Hanna in China

We just got an order of new Hanna's delivered today. They are, of course, adorable and fit Buttercup well — their European sizing works well on her. Sad to say, they are also all made in China. This is nothing new, and I'm not going to belabor it. I just can't help being sad that even good brands known for quality and attention to "sustainable" materials opt for outsourcing to the factory of cheap.

wrap your mind around this

I picked up on this on a news report on WNRN yesterday, and had to pursue it when I got back to the office. It was that absurd. Leave it to provincial officials in China to require people to damage their health. Or rather, leave it to become state policy. Regardless, it takes a special kind of topsy-turvy world where you require people to smoke 230,000 packs of cigarettes a year — just to stimulate the local economy.

Sad to say, it just validates whole other layers of bizarro-world that I experienced when I traveled there in 1996.

(Image picked up here. Check it out.)

Santa's New Elves (or a rather depressing look at where our kids' toys are made)

So Santa's Elves have migrated to factories in China where they churn out toys for Banana and her classmates one arm, leg, and Mickey head at a time. They eat the gruel doled out by fellow workers ("please, sir, may I have some more, sir?"), and sometimes sleep under the tables. I'll be hard-pressed to get this one out of my head the next time Banana asks whether she can get a toy--just a small Polly Pocket/Littlest Pet Shop/Barbie--on our next Target run.

Occasionally we pay attention to the costs this sort of economy of (cheap) scale is taking on our society, but mostly when it risks our kids' health. What would the real tab be in economic, environmental, and social scales if we actually tallied it up?

[Image and link via Daily Kos.]

cheap toys, sad

The news broke this morning that Mattel will announce another toy recall of products made in China. The tipster was anonymous, and I suspect this one might be even bigger than the last one.

It is scary and pathetic that our drive for ever-more, ever-cheaper products is coming back to haunt us. That's not quite the right way to say it, of course. Maybe I'll work on a more cogent commentary later in the day.

Chinese "Food"

I've been paying close attention to the growing controversy over Chinese food exports and production, and this piece on Consumerist was more than a little revolting and frightening. It also reminded me of a few things.

When I traveled to China for a couple of months in 1996, food was one of the more interesting adventures. Not just in terms of knowing what or how to order, but knowing what in fact you were being served. This wasn't as much a problem with the private cook my mother shared with a few other professors in Nanjing or with the the bigger, more reputable restaurants in large cities. Rather, the problem came up more often at "tourist" restaurants where you were herded into a large space and fed a "traditional" chinese meal of egg roll, sweet and sour pork, green vegetable (usually either bok choy or choy sum), and duck.

A few times in such restaurants, particularly when we were traveling down the Yangtze, I made the mistake of asking what we were being served because the meat was clearly nothing I had tasted before. In every case, however, the answer was the same: Pork. Apparently, pork is the universal choice for feeding westerners who, as a rule, do not speak the language. Even if it's not pork. There were no pigs to be seen anywhere in these towns, and these are not places that bring food in.

Anyway, they were treating our tourist groups like rubes the same way their agribusiness has been treating us like rubes by intentionally filling food ingredients with dangerous additives. What is truly frightening is that companies in China produce an increasing amount of our food ingredients, including shrimp, crawfish, rice, and much more. If neither we nor they are really policing the safety of production, how far will this reach?

For lots of reasons, I see a correlation with the number of incidences of toys made in China coming up with warnings for lead poisoning hazards; a quick search of the CPSC site for "china lead" turns up 1,451 recalls.

Is it possible that our drive for ever-cheaper and more abundant is catching up with us—with dangerous results?