17 ms·

Nervous Parents In One Country Clear Supermarket Shelves In Another

80 points by septerr 13y ago

BSousa 13y ago
There was a news story last week here in Portugal saying basically the same. Some supermarkets ran out of formula since there was a big Chinese committee here and bought them all to take/ship home. I also know a lot of folks that work in Angola, and whenever they come here, they buy some products (baby formula included) like they own a boarding school or something. 3-4 car trunks full of stuff to send over.
nwh 13y ago
Buying Chinese made products has always got me a little on edge, mainly just due to their lack of regulation. I was going to buy a reasonably well known miniature camera recently, but was completely put off when I read a note by some other purchasers who had somehow realised that the case of the camera contained insane amounts of lead. I wasn't particularly impressed by the recommendation that they're fine to use, just don't let your children touch it and wash your hands afterwards. Things like this seem to pop up with alarming frequency.
- mhurron 13y ago
  Exactly what danger did you believe there would be in touching something containing lead? Leaded gas was done away with because you could breath in the fumes, because the gas was, you know, incinerated and released the lead in fumes. Leaded paint was removed from homes, not because touching the paint was bad, not because having it was bad but because children were eating the paint chips. Lead piping was again a problem because of drinking water with lead now in it. So unless you were planning on inhaling or eating the camera, what danger did you think there was from it.
  - pyre 13y ago
    Keeping it away from children was probably still a good idea. Little children have a penchant for putting things in their mouths.
  - nwh 13y ago
    Contact with lead leaves it on your skin, and people tend to pick up food with their fingers. It was always mentioned to me at school to wash my hands after handeling solder (which is tin + lead), and I assumed that the same would apply here. Without doing any more research into the stuff, I would much rather just spend a few more dollars and get one that is not going to poison me.
  - city41 13y ago
    A recent article in Mother Jones[0] suggested that lead is much more dangerous than we ever realized, and even blamed it on the rise in crime in the US. [0]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
shanev 13y ago
Babies shouldn't be eating crap that comes in a package anyway. They should be drinking breast milk, and eventually graduate to eggs (not the plastic kind) and normal human food.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  So we should just let those whoes mothers died or are unable to produce enough milk starve to death?
  - adekok 13y ago
    Please avoid reddit-style extremism. OP said: "They should .." Emphasis on the "SHOULD". He didn't say "nothing but breast milk, and I don't give a damn if the babies die" Creating a straw man for your someone signifies only one thing. Your bias, extremism, and inability to treat your "opponent" as human.
- binarycrusader 13y ago
  Many children can't be breast fed or have mothers who are unable to. Don't generalize.
  - wooster 13y ago
    Suboptimum breastfeeding still accounts for an estimated 1.4 million deaths in children under five annually http://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index_breastfeeding.html http://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index_breastfeeding.html
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      Where most of these are just a subtype of malnutrition, if I don't miss my guess. If they only counted babies who die because they are fed with the adequate amount of formula instead of breastfeeding, that number would probably be vanishingly small. Unfortunately, the cited paper is not freely available, so I cannot check.
hrktb 13y ago
There was a very mediatised incident in Japan a few years ago [1], with toxic substance getting into frozen food packages. As public opinion was focused on the issue, a lot reporting got done on the general practicies of the chinese factories in the food industry, and some of them were having a 'low cost' line with simpler quality checks for domestic foods, and a 'high profile' line with increased checks and attention to sanity for goods to be exported. A lot of it was sensationnalized I supposed, but there still seemed to be a radically different thinking about food quality on the manufactoring side. [1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/03/05/business/jt-to-trim-frozen-food-production-in-china/#.UXtyeMsaySM http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/03/05/business/jt-to-t...
TeMPOraL 13y ago
There's a common belief in Poland that the very same goods (down to package/barcode) sold in countries west of it (Germany in particular) are much better in quality than the ones sold domestically. It's especially common when discussing cleaning chemicals - people believe that local products are diluted, or sth. I don't know whether this is a case of "grass is greener on the other side" or it is based on reality. (And there's one exception to this I've heard of - some people believe here that Lipton tea brought from US tastes much, much worse than one bought locally ;)).
- Swizec 13y ago
  That's because Lipton is terrible. Seriously the lowest quality and worst tasting tea I have ever tasted anywhere.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    Be that as it may, I believe the comparison TeMPOral is talking about is Lipton in both cases.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      I'm sure that Lipton would sell the lower quality tea in Poland as well, were it economical to do so.
  - SoftwareMaven 13y ago
    There is one place in the US that has a tea culture, and it's an iced tea culture. Lipton would most likely sell tea that meets that demand and let's the rest of the tea drinkers cope than, even if it does make a cup of something not entirely unlike tea for people who were raised on the stuff.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      Its a historical artifact. The US is the one country iced tea is consumed more than hot tea. This dates back to the revolution and the resentment of tea taxes that lead to coffee being the "patriot's drink". Iced tea became popular in the 1900's.
ck2 13y ago
Except there is no regulation in the USA. You think there is regulation but congress has defunded all inspection so it barely happens. That fertilizer plant that exploded was last inspected in the EIGHTIES. It's just that lawsuits are easier in the USA so that might cause food manufacturers to behave better. Plus I am starting to see food and supplements now made/grown in China on the shelves in the USA. So how much regulation you think each batch gets? I'd guess something close to zero. But when congress needs to fly home, well then they will fund things like air-traffic controllers so they do not have to wait on the tarmac like everyone else.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  In Germany the milk powder already gets rationed by super market chains. On the face of it, Germans will complain a lot louder and harder about their food security than Chinese people do, but actually we have very tough regulation that works better than pretty much everywhere else in the world, let alone China...
- tokenadult 13y ago
  Except there is no regulation in the USA. The submitted article is about food products consumed by infants (and is about the U.K. and China, mostly). Your statement "there is no regulation in the USA" is categorically false in regard to food products to be consumed by infants. http://www.fda.gov/food/foodsafety/product-specificinformation/infantformula/default.htm http://www.fda.gov/food/foodsafety/product-specificinformati...
  - jchrisa 13y ago
    Don't eat packaged food. Definitely don't feed it to babies. They are not a pet fish.
    - begurken 13y ago
      Utterly useless and completely ignorant advice for a mother with an infant who is unable to breast feed. Small babies can't eat 'foods' as we know them; they can only drink. It's a shame to see people who are so out of touch with nature and society that they don't even know how human reproduction works. My wife breast-fed all of our children until over 18 months, but I know several mothers who are simply unable to breast feed. It's such a common problem that there is a serious job title called 'lactation consultant'. In the good old days, if a mother was unable to feed, the infant either fed from another woman, or died; we're talking about 20% infant mortality from malnutrition. That is the problem that formula was invented to solve. And no, you can't make your own from available foods; if you do that, your baby will most likely die.
dlib 13y ago
In the Netherlands, Chinese investors are building a factory to produce baby formula that will export the baby formula back to China. There are in fact limits to how much baby formula you can buy in Dutch supermarkets due to the Chinese demand. I'm always amazed at how money flows, to where profits can be made.
vsh426 13y ago
OTOH Hersheys chocolate syrup made in India (by Godrej) tastes better than the imported US version. Don't know why, iirc the main difference in ingredients was invert sugar in the Indian version and hfcs in the US version, or maybe it's the quality of the other ingredients.
- pyre 13y ago
  One Christmas we had some Hershey's Kisses from both the US and Canada. Both tasted different. It's been a while, so I don't remember which I preferred or what the taste difference was (i.e. if one was sweeter than the other).
  - mistercow 13y ago
    Neither of these are surprising. Hershey's makes very low quality products, so I would expect them to use whatever ingredients are cheapest locally.
GliterZhang 13y ago
I bought 20+ cans Aptamil online from an international student at a nearly double higher price than it is in Germany supermarket last year,although my wife gave sufficient breast milk to my son.Yes I am a nervous parent too.There were so many babies poisoned by milk powder in China.No one really trust manufacturers and Gov of China,even those officials themselves. You know,there is only one market on this little planet.Those manufacturers produce best products survive and get stronger. They can buy Gov and the Gov can deceive or even threaten people,but what if everyone buy nothing from them?
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  On the other hand, probably the one safest food in China right now is probably milk powder. People have been jailed and executed over it, and officials at all levels have no interest in loosing face again.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    No. The milk industry is still a mess, only some scapegoats got executed. Officials don't care about face. But at least we've moved on from bad milk to bad bottled water.
- lostlogin 13y ago
  The situation where shelves are cleared and shipped to China happens here in New Zealand. What's interesting about it is that the scandal of contaminated milk started with a subsidiary of Fonterta, called Sanlu. Fonterra blew the whistle on their crappy practices. So people get product from New Zealand, to avoid buying from part of the same company. Our favourite source. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonterra http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonterra
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
Of course it is illegal to poison babies in China. It was before 2008 as well. That didn't stop greedy idiots from trying to enrich themselves by poisoning people. It didn't stop at baby formula either. It was also discovered to be common that milk was adulterated with melamine.
milktrust 13y ago
If anyone here is qualified to facilitate testing milk powder, please get in touch and I'll send samples from China. email milktrust@hushmail.com I'm not going to publicly list my HN id or email. I would like to participate in getting useful information to the public. Not just milk. If you have other food products you can help test, I'll see what I can do to get samples.
tenpoundhammer 13y ago
This is exactly why we should be happy when the quality of life in other countries improves, it gives those people an opportunity a chance to buy higher quality goods and is a net benefit to importers and exporters. So I don't want to hear "They took our jerrrrbbbs",because they will also start providing new ones.
orr721 13y ago
But the same food really IS different across borders. There was a test of Coca-Cola published, within 8 close countries of European Union, each had different composition (esp. type and amount of sugar): http://i.sme.sk/cdata/5/58/5843725/800-med.jpg http://i.sme.sk/cdata/5/58/5843725/800-med.jpg I remember a similar test done with Milka chocolate, the content was even different on the packaging label, only the artwork on the front was the same.

80 points by septerr 13y ago

There was a news story last week here in Portugal saying basically the same. Some supermarkets ran out of formula since there was a big Chinese committee here and bought them all to take/ship home. I also know a lot of folks that work in Angola, and whenever they come here, they buy some products (baby formula included) like they own a boarding school or something. 3-4 car trunks full of stuff to send over.

nwh 13y ago

Buying Chinese made products has always got me a little on edge, mainly just due to their lack of regulation. I was going to buy a reasonably well known miniature camera recently, but was completely put off when I read a note by some other purchasers who had somehow realised that the case of the camera contained insane amounts of lead. I wasn't particularly impressed by the recommendation that they're fine to use, just don't let your children touch it and wash your hands afterwards. Things like this seem to pop up with alarming frequency.

mhurron 13y ago
Exactly what danger did you believe there would be in touching something containing lead? Leaded gas was done away with because you could breath in the fumes, because the gas was, you know, incinerated and released the lead in fumes. Leaded paint was removed from homes, not because touching the paint was bad, not because having it was bad but because children were eating the paint chips. Lead piping was again a problem because of drinking water with lead now in it. So unless you were planning on inhaling or eating the camera, what danger did you think there was from it.
- pyre 13y ago
  Keeping it away from children was probably still a good idea. Little children have a penchant for putting things in their mouths.
- nwh 13y ago
  Contact with lead leaves it on your skin, and people tend to pick up food with their fingers. It was always mentioned to me at school to wash my hands after handeling solder (which is tin + lead), and I assumed that the same would apply here. Without doing any more research into the stuff, I would much rather just spend a few more dollars and get one that is not going to poison me.
- city41 13y ago
  A recent article in Mother Jones[0] suggested that lead is much more dangerous than we ever realized, and even blamed it on the rise in crime in the US. [0]http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

shanev 13y ago

Babies shouldn't be eating crap that comes in a package anyway. They should be drinking breast milk, and eventually graduate to eggs (not the plastic kind) and normal human food.

tomjen3 13y ago
So we should just let those whoes mothers died or are unable to produce enough milk starve to death?
- adekok 13y ago
  Please avoid reddit-style extremism. OP said: "They should .." Emphasis on the "SHOULD". He didn't say "nothing but breast milk, and I don't give a damn if the babies die" Creating a straw man for your someone signifies only one thing. Your bias, extremism, and inability to treat your "opponent" as human.
binarycrusader 13y ago
Many children can't be breast fed or have mothers who are unable to. Don't generalize.
- wooster 13y ago
  Suboptimum breastfeeding still accounts for an estimated 1.4 million deaths in children under five annually http://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index_breastfeeding.html http://www.unicef.org/nutrition/index_breastfeeding.html
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Where most of these are just a subtype of malnutrition, if I don't miss my guess. If they only counted babies who die because they are fed with the adequate amount of formula instead of breastfeeding, that number would probably be vanishingly small. Unfortunately, the cited paper is not freely available, so I cannot check.

hrktb 13y ago

There was a very mediatised incident in Japan a few years ago [1], with toxic substance getting into frozen food packages. As public opinion was focused on the issue, a lot reporting got done on the general practicies of the chinese factories in the food industry, and some of them were having a 'low cost' line with simpler quality checks for domestic foods, and a 'high profile' line with increased checks and attention to sanity for goods to be exported. A lot of it was sensationnalized I supposed, but there still seemed to be a radically different thinking about food quality on the manufactoring side. [1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/03/05/business/jt-to-trim-frozen-food-production-in-china/#.UXtyeMsaySM http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2008/03/05/business/jt-to-t...

TeMPOraL 13y ago

There's a common belief in Poland that the very same goods (down to package/barcode) sold in countries west of it (Germany in particular) are much better in quality than the ones sold domestically. It's especially common when discussing cleaning chemicals - people believe that local products are diluted, or sth. I don't know whether this is a case of "grass is greener on the other side" or it is based on reality. (And there's one exception to this I've heard of - some people believe here that Lipton tea brought from US tastes much, much worse than one bought locally ;)).

Swizec 13y ago
That's because Lipton is terrible. Seriously the lowest quality and worst tasting tea I have ever tasted anywhere.
- mistercow 13y ago
  Be that as it may, I believe the comparison TeMPOral is talking about is Lipton in both cases.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    I'm sure that Lipton would sell the lower quality tea in Poland as well, were it economical to do so.
- SoftwareMaven 13y ago
  There is one place in the US that has a tea culture, and it's an iced tea culture. Lipton would most likely sell tea that meets that demand and let's the rest of the tea drinkers cope than, even if it does make a cup of something not entirely unlike tea for people who were raised on the stuff.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    Its a historical artifact. The US is the one country iced tea is consumed more than hot tea. This dates back to the revolution and the resentment of tea taxes that lead to coffee being the "patriot's drink". Iced tea became popular in the 1900's.

ck2 13y ago

Except there is no regulation in the USA. You think there is regulation but congress has defunded all inspection so it barely happens. That fertilizer plant that exploded was last inspected in the EIGHTIES. It's just that lawsuits are easier in the USA so that might cause food manufacturers to behave better. Plus I am starting to see food and supplements now made/grown in China on the shelves in the USA. So how much regulation you think each batch gets? I'd guess something close to zero. But when congress needs to fly home, well then they will fund things like air-traffic controllers so they do not have to wait on the tarmac like everyone else.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
In Germany the milk powder already gets rationed by super market chains. On the face of it, Germans will complain a lot louder and harder about their food security than Chinese people do, but actually we have very tough regulation that works better than pretty much everywhere else in the world, let alone China...
tokenadult 13y ago
Except there is no regulation in the USA. The submitted article is about food products consumed by infants (and is about the U.K. and China, mostly). Your statement "there is no regulation in the USA" is categorically false in regard to food products to be consumed by infants. http://www.fda.gov/food/foodsafety/product-specificinformation/infantformula/default.htm http://www.fda.gov/food/foodsafety/product-specificinformati...
- jchrisa 13y ago
  Don't eat packaged food. Definitely don't feed it to babies. They are not a pet fish.
  - begurken 13y ago
    Utterly useless and completely ignorant advice for a mother with an infant who is unable to breast feed. Small babies can't eat 'foods' as we know them; they can only drink. It's a shame to see people who are so out of touch with nature and society that they don't even know how human reproduction works. My wife breast-fed all of our children until over 18 months, but I know several mothers who are simply unable to breast feed. It's such a common problem that there is a serious job title called 'lactation consultant'. In the good old days, if a mother was unable to feed, the infant either fed from another woman, or died; we're talking about 20% infant mortality from malnutrition. That is the problem that formula was invented to solve. And no, you can't make your own from available foods; if you do that, your baby will most likely die.

dlib 13y ago

In the Netherlands, Chinese investors are building a factory to produce baby formula that will export the baby formula back to China. There are in fact limits to how much baby formula you can buy in Dutch supermarkets due to the Chinese demand. I'm always amazed at how money flows, to where profits can be made.

vsh426 13y ago

OTOH Hersheys chocolate syrup made in India (by Godrej) tastes better than the imported US version. Don't know why, iirc the main difference in ingredients was invert sugar in the Indian version and hfcs in the US version, or maybe it's the quality of the other ingredients.

pyre 13y ago
One Christmas we had some Hershey's Kisses from both the US and Canada. Both tasted different. It's been a while, so I don't remember which I preferred or what the taste difference was (i.e. if one was sweeter than the other).
- mistercow 13y ago
  Neither of these are surprising. Hershey's makes very low quality products, so I would expect them to use whatever ingredients are cheapest locally.

GliterZhang 13y ago

I bought 20+ cans Aptamil online from an international student at a nearly double higher price than it is in Germany supermarket last year,although my wife gave sufficient breast milk to my son.Yes I am a nervous parent too.There were so many babies poisoned by milk powder in China.No one really trust manufacturers and Gov of China,even those officials themselves. You know,there is only one market on this little planet.Those manufacturers produce best products survive and get stronger. They can buy Gov and the Gov can deceive or even threaten people,but what if everyone buy nothing from them?

bayesianhorse 13y ago
On the other hand, probably the one safest food in China right now is probably milk powder. People have been jailed and executed over it, and officials at all levels have no interest in loosing face again.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  No. The milk industry is still a mess, only some scapegoats got executed. Officials don't care about face. But at least we've moved on from bad milk to bad bottled water.
lostlogin 13y ago
The situation where shelves are cleared and shipped to China happens here in New Zealand. What's interesting about it is that the scandal of contaminated milk started with a subsidiary of Fonterta, called Sanlu. Fonterra blew the whistle on their crappy practices. So people get product from New Zealand, to avoid buying from part of the same company. Our favourite source. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonterra http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonterra

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

Of course it is illegal to poison babies in China. It was before 2008 as well. That didn't stop greedy idiots from trying to enrich themselves by poisoning people. It didn't stop at baby formula either. It was also discovered to be common that milk was adulterated with melamine.

milktrust 13y ago

If anyone here is qualified to facilitate testing milk powder, please get in touch and I'll send samples from China. email milktrust@hushmail.com I'm not going to publicly list my HN id or email. I would like to participate in getting useful information to the public. Not just milk. If you have other food products you can help test, I'll see what I can do to get samples.

tenpoundhammer 13y ago

This is exactly why we should be happy when the quality of life in other countries improves, it gives those people an opportunity a chance to buy higher quality goods and is a net benefit to importers and exporters. So I don't want to hear "They took our jerrrrbbbs",because they will also start providing new ones.

orr721 13y ago

But the same food really IS different across borders. There was a test of Coca-Cola published, within 8 close countries of European Union, each had different composition (esp. type and amount of sugar): http://i.sme.sk/cdata/5/58/5843725/800-med.jpg http://i.sme.sk/cdata/5/58/5843725/800-med.jpg I remember a similar test done with Milka chocolate, the content was even different on the packaging label, only the artwork on the front was the same.