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[balmofgilead]

As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
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I don't understand a world that can produce people who are so morally bankrupt.  This is on par with the counterfeit infant formula incidents.

Comments

[ginamariewade.livejournal.com]

Well, this is a prime example of why business needs to be regulated.
If it's not, amoral corporations go for the highest profit, regardless of the consequences.

Sinclair Lewis graphically illustrated this a hundred years ago with "The Jungle."

[bride.livejournal.com]

I wish I could explain the desparation and suffering to you that I have only heard about from family and read on the situation in China from the mid-20th century onwards. Through being forcibly addicted to opium by the Western nations in the latter days of the Qing Dynasty, through war, nation-wide famine, poverty, gross mismanagement of the elite ruling party, unbelievable civil violence during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese have been through so so much.

Things had only begun to take a turn for the better in the 1980s and there is some form of normalcy now. But the nation and people are traumatised and this will have effects for decades to come. There are still regions that are still pretty desparately poor. "Thinking of others" and "compassion towards others" is something that's going to take generations to build.

The world changes much faster nowadays. Amazing opportunities are available to people in the blink of an eye. And those opportunities don't discriminate. Opportunities can find people whether they are ready or not. Psychologically ready or not. Someone who hasn't completely let go of that "desparateness" deep down inside them can still be an entrepreneur. And it very easily turns into greed.

I'm not excusing it. I'm just trying to explain (maybe just to myself) how the world can produce people who are so morally bankrupt.

[balmofgilead.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the elaboration. What I wrote was meant as a plaintive "the world seems so broken sometimes" rather than an accusatory statement.