Got Milk?

That used to be simple enough question, but now with four babies dead and 13,000 sick because of tainted baby formula, milk, and other milk products it's become a serious question.


When we first moved to Shanghai we bought and used the local milk. It tasted fine, but shortly thereafter, however, after microwaving the milk in the microwave because our girls liked warm milk for their naps at the time, we noticed that there was seperation in the milk where an oily film could be seen in their sippy cups. Since the girls go through a significant amount of milk, and having enough skepticism at the time that perhaps something with the milk was just not right, we stopped buying the Chinese brands of milk.


We switched to imported milk... yes, imported milk. If you've ever spent any significant amount of time in Europe, you've seen the "super homogonized" milk that is sold in 1-liter bricks and can sit on your shelf for 4-6 months. That's what we bought, milk from Germany or New Zealand. This milk has a distinct flavor, a slight "burned" taste to it from the increased heat used in the the special homoginization process. These liters are also $3/liter here in Shanghai, so about $12/gallon. Again, with the amount of milk that we were going through, we looked for something different.


So anybody who has visited here since last October knows that we use powdered milk that we order from the States in our home. This has fit the need for us, it makes our cereal eatable and the girls like drinking it. It does have a slight sweet-vanilla taste to it, but we've gotten used to, although I don't pour a glass of milk to eat oreos here. At any rate, we like it, it's healthy, and it's cheap.


Then the story hit this past week that Chinese baby formula was tainted, and two days ago it was announced that the scope has expanded to milk and milk products. Here's what has been happening:


"The raw milk had been watered down and the chemical added to fool quality checks, the newspaper said.

Melamine is commonly used in coatings and laminates, wood adhesives, fabric coatings, ceiling tiles and flame retardants."

This Melamine boosts the protein content of the liquid so that it passes the inspections testing the quality of the milk.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/18/china.tainted.milk/index.html

Btw, this is the same chemical that was put into dog food last year that killed and made dogs sick in America.


Can you believe this? Two people thus far have been arrested, but there is no way that just two people were able to corrupt the entire dairy system here in China. It will be interesting to see how many people are convicted because of involvement with this, and those who are convicted, in light of the deaths that have happened and could have happened, I hope that they are tried for murder and attempted murder. This isn't a mistake, this was a conscious decision to put people's health and lives at risk.

So is this what the U.S. was like back in the day before the "muckrakers" exposed the bad industry practices?