Milk, Panics Living next door to a leviathan is disturbing in some ways - there is always a general 'background noise' of things happening in China, but every couple of months or so something happens that directly impacts our life in Hong Kong. So for the last couple of weeks it's been the Melamine in Milk Scandal. This is a truly horrible scandal - farmers and producers adulterating their milk with melamine, that milk being turned into infant formula, and 50,000 children in China developing kidney stones because of it. And that's just the infant formula - the milk has been used in a huge variety of products - coffee, cakes, biscuits, sweets and more. It seems like every time I go to the supermarket here now I see people gingerly examining cartons of milk, trying to work out where it was produced. You can almost see them thinking "Will this milk kill me?" as they stare at the label.

We've always had the feeling that we don't really know what we're consuming here in Hong Kong - it seems like there's simply too much for the local authorities to test, and the events of the past weeks (where supermarkets are announcing product recalls before the government does) seem to confirm that feeling.

What's also interesting is the secrecy - the Chinese government knew about the tainted milk months ago, but didn't want to spoil the Olympics!

Meanwhile, a blast from the past. Riding the bus the other night I found an old Team Clean poster from 2003, which was part of the HK government's efforts to clean up the city in the wake of the SARS crisis - a crisis incidentally that was made worse by the Chinese government's deliberate suppression of news about the disease.

Nothing changes.



Discarded fishballs are particularly worrisome...

  ¶ 3:28 PM