is very difficult to detect. It’s also 100 times cheaper—$9 per pound versus $900! Because of such low costs, some contaminated heparin batches have been found to have been cut by up to 50% with the counterfeit chemical!

To put a personal face on this particular Death by Chinese Poison, look no further than Leroy Hubley of Toledo, Ohio. He lost his wife of 48 years to tainted heparin. Just a month later and before the contaminant was identified, Hubley’s son, who shared his mother’s inherited kidney dysfunction, fell victim to the same Chinese cost-cutting scam.

To date, China’s heparin poisoners have killed hundreds of Americans while sickening thousands. Bad heparin has also shown up in 11 other countries, including Japan, India, Germany, and Canada. Moreover, despite efforts by both Chinese and American regulators to contain the problem, bad heparin keeps showing up in our operating rooms and dialysis centers to this day.

At this point, we must ask ourselves this pointed question: Why are so many Chinese black hearts so willing to poison the world’s food and drug supply for profit? The answer of at least one noted Chinese scholar provides a penetrating look into the aforementioned “moral degradation” of the Chinese soul. According to business professor Luo Yadong11 in the Management and Organization Review, such degradation—and the rush for profits at any cost—has occurred because of the breakdown of Confucian principles in the moral and ethical vacuum that is Chinese Communism.

It’s precisely such moral degradation, working in tandem with corrupt government officials and lax regulatory enforcement, that has led Chinese food processors to deliberately add a long list of poisonous industrial chemicals to foods either to improve taste or to act as preservatives.

In fact, China’s own regulators have found such abominations as hot pot soups “seasoned’ with formaldehyde to improve taste and soy sauce spiked with hydrochloric acid and human hair to boost amino acid levels. The Chinese black hearts have even added the highly toxic pesticide dichlorvos to make the humble sausage “deliciously” deadly. Just remember these little tidbits the next time you think about eating anything “Made in China.”

Sometimes It’s Not Murder—Just Manslaughter

There reaches a point where I think it’s clear,12 if China wants to live in the twenty-first century, then they have to produce to those standards.

—Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL)

While “first-degree murder” is the verdict in cases ranging from melamine to heparin, in many other cases, it’s simply “involuntary manslaughter”—the killing of another human being without “malice aforethought.” A major problem here is that as China has established itself as the world’s manufacturing floor, it has also turned itself into a toxic waste dump and the world’s most polluted country. Such wholesale environmental trashing now means that the soil China uses to provide the world with its nourishment is riddled with all manner of carcinogens, heavy metals, illegal pesticides, and other toxins. That the poisons from China’s soil are leaching into the diets of America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea should be evident to anyone who bothers to look.

A Chinese “Apple a Day” Keeps American Oncologists Fully Employed

Consider, for example, the sweet and cuddly “juice box” you might pack in your child’s lunch. There’s a good chance this ostensibly “healthy” alternative to soda pop might be dosing your kid with arsenic, a heavy metal that can cause cancer. Here’s why:

Over the past 30 years, Chinese exports of apple juice concentrate have soared from 10,000 gallons a year to almost half a billion; and today China commands half or more of the U.S. market. Sure, the juice is cheaper than what American farmers can produce. But one reason is that Chinese orchards13 rely heavily on illegal arsenic-based pesticides that are absorbed by the tree and concentrated in the fruit.

Do You Like Your Tea Regular or Unleaded?

As for the expression “all the tea in China,” well, even that can’t be trusted! Here is how a former deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration described one Chinese method of drying tea leaves on National Public Radio: The manufacturer lays the “tea leaves out on a huge warehouse floor14 and drive[s] trucks over them so that the exhaust...more rapidly dr[ies] the leaves out.” Because China uses leaded gasoline, there is no more effective way of turning a tasty green tea into a lethal weapon.

There Is No Truth in Chinese Food Labeling

In addition, one of the most deceptive black heart practices is to chronically mislabel “organic” food products. Not surprisingly, Chinese farmers have been eager to jump on America’s “organic foods” bandwagon, but this admission from a Chinese grocery store owner says it all:

Maybe 30% of farms that put the organic label15 on their food produce the real thing. I think in the future the government will improve testing. But now, hygiene officers have so much work to do with essential food safety that they don’t worry about organic.

Given this admission, it should come as no surprise that Walmart, Whole Foods, and other retailers have found supposedly “organic” products from China to be heavily dosed with pesticides.

Japan’s Green Bean Gag Reflex

It’s not just America that China is turning toxic. Consider what happened when one Japanese16 food distributor imported over 50,000 packages of allegedly “fresh” Chinese green beans from the Yantai Beihai Foodstuff Co. in Shandong Province. After consumers experienced nausea and vomiting followed by mouth numbness, Japanese health department officials found the level of a deadly insecticide present in the beans to be almost 35,000 times the legal limit!

Of course, we could continue to chronicle tale after tale of “death by Chinese poison.” For example, there’s the fiasco in Europe involving Vitamin A supplies contaminated with a deadly bacterium that almost got into infant formula. There have been multivitamins riddled with lead and honey and shrimp dosed with antibiotics. There’s also the infamous and well-publicized cough syrup laced with antifreeze that killed thousands around the globe. But examples such as these are only as good as the broader points they illustrate.

The last broad point we wish to illustrate with an example about fish farming in China is this: Given the scope of the environmental problems with Chinese foods and drugs and the pervasiveness of morally degraded Chinese entrepreneurial behavior, it is virtually impossible for agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Food and Safety Authority, and the Food Safety Commission of Japan to adequately police Chinese imports. In fact, the story of how Chinese fish farms have overwhelmed both foreign competitors and food safety regulators represents a microcosm of all that is wrong with relying on Chinese food—and fish!

It’s Not Just China’s Humans Who Live in Crowded Conditions

Our waters here are filthy.17 There are simply too many aquaculture farms in this area. They’re all discharging water here, fouling up other farms.

—Ye Chao, eel and shrimp farmer, Fuqing, China

This unfortunately quite true Chinese “fish story” appropriately begins in the Southeastern United States where, during the 1990s, raising fish like the southern catfish represented one of American aquaculture’s great success stories. Then, enter the Dragon.

As we discuss fully in Part II, “Weapons of Job Destruction,” Chinese enterprises benefit from an array of unfair trade practices, and China’s fish farms are no exception. Indeed, beginning in the early 2000s, under the onslaught of Chinese subsidized exports, many American fish farms across states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama quite literally dried up.

Today, China is the world’s leading source of farm-raised fish and dominates the markets for catfish, tilapia, shrimp, and eel. However, China’s fish farms provide no pastoral image of peace and harmony with nature. Rather, they project a Paradise Lost nightmare of hellish filth.

This fish farm filth begins with the fact that less than half of China has access to sewage treatment facilities. How this human waste—along with a flood of pesticides, fertilizers, coal slurry, antibiotics, dyes, and other pollutants—finds its way onto your Friday night dinner plate is instructive.

This stomach-turning journey begins at the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and runs over 3,000 river miles to China’s Eastern Delta. It is at this Eastern Delta where much of the contaminated fish raised for export to the United States, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere is raised.

Along the Yangtze’s route,18 booming large cities such as Chengdu and Chongqing dump billions of tons of mostly untreated human, animal, and industrial waste directly into the river. This toxic mess is then given some considerable time to ferment and stew as it collects in the reservoir behind the gigantic Three Gorges Dam below Chongqing.

In fact, to take a 3-day “luxury” cruise down the Yangtze River from Chongqing to the Three Gorges Dam—as many American tourists do—is to experience a frightening environmental nightmare. The reservoir waters glow an eerie19 and sometimes malodorous florescent green under an ever-present cloud of smoke from coal burning plants. Like Sherlock Holmes’ “dog that didn’t’ bark,” the almost complete absence of waterfowl, turtles, and amphibians—not to mention the once playful, iconic, and now extinct pink river dolphins—underscores the toxicity of one of China’s largest rivers and drinking water supplies.

As to why this is in any way relevant to the Chinese fish you eat in America, remember that it is precisely this Yangtze stew—as well as the equally wretched waters of the Pearl and Yellow Rivers—that fill the export-focused fish farms on China’s East Coast. Of course, because Chinese eels, fish, and shrimp are raised in such toxic conditions, the creatures suffer from all manner of infections and parasites. As Chinese scholar Liu Chenglin has noted:

[T]he conditions that aquacultured seafood is grown under20 in China are deplorable: Producers tightly cram thousands of finfish and shellfish into their facilities to maximize production. This generates large amounts of waste, contaminates the water, and spreads disease, which can kill off entire crops of fish if left untreated. Even if a disease does not kill off all the fish in an aquaculture facility, remaining bacteria, such as Vibrio, Listeria, or Salmonella, can sicken people who eat the fish.

To treat these conditions, China’s fish farmers routinely pump all manner of banned antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, and dyes into their polluted waters. These toxic substances, which are inevitably absorbed into the creatures’ flesh, range from malachite green, chloramphenicol, and fluoroquinolones to nitrofurans, contraceptive drugs, and gentian violet; and they can do everything from cause cancer and trigger rare diseases like aplastic anemia to degrade the human body’s ability to use antibiotics to cure infections.

On top of these outrages, Chinese fish processors routinely treat fish for export with substances such as carbon monoxide gas to give the filets a bright red color. This not only increases the visual appeal of the product but disguises any spoilage. Please remember that little trick the next time you see a nice pink Chinese fish and think it is “fresh frozen.”

Of course, in China, “what’s good for the American goose is often not what’s good for the Chinese gander.” Indeed, this type of “pink primping”21 is subject to harsh penalties if used in fish designed for domestic Chinese consumption.

Now here is the broader point of this Chinese fish story—and really the only thing you need to remember: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is so grossly understaffed that although it regulates 80% of America’s food supply, it only inspects less than 1% of food imports. It is precisely for this reason that whenever you eat anything from China you are effectively playing “Chinese Food Roulette.” And no amount of assurances from either the Chinese government or American regulators should convince you otherwise!

Selling Fake Coals to Newcastle

Certain Chinese companies are now mass producing22 and selling fake rice to unwitting villagers. According to a report in the Korean-language Weekly Hong Kong, the manufacturers are blending potatoes, sweet potatoes, and plastic industrial resin to produce the imitation rice.

—Natural News

To end this chapter, we would be remiss in not sharing with you two of the most recent, brazen, and outrageous examples of Chinese product adulteration. These examples put several exclamation points on the point that if Chinese entrepreneurs will do these kinds of things to their own countrymen, why would you expect them to send us safe food, drugs, or products?

The first example involves a scheme to pawn off fake plastic rice to poor villagers. In this particular con game, the faux rice manufacturers first mash up a blend of regular potatoes and sweet potatoes and mold the mash into the shape of rice kernels. Synthetic plastic resin is then added so the grains hold their shape; the giveaway is that you can boil the faux rice for hours and it remains crunchy. As noted by an official from the Chinese Restaurant Association,23 eating three bowls of this Frankenstein mashup is the same as swallowing an entire plastic bag. And you thought that wheat bran was hard on your intestinal track.

As for example number two, this scheme is rampant throughout major provinces of China, including Gansu, Henan, Qinghai, Shanxi, and Sichuan. The con involves adding fake flavors and aromas to ordinary rice to make it smell and taste like the much more expensive premium and aromatic “Wuchang” rice.

By adding a mere half a kilo of fragrance, an unscrupulous Chinese rice processor can aromatize up to ten tons of rice. That this scheme is out of control is captured in one laugh-out-loud statistic reported by the Chinese media: Each year, farmers grow only 800,000 tons of Wuchang rice,24 but more than 10 million tons are sold at market.

Nor is there any apparent remorse among the perpetrators of this scam. When confronted, one spokesman for a company caught red-handed simply said, “The adulterated rice products have been selling very well due to the lower prices compared to the real thing.” We know sociopaths who have more social conscience.