And for Dessert, Melamine Bread Pudding

 A sweet, innocent, little girl inquisitively looks up at her mommy who is standing at the checkout stand at the grocery store and asks ‘where do roses come from, mommy?’ referring to the flower the woman holds in her hand.

 “Well, Buffy, roses come from God. God makes everything.”

 “But Mommy, everything in our house is made in China”

Appliances, televisions, stereo equipment, clothes, furniture, tables, chairs, knives, forks, and spoons have long been accepted import items spurning the purchases of the American family. Woven into the fabric of American culture, imported items are widely accepted as the norm – and in many cases offer not only a more reasonable price, but comparable or better quality than what once was produced in this country.

But food? Do we really need to put the safety and security of what goes into our mouths into the hands of others?  Especially in these times of world conflict and budding human insanity. In these times of melamine detection.

You don’t have to be a trained CIA Operative, or an espionage-terrorist-seeking wizard to realize that one quick way to deplete American society is through its food chain and eating habits.

I certainly don’t want to be the one person who claims not to have that much faith in the FDA but, really, can they be expected to inspect everything we eat, drink, or import from other lands?

Obviously, not.

The current wheat gluten fiasco, rumored to have been tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, has heightened our curiosity when it was reported that not only have dogs and cats been eating it, but we may have had an appetizer portion too.  Before we all go scurrying around thinking about changing to a gluten-free diet don’t blame it on the melamine. The product has some very redeeming qualities. People claim that it is very versatile- it’s used in floor tile, whiteboards, plastic utensils, fire retardant fabrics and other products made of resin. It is often combined with formaldehyde- which most of us will get our fill of, eventually- in order to make that pliable resin that is so sought after in a variety of imported products. Remember the last time you thought the bread tasted a little “plasticy”, well. Ever complained about the pizza tasting like the box? Melamine?

One of the qualities melamine has is it purportedly can trick the protein test used on products. Simply, those daily requirements that appear on the back of those packages that few read in our grocery stores can be altered through the use of this industrial chemical- headline-grabber.

So here we are, ingesting some form of plastic in a variety of yet-to-be tested foods while billions of dollars are being spent on research to cure cancer and a variety of other terminal diseases. On top of this I will bet that the two China-based companies where the melamine incident began will have some American ties.

We really need to take a time out to reflect on how far we have come. We now live in a society that spends billions of dollars on war while people who are starving in other countries could be fed for pennies a day.

We export corn, import gluten, fly in beef, ship out pork, truck in produce, sail in televisions, and continually complain things are not going well Homes are too expensive, cars cost too muh, the price of beef is outrageous, gas is unaffordable and that terrorism lurks around every corner, in every plane and in the luggage section of airports across the world. No we have to add plastic resin tainting our bread to the list.

We headline the fact that Barry Bonds may be taking a synthetic drug so he can hit a cowhide wrapped ball of cork and sawdust further than the next guy all the while not paying attention to how passionate those inspectors at the FDA are. FDA-passionate, complacent, reckless? Maybe overworked, underpaid, some Senator’s cousin. Who knows.

But it may be time to start thinking local food, local farms, local inspectors.

Remember when we used to joke that the steak tasted like shoe leather? Well, now it may be true.

Do they use melamine in shoes?