Monday, October 29, 2007

a rant about china

i've been simply appalled for several months about the numerous products made in china that have been recalled. some of the stories have been mundane, simple miscommunications, poor product specifications. some have been horrific, the stuff of you hope is only urban legend like this story: to speed up the drying process, they would lay the tea leaves out on a huge warehouse floor and drive trucks over them so that the exhaust would more rapidly dry the leaves out. the problem there is that the chinese use leaded gasoline, so they were essentially spewing the lead over all these leaves. according to an article on NPR, in the past year, the FDA rejected a higher proportion of food shipments from china than from any other country. the problem is, the FDA only inspects about 1% of food imports, so while they are catching a whole bunch of stuff, its really only the tip of the ice burg. and don't get me started on all the environmental issues. did you see cnn's world in peril stuff on china??

andrew and i have often gone on rants about chinese imports, their lack standards, and how they are basically killing themselves with all that water and air pollution etc. apparently zoecat has been listening and really taking this to heart.

we had a world map on the wall, but for the longest time, have only been using the back side of it. andrew has a blossoming ebay business and he needed a plain white background for taking pictures of items to be sold, his G I Joes, transformers, micromachines, clixs men, etc. so the map would usually get tossed onto the floor and zoecat loves to play with it, as it crinkles and she can hide under it, and other cat sorts of things. the map has been destroyed time and again, we just keep taping it back together. this last time, however, we noticed that she had pretty much eaten all of china. its just not on the map any more. since we still occationally need a blank background, you'll notice the white paper taped over where china used to be. now, i would never advocate that china simply be wiped off the map, i just find it funny that zoecat actually did it...










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