Sadly, due to her high profile, there is a boatload of bad information propagated and entrenched across the net. And so when new parents start researching vaccinations for their budding bundle of baby, it’s impossible not to run up against it.

McCarthy’s vaccination-causes-autism bullshit is largely based on Andrew Wakefield‘s 1998 research paper in The Lancet medical journal that linked the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella vaccine) to autism. McCarthy and Wakefield, using their status and professional clout, have caused vaccination rates on both sides of the Atlantic to drop significantly. Unsurprisingly, children getting sick and dying of diseases that had virtually been eliminated in developed countries is on the rise.

Back in May, not long after Casey was born, Wakefield was removed from the medical register in the UK by the General Medical Council because “he acted in a way that was dishonest, misleading and irresponsible while carrying out research into a possible link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, bowel disease and autism. He had ‘abused his position of trust’ and ‘brought the medical profession into disrepute’ in studies he carried out on children.”

Even unable to practice medicine in the UK, I’m sure he still had (has?) supporters that believe he’s been wrongfully removed. Thankfully, the final nail in this fiasco has come by way of the Telegraph today:

The British Medical Journal has reviewed the six million word transcript of the General Medical Council hearings, comparing them with the findings of investigative journalist Brian Deer and the research paper in the Lancet.

Huge discrepancies have been found between what was in the children’s medical notes and what was published about them in the Lancet.

As a result, Dr Fiona Godlee, Editor of the BMJ, has accused Dr Wakefield of deliberate fraud and said the scare was a hoax on the scale of the Pildown man, which was for 40 years believed to have been the missing evolutionary link between ape and man.

She said: “The MMR scare was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud.” She added that such “clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare.”

In case this isn’t clear: vaccinating your child does NOT cause autism. It was a total and complete fraud!

I can totally understand why parents bought into the whole thing. Most of us grew up never knowing these diseases first-hand, thanks almost completely to the vaccines that were called into question. But many of us have met someone suffering from some degree of Austism, and that scares the shit out of us. It’s the devil we know and as new parents, the one that’s easier to guard against — just do nothing.

Coupling that with the truckload of new responsibilities, and the endless number of opinions everyone and their mother has on child-rearing, it’s easy to see vaccination as just a “choice”. But it’s really not. It’s a civil responsibility.

Of course, every parent should have the right to decide what is best for their child, and I don’t at all mean to suggest that the liberty of doing so should be taken away from them. However, when you refuse vaccinations, but then take part in the rest of society (schools, malls, public pools, etc.) you are leeching off the benefits of herd immunization that the rest of us have helped with. If enough people stop vaccinating, that herd immunization drops below its threshold and we all suffer.

And Jenny, my heart goes out to her and her kid. It’s tough, and I’ve no doubt that finding pet projects to feel like she’s still in control of something allows her to get out of bed in the morning. But shame on her for using her fame to disseminate bad advice, shame on Oprah and Larry King for assisting her, and shame on the parents who blindly listened to a Playboy Playthingmate over peer reviewed and well-tested science.

For all the grief that myself and my fellow compatriots give the country, it really is top shelf as countries go. Sure, it’s a bit vanilla when it comes to foreign affairs and global influence; a bit archaic when it comes to political makeup; and, well, a bit cold.

But it’s clean, big, relatively safe, under-populated and has enough of a balance between social conscience and capitalistic motivation for my liking.

The question that shadows me every day I live abroad, and is usually not far from the lips of my family, is “when will I move home”. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there was spark of desire to do so, but all I can say for now is, “not yet.”

Mags and I have some plans that I will discuss in a separate post, and the majority of them will keep us in China for the near future. But not forever. One day I am sure I will leave the Middle Kingdom and return to the True North Strong and Free, turning the tables on my laowainess and putting my wife in the confused-foreigner chair (something I sadistically revel the thought of) – just “not yet”.

Happy Canada Day everyone.

Canada, Please! – Julia Bentley & Andrew Gunadie

Sorry if you’re in China without VPN and thus can’t see the embedded YouTube video above.

Of all the numerous things about living away from Canada I miss, trust is more poignant than them all. It is–more than family, friends, air quality or money–the thing that is most likely to cause me to eventually leave China.

When Addie contracted aflatoxin poisoning, it really forced front and centre a sense that I had only peripherally been exposed to through news articles and conversations with Chinese–trust is a commodity China is dangerously short on.

When you put this into the larger context of how much we rely on trust in our day to day lives, the gravity of its absence is frightening. Trust that the water coming out of your tap is clean, that the milk we drink is safe, that the meats we buy are fresh, that the cell phones we use wont explode, that the electrical wiring in our apartments wont electrocute us in the shower.

And further, extending this from the faceless products and constructions of daily life, to the “professionals” we rely on. Trusting the shopkeepers, the police, the vets, the journalists, the doctors — and when they all fail, the judges and the law.

Trust is required for all these things. Trust, faith really, is needed to be able to move about your day-to-day routine. Needed so that you aren’t paralyzed by the thought of what a lack of trust in any of those things might entail.

But my trust is gone. It was whittled thinner and thinner over my time here and then broke completely when a high-end imported dog food we trusted was left to spoil in a Guangdong warehouse.

The painful part is I understand it. I understand why it seems almost everyone in China is only looking out for themselves. Not necessarily pulling the trigger on things that will hurt others, but certainly complicit in evil actions so long as it doesn’t directly affect them or theirs. If no one is looking out for them, why should they look out for anyone else?

Call it history, culture, learned behavior. Tell me it’s not all-spanning, not everyone, not all things. Explain to me that development is everywhere, things are changing, just one more generation… Then rest your life, or the lives of those you care about on that ideal.

I often use the analogy of a single drop of oil in a barrel of water when explaining to Maggie why she can’t trust the Chinese news she reads. It doesn’t matter if 99% of that barrel is water, if there is just one drop of oil, it’s spoiled.

Living in China is like playing the Windows classic Mindsweeper on the “easy” setting. You can click and click and click and most of the time you’ll be fine – but that one random time you’re not — game over.

So, our new dog, Button, is sick. Again, we are forced into a position of hoping we can trust experts telling us what is wrong and what we need to do. We trusted the vet we bought her from that we needed to give her the medicine she suggested to solve the problem. When that didn’t work we trusted a second vet (the most lauded one in Suzhou) that he really had never seen anything like this problem, and trusted that we actually required the litany of expensive tests he prescribed. We trusted that he, one of the truly “qualified” veterinarians in Suzhou, was actually dumbfounded and had no idea what was wrong with her. And maybe he didn’t.

But after digging for just a few minutes online, after our trust in the experts had worn out, we learned that her symptoms fit a perfectly normal and common problem with female puppies and that it was nothing to worry about and rarely something to treat.

So… do we trust that the doctors were both clueless? Trust that they just didn’t tell us the details? Or trust that they, like so many others, simply had their own agendas, and not the health of our dog or the peace-of-mind of her owners, when giving their diagnosis? Trust that maybe they just wanted to string out an otherwise inexpensive problem as long as they could.

And this is “just a dog”. These problems certainly extend to human medicine as well. Doctor’s prescribing unneeded drugs is the norm, not the unethical exception — ordering costly procedures and tests under the guise of caution all in an effort to bump up the bill at a patient’s most vulnerable hour.

In any Western country my thoughts about this would be considered overly cautious at best, and paranoid at worst. But this is China. Whatever wonderful gifts this country has to give, trust simply isn’t one of them.

However, I have absolutely no belief in any god or gods, nor do I believe in miracles or magic. I have no hope of heaven, nor a fear of hell. I believe that when I die, as with all living things, I am dead. I do not believe that my soul, which I view as a sense of self, lives on after the death of my body.

I am an atheist.

A couple months back I changed my about page to include a section on my “beliefs”, and inserted the atheist graphic (above) in my sidebar. I had decided it was time to put a bit more of a voice behind what had been my, mostly quiet, thoughts on the world for a long time.

Maybe there is no need for such a declaration. Maybe the fearsome bulk of irrational religious-based actions portrayed daily by the media is grossly overstated. Maybe the lunacy of creationism is not on the verge of being taught in science classes around the world. Maybe the complete denial of proven scientific facts is only really practiced by a small, but vocal, minority of religious zealots.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

Something in me feels that we, the silent non-believing minority, need to speak up. We need to make a stand not for what we believe in or what we have faith in, but for what is fact and what is truth to the limits of our current understanding. We cannot allow this back-stepping in the grand evolution of human knowledge to continue.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating any sort of persecution. I believe, fundamentally, that every person should be allowed to believe whatever they like. This is personal freedom and personal liberty. However, to say that religion is a matter of personal liberty is a bit of an oversimplification, and ignores or denies what religion, at its foundation, is. Religion is a large and powerful method of control which indoctrinates the young, the poor and the sick. It works to evangelize a specific (and often archaic) set of values and hide or destroy knowledge that conflicts with its tenets. That is exactly the opposite of liberty.

In writing this I understand that the religious among you are just itching to drop to the bottom of the page and leave heated comments calling me all sorts of ungodly names and explain to me how I’ve got the path to god all wrong. And such is your right to have your own opinions, I’ll not remove them. However, before you do, please stop and ask yourself how it is you came to believe what you believe.

Can you honestly say you came to your unquestioning belief in a supreme being, or beings, without the overt influences of your family or the culture you grew up in? I’m sure there are some of you that are “born again”, or have come to your faith as an adult in some way, but the vast majority of religious people blindly follow the faith of their parents or forefathers. How then can anyone who has spent their entire life surrounded by a specific set of ideas possibly have an objective view about their religion?

We must stand up to the enemies of reason

“We must favour verifiable evidence over private feeling – otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.” – Richard Dawkins, “The Enemies of Reason”

Here’s the thing. I understand the pull of believing in something greater than ourselves. The desire to believe in some master plan for our existence. Numerous times throughout my life I’ve felt that pull – whether because of tragedy or trepidation. Despite seeing all signs of rationality point towards atheism, I was drawn to the colourful and imaginative world of religion.

But it never sat right. Sort of like, as a child, you go to slay dragons in the forest behind your house and only find trees.

I resigned myself to the cold, but truthful, reality of a world without god and the supernatural. And then I began to realize something: the workings of nature are much more fantastic and amazing than anything dreamed up millenniums ago as a means for explaining what we could not then possibly understand.

The blind belief in anything, anything, is flawed. And this is why science, and its methods of proof, is so brilliant. Science holds the answers not because it has all the answers, but because it wants to find them. At its core, science has no allegiance. It will quite happily do away with what it thought it knew, and replace it with a new set of understanding. In short, it learns. It grows. It evolves.

“Relativism – the quaint notion that there are many truths all equally deserving of respect, even if they contradict each other – is rife today. It sounds like a respectful gesture towards multiculturalism. Actually it’s a pretentious cop-out.

“There really is something special about scientific evidence. Science works. Planes fly – magic carpets and broomsticks don’t. Gravity is not a version of the truth – it is the truth. Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a 10th floor window.

“Evolution, too, is reality. You don’t believe it or not believe it on the basis of whom or culture – the evidence supports it. Evolution is the plain truth.” – Richard Dawkins, “The Genius of Charles Darwin”

I think what Dawkins is saying is that moderates, whether religious or atheist, tend to hide in relativism. There is nothing wrong with being a moderate, if (and that’s a big ‘if’) doing so does not allow extremists to push forward their agenda. There are numerous places around the world where this is being done, that it’s in my own backyard is more than a little disturbing to me. By allowing religious fundamentalists to elevate creationism to the level of being considered a “scientific theory” and pushing for it to be included in science class is nothing more than pure insanity.

We live in a scientific world, where the direct results of scientific methodology can be seen absolutely everywhere. The extent of human knowledge is in a golden age. Whereby past centuries were lucky to be graced with one or two major scientific marvels, we experience them weekly – so much so that we’re hardly phased or amazed by them anymore.

We take for granted the fact that the life expectancy of the average human being living in a (scientifically) developed country has nearly doubled in the past hundred years – and infant mortality rates have dropped even more drastically. This isn’t from an increased belief in religion; this is because people, largely non-believers in a god, dedicated their lives to improving and understanding the world.

(c) AtheistCartoons.com

Because of science playing such a huge role in the comforts we all now benefit from, churches can’t but add science to the conversation. History has repeatedly shown how the church first denies, then covers up, and finally adapts/adopts scientific discoveries that conflict with religious belief. The most shining example, of course, is the belief the sun revolved around the world. Or, just as relevant, that the world was flat.

Now, of course, these are considered undeniable facts as proven by (not even all that) modern science. So, how then can there still be an argument, any argument, that teaching our children the world is less than 10,000 years old is anything but wrong? How can the fiction that God created two humans before all other animals be elevated to the same “scientific” level as the undeniable and proven fact of evolution by natural selection?

But this is exactly what is being done when people subscribe to a literal belief in the Bible, Torah, or Qur’an. By its very nature religion asks its followers to suspend their rationality and blindly believe, via “faith”, that what is being said is truth. Nonsense.

Equally nonsensical is the argument by creationists that goes something like: “Evolution isn’t proven because we can’t see it. Why aren’t gorillas still evolving into humans? Why aren’t other animals still evolving if that’s how it happens?”

But that’s not how it happens. We didn’t evolve from gorillas, or chimps. Rather we all evolved from a common ancestor – modern apes went their way and we went ours. And we are still evolving. It’s just that evolution doesn’t happen in a lifetime, or 100 lifetimes, it takes thousands upon thousands of years.

(c) AtheistCartoons.com

This is not a theory. It is a fact. It is evidenced by a meticulously gathered mountain of research initially through paleontology, and now conclusively by scientific strides in the understanding of DNA. As human evolution deals with times dating back millions of years (at least 4-5 million years since splitting from our closest cousin – the chimpanzee), there are bound to be some fuzzy areas that scientists aren’t certain about. However, it is not a question of whether man originated several million years ago or six thousand years ago. The latter is simply false.

That returns us to the moderates – those who largely agree the young earth theory is nonsense. The religious liberals who don’t look at their holy book as being literal, but rather allegorical. Religion is thus just a set of moral codes or laws to follow to live a healthy and happy life – or else burn in hell for all eternity. And that’s where you lose me. I get living a moral life, and I totally understand wanting some guidance on how to do that. We’re social creatures, and learning from others is how we grow.

Why though must we tack on supernatural ideas to such a moral code? Why do we need the prize or punishment of Heaven and Hell to force us to behave in a proper fashion? The truth, of course, is that we don’t. I am an atheist and I live a happy and fulfilling life that, by most’s standards is completely moral. In fact, I am certain that morality has no connection to religion, and atheists by and large are no less moral than the religious.

And though it could be argued the opposite isn’t true – that much death and immoral actions are done in the name of religion – I’d hazard a guess that even without religion we’d find ways to kill each other.

Where my problem with religion lies is that it infects systems that I both desire and require to stay non-religious. It creeps into and infects education and political policy – two things that should never be marred by a lack of rationality.

It is for this reason that I am standing up and stating, loudly and longly, that I am not a communist, I am not an anarchist, I am not immoral, I am not unethical, I am not non-spiritual, but I am an atheist.

Most, the rich and clever ones at least, leave the country. Getting the frack out well before the world’s largest human migration takes place and starts blowing shit up is ideal, but simply not practical for everyone – particularly those of us who have spouses that get all warm and fuzzy around the holiday.

Chinese New Year is, for all intents and purposes, the Christmas of the East. Warm familial gathers, gifts, crowded malls, last-minute shopping, celebration of myths, and food – lots and lots of food.

The biggest difference is the god damn fireworks. Y’know how annoying it is to walk into a store on the 26th of December for some afternoon shopping and hear Jingle Bells for a ninety billionth time? Well, it’s just like that – but instead of a shop it’s your home, instead of the afternoon it’s somewhere between 12am and 6am and instead of the muzakiriffic carol it is explosions that put the Bombing of Baghdad to shame.

This being the fifth Spring Festival I’ve endured celebrated, I had hoped that the whole thing wouldn’t phase me. My lack of sleep and frayed nerves are evidence that I was wrong.

Chinese New Year’s Eve this past Sunday night was, however, quite excellent. Our friends Mark and Lyndal came over and Maggie cooked us up a feast of Chinese food. After dinner some more friends joined us and we had a few drinks before we headed downtown to buy explosives of questionable quality and drink some more – an activity that anywhere else would be illegal for its rather obvious conflict with public safety.

We hit up the Shamrock, as it’s been ages since I’ve been downtown, and I tend to gravitate towards places familiar. Last year I also celebrated CNY eve at the Shamrock, and it was strikingly quieter this year – people-wise at least. I’m not sure if its the tighter economic situation or the winds of favour have shifted a bit since I used to be a regular down there.

After midnight, and the cacophony of fireworks, we lit some sparklers that were quickly scooped up by the little beggar kids who would swing them around and shout out “gei wo money, gei wo money”.

A quick video, playing with YouTube’s annotations, showing the Zero Hour

Today is, allegedly (as I’ve not found any solid references to it online), “Second Chinese New Year”. Second Chinese New Year falls five days after the First Chinese New Year, which itself happens a week after “Small Chinese New Year”, and 10 days before the Lantern Festival. I think someone needs to enter a 12-step program for EA – exploders anonymous – “Hi, I’m China and I like to blow shit up.”

Some photos

Here are a few photos from Chinese New Year’s Eve down on Shiquan Jie outside the Shamrock:

When all this began I created a Google Alert for “Optima dog food”, so I’d know any time the phrase appeared on Google’s news channel. For weeks there wasn’t a peep, but then suddenly (just after the Shanghai Daily piece) it lit up and I began receiving several notices a day.

Perhaps most prominently, the Associated Press picked up the story, and Elaine Kurtenbach (AP writer) chatted with me for some time about the situation and on what she had discovered about the supply chain (and its convolution):

(AP) … A sales person at Optima Co., the local representative for the product, said the dog food had been sent for analysis, but he would give no details.

“I’m not authorized to speak about this,” said the man, who gave only his surname, Zhang.

Ryan McLaughlin, a Canadian living in the eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, publicized the problem after his own 1-year-old golden retriever, Addie, fell sick after eating Optima dog food.

“When it’s an imported dog food, you don’t expect this sort of thing to happen,” Ryan, who comes from Welland, Canada, said in a phone interview. “Here we were paying the extra cash to try to ensure she was healthy and instead it made her sick,” he said. Addie died on Jan. 5.

Gu, of the local distributor, said only that his supplier was based in Taiwan.

Zhang said the product his company sold came from “somewhere in Australia.”

The AP article was picked up by a few other news sources, including the Canadian Press (CP), reprinted on CBC.

Here’s a partial aggregation of where the story was reported (those that include mention of Addie are noted):

• Shanghai Daily: Emergency recall of dog food after pets poisoned – Jan 12/09
• Associated Press: Shanghai seller stops sales of suspect dog food [Mentions Addie] – Jan 13/09
• Canadian Press/CBC: Pet food suspected of killing dogs in China; distributor suspends sales [Mentions Addie] – Jan 13/09
• CNN: Australian dog food pulled from Chinese stores in health scare – Jan 13/09
• China Daily: Dogs’ deaths linked to imported food – Jan 13/09
• iNews880: Troubles with cheap brake pads & Chinese pet food  - Jan 13/09
• Xinhua: China quality watchdog denies authorizing imports of problematic dog food - Jan 14/09
• People’s Daily: AQSIQ: China never imported Optima dog food from Australia – Jan 15/09
• Seattle PI: Poisoned pet food is killing Chinese dogs. Is it really made in the U.S. or is it counterfeit? [Mentions Addie] – Jan 15/09

It’s been an experience watching the coverage unfold. Seeing where certain news sources pull their information from. It’s a bit surprising to see how little actual journalism goes into it. Aside from one or two of the articles above, the rest are essentially re-writes based on information found online and/or from other news sources. 

That’s fine if the handful of reporters actually reporting have everything in order – but in most situations, they don’t. They can’t. In a case like this, especially in China, the ONLY people that are going to be co-operative are the victims, and they’re (we’re) generally relying on the media to uncover the truth.

And so you get CNN reporting that Optima dog food comes from Australia (it’s very definitely made in the USA), you get a lot of the reports (bordering on editorials) insinuating that it was fake dog food manufactured in China (it’s more likely that it’s real dog food, but illegally imported from Taiwan), and you get virtually every single one of them pointing out a connection to melamine-tainted Chinese-made dog food that killed dogs in the US in 2007 – then making the obvious jump to the melamine milk scandal of last fall.

Does it surprise anyone that when I close my eyes and think “modern media” I have visions of the Keystone Cops or a Benny Hill sketch playing out in my head?

Don’t get me wrong – news exposure is important and the media are purported to be the watchdogs of evil corporations and gov’ts who are looking to endlessly pull fast ones on the public.

But here’s the rub. The increased media exposure, and in turn pressure on local gov’t, has thrown the local distributor into chaos. Assuming it is the media calling for a one-liner or sound-bite, they are now dodging all calls, including those from those of us that have been affected by this situation and whom, until this week, had been receiving at least a decent amount of co-operation.

Maggie and I had a meeting planned with the distributor on Monday to discuss compensation, but when the Chinese media picked up the story they had to cancel, prioritizing their fires. This only worsened as the week went on and the story grew, until now we’ve been given the rather open-ended “we need to wait and see what happens”.

The distributor informs us that before they can reach a compensation deal with us (and allow us to put this whole tragedy behind us and move on), they need to wait and see if the government takes over the case. If so, it would virtually assure we’ll (a) never see a dime of compensation, (b) this will drag on for months and months, and (c) anyone responsible for this situation that can cut and run, will.

On the plus side, whether we see compensation or not, the increased exposure pretty much guarantees that the company responsible will be destroyed – as I doubt anyone would trust them again – which is a reward of sorts. But then, it just creates a void for another distributor to rise and take its place – one without the black-eye and still-tender reminder to not do something like this again.

Bah.

The site reports:

Since the end of November at least 20 dogs are believed to have died in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou from liver complications. Some pets died within 10 days of showing symptoms.

An agent of Shanghai Yidi Pet Co Ltd, a Shanghai dealer of Optima food, admitted that a “severe quality problem” was found in the batch, and they were recalling the products.

Yidi said pet owners should return the contaminated food to be exchanged for other brands.

Yidi purchased the batch of Optima dog food from a Taiwan supplier, according to an agent who declined to be named.

An imported feedstuff registration list posted by China’s Ministry of Agriculture shows that the Optima dog food’s production enterprise is Australia-based Doane International Pet Products.

But Tan said her purchase order said the food was made in the United States. “American-made Optima is a very famous brand. That’s part of the reason I chose it,” Tan added.

The confusion over where Optima is actually made is rampant in the Chinese forums discussing this as well – with most claiming Optima is made in Australia – but Optima’s Web site clearly indicates that it is “Made in U.S.A.”

Optima is owned by Doane International Pet Products, as the SH Daily reports, however where SH Daily says it is Australia-based doesn’t jive. According to the company’s history, the company was originally based in Missouri, but moved to Brentwood, Tennessee, after a merger in 1998 with Windy Hill Pet Food. This corresponds with both the company’s Web site registration, as well as Optima’s address. No mention of Australia at all.

I’m generally not one to go looking for conspiracies or cover-ups, but if SH Daily is right and China’s Ministry of Agriculture shows Optima pet food coming from Australia – there is a massive failure in the transparency of the distribution chain.

When this all started (December 22, 2008) I e-mailed Optima via their Web contact form:

My name is Ryan McLaughlin and I am a Canadian living in China.

I have a one year old golden retriever and since we got her last February we\’ve been feeding her Optima Puppy Formula (alternating chicken and lamb).

As I\’m guessing you\’re well aware, the local media and message boards are filling with reports that Optima food is killing dogs due to contaminants that are causing liver failure.

My wife is Chinese and so has been following all this in Chinese, as well as in dialog with our local Optima dealing pet shop, but I\’ve not seen anything online about it.

So, to be blunt about it, are you killing my dog?

Ryan McLaughlin

The e-mail was sent to Optima’s sales department, which seems to use the address sales@nappinc.com (nappinc.com domain expired December 28, 2008) and then was forwarded to Shirley Yu from an e-mail using the domain effem.com – which appears to be connected to Mars, Inc.. Her reply:

Dated December 26, 2008
Mr. Mclaughlin,

What you described in your mail surprises me. Optima pet food is produced in US and only sold in Taiwan around the world. As a business representive of Optima pet food in Taiwan, we have never been allowed to export any pet foods to PRC either from Taiwan or US.

For your information, Optima had been launched in Taiwan for over 10 years, and never have lethal cases reported. Optima is the top 4 brand in Taiwan market and famous for it’s superior quality and palatability. If you have queries about petfood you bought in China, I would suggest you to directly contact the retailer which you buy products from.

Best Regards,

Shirley Yu

My response:

Dated December 26, 2008
Hi Shirley,

When you say “Optima pet food is produced in US and only sold in Taiwan around the world” are you saying that Optima isn’t exported from the US to any other countries but Taiwan? As that seems to contradict what the Optima Web site indicates.

You said you are a business representative for Optima in Taiwan – but did not indicate your company, nor your title at the company.

According to the OPTIMA literature we received from our local pet shop, it lists Natural Pet (in Taiwan) as the distributor for Optima. Are you the only Optima distributor? Natural Pet’s Web site (www.naturalpet.com.tw) very clearly shows Optima as a brand they distribute and shows distribution to Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing in the People’s Republic of China.

Our dog has since been diagnosed with exposure to aflatoxin from Optima brand dog food here in China and is in critical condition, not expected to recover. If someone is selling Optima dog food (widely) in China, particularly poisoned dog food, I would think that your company, Optima and Doane would know or want to know about it.

Ryan

To date I’ve still not received a reply from Shirley, nor from CCing the message to the sales@nappinc.com address.

At the end of the day, I really don’t expect this convoluted path to lead anywhere, nor do I believe that Optima, Doane, Natural Pet, Shanghai Yidi Pet Co Ltd, or whoever the fuck is actually responsible for killing my dog to owe up to the true responsibility of that action. How can they? Money? Apologies? None of it will bring back Addie. None of it will fill that which they have taken away from us. And really, none of it will ever allow me to forgive them.

Tomorrow we meet with the distributor to come to some sort of compensation agreement. Part of me wants to fight as hard as I can and reign what fire I can down on the parties responsible for killing a dog I loved so deeply, but another part of me looks forward to being able to lay this all to rest so we can move on and begin to heal.

Ultimately, I know that if I travel down this road of seeking retribution and justice, no matter what I am able to do, I will only find disappointment.

Now with the majority of State-run businesses at least partly privatized, and the future of an econimically powerful China prophecized, why is it that the Great Torchbearer of Capitalism seems to be taking economy lessons from Mao-era China?

I watched this GM-produced video about all the horrors that will befall the country as a whole should the American people not get behind the Big 3 Auto Industry Bailout:

And then I read “Chrysler shuts down all production“, where the company (somewhat following GM’s lead) has gift-wrapped an unpaid holiday for all its American employees. Though easy to excuse as the fault of “the times”, I can’t but see it as anything other than a thinly disguised ditch effort to rally the work/union voice for their bailout.

Aren’t we past fear-mongering for public support? Did a world under eight years of Bush control teach us nothing? Do we not understand that if a (semi)domestic industry is crying out for a patriotic duty to assist it in its time of need, everyone needs to back the Ford up and consider why it’s in trouble in the first place.

The reason, as if anyone didn’t know, is because it cannot compete. Sure, the flavour of the month is to blame the economic crisis, it’s the CFO equivalent of a Get Out of Jail Free card. But the US auto industry was in HUGE trouble LONG LONG LONG before people with no right to buy a sofa on credit were given hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgages.

Definitely, should the big three automakers fall, jobs will be lost. Many jobs. Good honest people will need to find a new industry to employ them. Local governments will need to find new ways to attract new industry to keep their populations employed. This is the way things work. Invest in that.

Or consider the alternative. Consider this bail out. You will be investing in an industry that has proven NOT TO BE PROFITABLE. You will all, as tax payers, become part owners of companies that suck. We’re not talking about investing in Google, and waiting for the bounce-back. We’re talking about dating a invalid 90-year-old widower with no pension and no savings.

If these companies get their payout, how long will it be before the domestic steel and coal industries, the few remaining non-outsourced call centres, the American-made silicon chip manufacturers, and a sundry of other globalized industries just barley holding on come a-callin’, demanding like I did as a child “but it’s not fair, THEY got some, I want some too!”

And what will you have at the end of the day? A government that has “wisely” invested billions of your dollars (that it doesn’t have, and has had to borrow at high interest rates) into industries that have proven they do not have a sound fiscal model for profit – let alone repayment or eventual buyback.

China calls its brand of commucapitalism “communism with Chinese characteristics”, maybe it’s about time that the US take a good hard look at what its elected officials are rushing through before you have “capitalism with un-American characteristics”.

The site offers home delivery of groceries in and around the Jinji Lake/SIP area of Suzhou. Yeah, we just click, click, click and hit send and magically a man appears the next day with our groceries. Blows my fucking mind.

Now, I’ve heard of similar services back home, but have had little cause to use them. Shopping in Canada is about as stressful as a yoga class. You show up, listen to a bit of Musak, casually consider your health for 45 minutes and then drive home.

A trip to the supermarket in China is … like my fat ass doing yoga. Uncomfortable, painful, awkward, and filled with the concern that I may end up seriously maiming others around me.

I’ve talked about my love/hate of Chinese supermarkets previously, and so wont rehash it all here. Needless to say, I avoid shopping as much as possible.

As Maggie largely handles all the shopping (in part because of our new cooking arrangement), and for a long time – like most things “China” – it didn’t get to her.

However, it is impossible not to see a transition in my wife from the somewhat sheltered person I met in Jinzhou to the woman she is today. Sociologists would have a field day with her. She’s a blossoming bougeois bouquet and, for better or worse, there ain’t no going back.

As such, she (like me) despises trips to the supermarket now, and routinely returns from Saturday afternoon shopping saying, “it’s like a damn war!”

Enter 5jshop.com – the bilingual, QQ-connected solution to all our problems (of a shopanistic nature).

We were a bit apprehensive about the service when it was suggested to us by our great new friends (and new Suzhou bloggers) Ric and Gin – how could we not be? Reasonably priced groceries, fresh from the market to your door, and free delivery? Surely it’s too good to be true.

Well, we must be cashing in karma chips, because our delivery yesterday sealed it. No rotten or wilted week-old celery, no funky smelling mystery meats. We got fresh, clean veg; still-frozen (and sealed) chicken breast; ripe fruit; high-quality pork… delivered at our door. And, factoring in the added costs of taxis and impulse buying, the whole deal is going to end up saving us money.

Maggie might need a bit of work with the ordering system though, as we looked a bit silly ordering one, solitary banana.

However, a little vodka’n'cranberry therapy at hand, it’s time I tackle a topic I’ve been meaning to address for a while now – the biggest bone of contention between my wife and I. Yup, it’s food.

Coming from two wildly different cultures, it’s likely of little surprise that we differ quite a lot. I’m outgoing, she’s introverted; I joke, she scowls (even at my best material); she’s fit, I’m … not; I’m flexible mentally, she’s flexible physically; I’m creative, she’s practical; I grew up playing with Transformers, she grew up playing with dirt (a fact she loves to remind me of when I get a bit too bourgeois for her commie sensibilities).

But despite, or perhaps because of, all our differences we get along amazingly well – except when it comes to food.

You only need to take a quick look at me to realize I am a man that likes to eat. I really enjoy food. And because I enjoy food, I also enjoy the creation of food. I like the idea that I can go into the kitchen and make something that is nearly as decent to eat as a good restaurant. I like finishing putting together a meal, sitting down and enjoying it.

My wife is much more utilitarian when it comes to food. Whether she likes something or not is largely based on two factors – is it healthy, and therefore something she can use to benefit herself; or is it food she’s eaten all her life, and therefore unquestionably comfortable.

The first bit irritates me, but I could certainly lose a few pounds, so am not at all opposed to eating healthily. I, perhaps mistakenly, assume that healthy food can taste good as well.

But that second part – there’s no rationale.

This penchants for only eating that which is familiar is a trait I’ve seen wide-spread across China, and it’s a pain in the ass. Commonly, cuisine neatly falls into the well-worn structure that seems to permeate the entire country:

• Home
• Home Town
• Province
• Region
• Country
• Foreign

Allegiance, dialect, gastronomical preference… it all sits in the same framework.

For me, I look at food like I look at music. I enjoy music. I have my preferences, but because I appreciate music for music’s sake, I can easily recognize quality music even when it sits outside the sphere I’m comfortable with.

Good music is, quite simply, good music. And, I believe, good food is good food.

As such, I love eating all kinds of food, and all nations’ food. So, to me I look at a week and see an opportunity to try food from seven different places – each one unique from the last.

So when my wife suggests that eating so much “foreign food” is too much and feels we should do 50/50 Chinese/Foreign (to be fair) – I protest. I protest because I really don’t want to eat that much Chinese food, but I also protest on principle.

To me this doesn’t just boil down to “cultural differences”, it is just bad math. Thai food, or Indian food, or Japanese food are no closer to my “home town food” than Chinese food. It’s wrong that it be lumped in with it.

Fortunately the saving grace in all this is that more than health and comfort, my wife just loathes cooking. She does it, and she’s good at it, but she doesn’t take any joy from it. It’s a task that must be done and is not meant to be enjoyed.

And as I’ve stated, I quite like cooking. So, after months, years really, of arguing about this we’re shifting tactics. Whereas we’ve always split cooking duties, starting today I am our home’s sole chef.

I’ve free range to cook whatever I want, but must make a solid effort to cook Chinese dishes a couple times a week. I get to take the reigns in the kitchen, and as a trade off Maggie gets out of ever having to lift a spatula or learn the difference between tomato sauce and ketchup.

We’ll see how it goes. I can easily foresee some potholes in the path ahead, but I’m pretty excited to finally have an excuse to really explore cooking. All recipes graciously accepted.