Toxic Chinese food ethics

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

The People's Republic of China's female volleyball team won a bronze medal at the Olympics in London in August. A month before, teams that didn't even qualify were thumping them. The reason? According to The Atlantic magazine, the coach blamed a vegan diet, brought on by a need to avoid eating contaminated Chinese meat that might result in a positive test for drugs like clenbuterol, a respiratory medication for horses illegally used to encourage lean meat production in other species. Earlier in the year, China's state sport authority had ordered athletes not to eat meat outside of official training facilities.

The Atlantic article, by Yanzhong Huang, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, blamed "China's failure to establish a code of business ethics as its market economy expands faster than government regulators can keep pace.

"In a country where serving God is still suppressed, and 'serving the people' is no longer in vogue, serving money seems to be the main attractive option.

"Yet an excessive focus on poor government oversight often means that the much graver problem of disintegrating civic morality is neglected," Huang wrote in another August opinion piece published in the New York Times. BP