The food contamination business is pretty scary stuff. I was particularly concerned a few weeks ago to read news stories about the substitution of poisonous diethelene glycol for harmless glycerin as a sweetener in some drugs and toothpastes.

What chilled my heart was that glycerin is a commonly used sweetener in medications aimed at children. And 100 dead Panamanians is evidence enough that companies chasing bigger profits can sometimes be lethal.

Just in case anyone's interested, I found a reference to the poisoned medication story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html?ex=1186804800&en=16a3a1d09d1905d4&ei=5070

Cheers!

Once all our food was grown here in Australia, we never needed to question it, where it came from, what was in it or how it was grown. Now to be certain of buying the same clean food we need labelling laws with strict and severe penalties for misleading statements.
I look for Australian made products but how can you be certain that ALL the components of a food are grown directly in Australia or imported?
Why do we need to import broccoli from Africa or oranges from America? Why do we need to import any edible at all , I know the answer is trade balance but foodstuffs should be off the lists.
And GM crops should never be allowed in this country.

Thank you for telling it like it is, John Carey. I couldn't have put it better myself. How about the atrocities committed on it's own people? The persecution of Falun Gong has been going on for over 8 years. Yet the world just sits by and watch. Don't we have a heart nor moral conscience anymore? Have we, in the free world been indoctrinated with the Communist culture as well? Falun Gong is a traditional qigong practice that benefits both the physical health and mind. They adhere to the basic principles of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. Check it out on www.falundafa.org. No human beings should be subjected to that kind of atrocities. As David Matas, Canadian human rights lawyer said, it is a new form of evil on this planet. I am appealing for the world to please do something to help my ancestral people. Thank you.

We Australians are now being force-fed Chinese "fresh" produce. In my region it is impossible to purchase Australian garlic. The only garlic available now is grown in China. It is terrible stuff, dehydrated and rotten.

The scandal where a Chinaman was apprehended for making lard from sewage is over the top, particularly when Chinese restaurants in Australia use lard in their cooking. Where does that come from?

The "free trade" has simply put this nation back to the forties when farmers sprayed crops with organochlorines and other pesticides which have been banned. Now we're being forced to consume these toxins again.

One cereal maker in Australia has a cereal labelled "organic" with the Australian organic certification on the packet. Further down it advises: "made from local and imported products." Which part is "imported" when the product contains only "wheat and salt?"

Why are we forced to drop our standards to accommodate China whose unethical food practices are making consumers and their animals ill?

Dickie -" a Chinaman"? At worst this harks back to the days of racist labels; at best it is some sort of pigin English. In either case it was a pretty telling word to use.

Can you supply a source for the lard made out of sewerage thing? As lard is melted animal fat surely anything that isn't made from this source is therefore not lard but some other substance? Very surprised to hear that Chinese restaurants in Australia use lard in any case. In China such an option would be way too expensive and traditionally Chinese cooking has always involved oil - nowadays Canola.

And hey, you can hardly blame the country of origin if your supermarket sells products well past use-by date : you should perhaps get onto the supermarket chain and ask them to stop putting out food which is so old it is "dehydrated and rotten".

I can't believe this biased and ill-informed writer continues to re-cycle the same ole same ole despite a plethora of sources available in the public forum which give empirical proof to the errors of fact he perpetuates.

His deliberately misleading and factually inaccurate editorials read like the propagandist fear-mongering of the Fifties which was used to fuel the Cold War cliches of a "Red under the Bed" and "The only good Commie is a Dead Commie". They are almost parodies of that hysterically gung-ho era to the extent that one sometimes feel he is engaged in a huge leg-pulling exercise.