Food Quality Quotes
What is fascinating about this quotation is that each year in the United States millions of Americans get sick from contaminated food. Well over 100,000 need to be hospitalized, and over 3000 Americans die from food borne illness. Yet this Congressman from an agricultural state can make such an absurd statement. The US is better than most counties in terms of food safety, and is much improved over the last decades. However, it is certainly not COMPLETELY safe. Ideologically, he was trying to ward off calls for increased Federal Regulation of the Food System which he believed could not be as successful at making the system more safe as if the food industry engaged in self regulation. But it is common in modern politics to completely depart from the truth if the truth might create public and political pressure for legislation that the Congressman was ideologically opposed to. The end of reducing Federal Regulation for him justified a blatant untruth which misled the public who believed him. Worse, Americans have less trust in anything their legislators say as more and more are exposed making statements like this.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was early pseudonym. In 1945 at the end of World War II, the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek invaded Vietnam instead of attacking the Japanese. 200,000 Chinese troops occupied Vietnam when the war ended. Ho Chi Min and other Vietnamese nationalists diplomatically worked to restore the order of things before the war and have the French return to Vietnam. Many were very critical of Ho for enabling the French Colonials to return with 15,000 troops, as they replaced the Chinese forces. After he made this statement, the Vietnamese then ousted the French and gained their independence but are continuously wary of China, their neighbor to the North and traditional enemy. To this day, Chinese maps refer to Vietnam as “The South-East China Province.”
