A Chinese blogger's entry on her country's melamine tainted baby milk powder scandal was reprinted in the Washington Post this morning, and should be read by everyone with a stake in reforming the industrial food system.
It is a soul searching piece that reaches behind the immediate, shocking reality of how industrialization and globalization of the food supply can lead to huge, widespread problems that the older, more regionalized system contained inherently -- due to scale, rather than any basic superiority or goodness.
Think back a year or so. Then it was American pet deaths ...now it is Chinese infants. What to do?
What Cui recounts is an anecdote, related by a country cousin, about a deeper corruption, what she sees as a moral failing of her countrymen that is a sort of perverse playout of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) principle -- though NIMBY is by its nature, rather, a hypocritical anti-principle.
It involved tainted rice (I'll let you read the post yourself, here) which farmers in the cousin's region knew was poisoned, but sent off to market anyway, knowing it would end up far away and untraceable. This ability, this "freedom" to dump waste at a distance (NIMBY) is something that is only possible when the scale of production (of anything, but here, in this case, and especially, food) puts the scope of the production process "over the horizon," out of sight, out of mind in the same way that toxic trash from the American lifestyle is "exported" to the developing world.
Organic and Fair Trade certification systems (as well as previous government standards) were developed in response to this problem; the question of whether or not they are up to the task depends, I guess, on your assessment of essential human nature. No system can cure human moral weakness, and it is on the socialization, the institutionalization of moral weakness that Cui writes so movingly.
