May 30, 2007
The Chinese Touch
I found a faux Nigerian email in my mailbox this morning -- from China. Never let a fine idea go unduplicated.
Jeg har ny e-postadresse!Nå kan du sende meg e-post på: vonlarry05@yahoo.no
Von Larry,Sales & Marketing Department,
China Metallurgical Steel $ Iron Industry
[Feel free to skim, since you've probably read one like this seventy five times].
- Good Day Friend,It is my pleasure to write to you in respect of our organisation. I got your contact from my private search. We are experts in the sales of Metal Raw Materials.We export into the Canada/America/british and some parts Europe. We are in search of a reliable offshore representatives who can help us establish a medium of getting our funds from our costumers in the canada/America/Europe/british as well as making payments through these offshore representatives to us.Please, if interested in transacting business in view of helping us,so our clients could make payment to you being our representative, we will be very glad. Compensations will be given and other benefits.Contact us for more information.If this proposal is acceptable to you.Please get back to me, so that I can work out a remuneration for your services as our offshore representative in Canada/America/Europe/british.Thanks,as I anticipate your earliest response in the above regard.
A dear and close personal relative once said that there's nothing like growing up under a communist regime to inspire the entrepreneurial spirit.
Another dear relative writes from the bosom of China:
Honestly, Chinese industry seems culturally equivalent to American business circa 1890, when bakers would spike bread with alum, and color candy with lead salts. Besides having no real equivalent of an FDA (it exists, it's just not enforcing anything), there's such a rush for profits that it seems to draw out examples of the most despicable human behavior.On the other hand, there is also a pervasive "what could it hurt/close enough is good enough" attitude here, probably a direct result of zero health education in the provinces, the total destruction of the medical community during the Cultural Revolution, and rule by fiat for the last fifty years.
And, let's face it, accurate information is not always available under a repressive government (as we are beginning to experience here in the USofA). For example, many Chinese do not understand the difference between fog and smog.
As the universe would have it, while reading Deconsumption this morning for other purposes, I was astonished to learn that there is lead in Chinese china., and, sure enough, all my new mugs are made in China. It's ubiquitious. Check out Walmart bibs and childrens' jewelry. We should all rush out to the hardware store and get a lead testing kit.
And finally a little news that will put some teeth in the Twinkie Defense, Steve Ettenger has deconstructed one for the LA Times:
When I began researching the ingredients for Twinkies, I naively thought that their raw materials were extracted from nuts, beans, fruit, seeds or leaves, and that they came from the United States. I was looking to link places with foods — along the lines of California wine or Maine lobster, but for thiamine mononitrate. It turned out that I was way off..Although eight of the ingredients in the beloved little snack cake come from domestic corn and three from soybeans, there are others — including thiamine mononitrate — that come from petroleum. Chinese petroleum. Chinese refineries and Chinese factories. And there are other unexpected ingredients that are much harder to trace. So much for the great "All-American" snack food.
We probably shouldn't have been eating Twinkies anyway.
Photo note: An acre of shiny metal cookware, shot on location at the Bai market in Dali, China
Posted by Dakota at May 30, 2007 06:26 AM