Asian Seafood Raised on Pig Feces Approved for U.S. Consumers
By Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen and William Bi - Oct 11, 2012 5:00 AM GMT
Bloomberg Markets Magazine

At Ngoc Sinh Seafoods Trading & Processing Export Enterprise, a seafood exporter on Vietnam’s southern coast, workers stand on a dirty floor sorting shrimp one hot September day. There’s trash on the floor, and flies crawl over baskets of processed shrimp stacked in an unchilled room in Ca Mau.

Elsewhere in Ca Mau, Nguyen Van Hoang packs shrimp headed for the U.S. in dirty plastic tubs. He covers them in ice made with tap water that the Vietnamese Health Ministry says should be boiled before drinking because of the risk of contamination with bacteria. Vietnam ships 100 million pounds of shrimp a year to the U.S. That’s almost 8 percent of the shrimp Americans eat.

Using ice made from tap water in Vietnam is dangerous because it can spread bacteria to the shrimp, microbiologist Mansour Samadpour says, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.

“Those conditions -- ice made from dirty water, animals near the farms, pigs -- are unacceptable,” says Samadpour, whose company, IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group, specializes in testing water for shellfish farming.

Ngoc Sinh has been certified as safe by Geneva-based food auditor SGS SA, says Nguyen Trung Thanh, the company’s general director.

No Record

“We are trying to meet international standards,” Thanh says.

SGS spokeswoman Jennifer Buckley says her company has no record of auditing Ngoc Sinh.

At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.

“The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,” says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China.

On a sweltering, overcast day in August, the smell of excrement is overpowering. After seeing dead fish on the surface, Chen, 45, wades barefoot into his murky pond to open a pipe that adds fresh water from a nearby canal. Exporters buy his fish to sell to U.S. companies.

Yang Shuiquan, chairman of a government-sponsored tilapia aquaculture association in Lianjiang, 200 kilometers from Yangjiang, says he discourages using feces as food because it contaminates water and makes fish more susceptible to diseases. He says a growing number of Guangdong farmers adopt that practice anyway because of fierce competition.

“Many farmers have switched to feces and have stopped using commercial feed,” he says.

Frequently Contaminated

About 27 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from China -- and the shipments that the FDA checks are frequently contaminated, the FDA has found. The agency inspects only about 2.7 percent of imported food. Of that, FDA inspectors have rejected 1,380 loads of seafood from Vietnam since 2007 for filth and salmonella, including 81 from Ngoc Sinh, agency records show. The FDA has rejected 820 Chinese seafood shipments since 2007, including 187 that contained tilapia.

www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/asian-...r-u-s-consumers.html

Thankfully I don't eat meat or fish, but my lil boy loves it, so I often buy fresh fish for him, My Dad who was a brilliant fisherman all his life, told me a few years back about this kind of fish and how dangerous it is to your health/ how they are raised etc etc. The reason was due to one day whilst in the supermarket shopping with my kid I saw smoked river cobbler and bloody cheap compared to the fresh prices i paid for fresh local sellers fish. Got home Dad popped in to see us and I thought i'd ask him what type of fish it was, I'd purchased, He took one look said there's no such fish as river cobbler and don't bloody feed it to my then toddler. That got chucked especially after a lil internet snooping. Luckily i live fairly near the sea and getting fresh fish isn't a biggy. Sadly Dad passed away but i've got all his rods so if i wanna go fishing for trout salmon or sprats the options there.

Good one, Mrs Good! Catch them yourself - can't beat fish straight out of the sea.

I don't know where you are, but while I was typing that, I got an image of that fish with 9 eyes off the Simpsons -hope you're not where there's possible Fukushima contamination.

Aye da nine eyed cobbler, I'm in pirate Du Maurier country ya bilge rat

Aha, great sea-faring spot then - just watch out for the birds.

Gilly wrote: lmao those shite hawks are so brass necked, theve peer pressured me into giving my grub away and seen them walk into a spar shop in Penzance and wog stuff. Dem da Pirates down ere

I saw a documentary a while back about prawn farming, can't remember where, but it was some place like Bangladesh. Anyway, the upshot of it was that loads of prawn farms grow prawns in sewerage.

shrimps remind me of bugs. asians love that shit though, the little octopus things, and the rotted fish in barrels. i bet people eat jelly fish too. see what you tube says.

Horrific but no more horrific than the battery hens and abatoirs in some Western countries.

I read Fast Food Nation and almost turned vegetarian.

Fortunately, Italy still has small local produce on sale in their shops

mikey mikey wrote:
Agreed no different at all. I used to be vegetarian but having moved to vietnam I eat little bits of beef and chicken now and then, the food is so difficult for me, if it was India no problem but man its hard here!! Though starting to cook some things myself and things are looking up.

Thing is its mostly seafood im eating, its so cheap and its everywhere its hard to avoid, I can buy a squid and like 10 decent sized prawns for two dollars. When your struggling like me you have to eat what the locals eat, well mostly. As mickey said its going to be pretty horrific in western battery hens and abbatoirs, least here most chickens have some semblance of a natural life.

Its a bit funny the whole ice thing, ice is really big here its very cheap to buy lots of it but then of course it adds up in industrial scale, but all the ice is made from drinking water. Health and safety though is pretty non existent, they probably don't even have a word for food hygiene they just hack meat up next to the road its crazy, feel so bad for the animals and been eating less and less meat the last month or two, takes a while to adjust you know, but the seafood is always really good and popular here, you go eat seafood and drink beer, thats what they do.

Ive only been sick twice when I first arrived and it was from a vegetarian dish I cooked lol Im sorry but for now im burying my head in the sand and thinking all the seafood is fine, ignorance is bliss, or maybe they send all the crap to the american pigs and keep the good stuff for the locals hahaha no offence to any americans thats just a figure of speech

Yes, the thing about chickens here & what you've said about the food there strikes a chord. You pay twice as much for a free-range, organically reared chicken that's half the size. If you can't afford, or source, good, wholesome food, it might be better not to know the things we do.

They pluck the eye off the female prawns to make them produce more eggs. It sound like a load of bollocks, but it honestly isn't.

You can watch the Food Unwrapped episode and see for yourself.

I'm so effing glad my body decided that it couldn't eat fish seafood or meat with-out virtually hurling

MrsGood wrote:


Did anyone else actually get that btw?

Hmmm?

Mrs Good's in du Maurier country - author of pirate riddled Jamaica Inn etc i.e. Cornwall.

Hitchcock's film noir, The Birds was based on Daphne du Maurier's book of the same name.

*Sigh*

Rightioh then

Lived just up river of Frenchmans creek, for a couple of years, then within sight of Du Maurier house across the estuary from Fowey, Bodinick for another couple of years then a couple of mile up the road from Jamaica Inn. Had a bird moment at the harbour in penzance too, did get a wee bit itimidating