Say what you want about the Environmental Protection Agency or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, think what you want about government regulation, I'll bet we'll never have 6,000 diseased pig carcasses floating down the Delaware River. If we do, time to move to Canada, en mass.
For those of you who cannot access videos, CNN and Reuters and a bunch of Chinese bloggers reported that more than 6,000 diseased pig carcasses were dumped in the Huangpu River, which supplies the city of Shanghai, China with its drinking water, in the last few days.
What's even worse, Chinese officials insist that the dead pigs, which were removed, posed no health risk to residents. What would have been worse, and apparently happens all the time, is that upstream farmers, who have lost 70,000 pigs since the beginning of the year, have been selling them to unscrupulous middlemen who put them into the food supply. This is cheaper than burning or burying the carcasses as the law requires and according to news accounts, it's a law that is not much enforced.
Bloggers on Weibo, China's version of Facebook, dared Chinese officials to drink the water first. "big leaders, please do go ahead and have the first drink," one quipped.
Clean Air Act anyone? Clean Water Act? Food inspection?
I guess I should stop buying Chinese bottled water.
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