News, Daunting and Trivial

We see it so often, the peculiar and often insane juxtaposition of news items on a page of the newspaper, one urgently upsetting, the other just plain trivial in nature. Page A2 of today's paper, a national newspaper no less, three columns and a number of large photographs of beautiful people in a glitzy setting, raving on about the Emmys. Which inane television program and its untalented but attractive stars will be chosen for U.S. television's highest awards.

I think to myself: people care? They read this stuff? They take all this nonsense seriously? It matters to them?

Directly next to that breathless article, a single column, page-long, devoted to China's latest food atrocity: Government negligence and corporate greed leading to serious contamination of yet another food source. Not just any food source, but milk and milk products, the primary consumers of which are mostly children. And, it appears, authorities in the country had knowledge of the tampering of milk products before this outbreak resulting in countless children becoming seriously ill.

The World Health Organization has taken the country to task for its laggardly response to this new crisis in confidence. Sometimes governing bodies are more complacent than they should be. When it comes to food safety and production in China there have been more than enough scandals to ensure that those in whose care the safety of the indigenous food supply, let alone that shipped regularly to global destinations, should be reliable and safe.

Food safety is so fundamental to the needs of any society, one might imagine, obviously wrongly here, that it takes precedence over so many other issues of social regulation. But then, even a country like Canada which prides itself on its record of food safety for the consuming public comes up against the hard fact that safe procedures are sometimes not sufficiently hygienic to ensure complete safety from deadly bacterium.

But in Canada's case, with the recent recall of cold cut meats, the Listeria outbreak was occasioned by food safety laxity in a stringent environment which demands better. In the tainted milk scandal unfolding in China today - the dreadful incidence of thousands of children falling ill as a result of ingesting milk products to which melamine, a type of plastic agent, has been added - it was the result of deliberate and industry-wide corruption.

Melamine was deliberately added to dried milk powder, to ice creams, to yogurts and liquid milk because it mimics the presence of protein in chemical tests. Something that industry producers and even farmers resorted to in an effort to conceal their watering-down of the original milk product to obtain a higher profit margin. In the process endangering the lives of consumers, and most bitterly, the lives of babies.

The situation has sent shock waves outside China as well, since a number of companies, including the Swiss conglomerate Nestle, manufactures their products in China, using Chinese-derived milk products, of course, for sale and distribution in the Far East. Although they steadfastly maintain that they exercise the same level of product maintenance and quality control in China as they do elsewhere, it's clear their guard was down.

Melamine added to milk and milk products has the potential to cause urinary conditions, including kidney stones. And it was discovered to be present in baby formula. There is a mass recall underway, but there is also a mass stampede of frantic parents taking their young children to hospitals. The hospitals identifying cases of mild impaction, readily remedied, and other, far more serious instances of infants' kidneys being destroyed.

Along with a number of deaths. All avoidable, with a measure of due diligence to food safety. Yet, we're informed that this situation is not unique, not new, but that the consumer and safety irregularities had been in place for years. Which translates to the country's consumer protection agencies either being ignorant of the problem, or incapable of stemming it.

A New Zealand dairy with a joint venture with China's worst dairy offender has been aware, it would appear, for a considerable length of time that a catastrophe in food safety was brewing. Their overtures to the government, and requests for a recall had been ignored. China is such a huge country, with an immense population and a gigantic array of industries. Corruption is known to be rife.

There have long been accusations levelled against the government that it is not upholding its most vital duty to the population, in ensuring safety of the food supply available to its people. The government, although purporting to have the best interests of its people at heart, seems comfortable ignoring such problems until they become an international horror story.

China, so long insulated against the world outside its borders, has latterly become consumed with the desire to throw its doors open to the world, to proudly demonstrate how much has been accomplished in bringing the country prosperity, how it has been able to challenge the apprehension of the outside world of China as a political backwater, a socially challenged and materially deprived country.

A huge financial investment, along with a political one, was made in the production of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. A proud, efficient, capable and wealthy country showed off its consummate ability to entertain the world at large and to burnish its reputation as a surging world power.

This is China's statement to the world. It is functionally incapable of focusing on the vital matters of providing safe and reliable food to its population, through the neglect of a bored, corruption-prone bureaucracy. Yet it can muster its huge talents and careful designs to stagger the world with its precise and practised artifice.

Much like the juxtaposition of news items; the dread with the drear.