Thursday, July 5, 2007

Another wrinkle in the great Chinese food scandal…

The new "China Syndrome," part one

You may remember the hit 1979 movie called "The China Syndrome," starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas. It was about cover-ups of safety violations at an American nuclear power plant.

Ironically, the movie was released just days before the real-life partial meltdown at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the film, the phrase "china syndrome" referred not to anything as insidious as faulty Chinese materials the reactor core was built from, but to the facetious notion that, should a "total meltdown" occur, the plant would have burned clear through the Earth to China. (And, actually, the plant responded exactly as programmed and shut down with no injuries at all - but you know Hollywood.) But as usual, I digress…

Today, there's a different deadly threat to the safety of American citizens that really DOES center on China: The flow of tainted foodstuffs and other ingestible products for both animal and people.


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