And now we strike a bit closer to home. This post from La Vida Locavore on Melamine in Africa has been opened on one of the tabs of my browser, sitting like a stain for three days. Apparently Chinese dairy products have made it to African shores, a place where governments are ill-equipped to deal with testing, recalls or consumer information campaigns.
Though the post discusses data from Nigeria (very far away from me) showing presence of melamine in a variety of foods, I–and everyone else anywhere in Africa reading this–know that it goes much, much further. Cheap Chinese goods are as common here as malarial mosquitoes, and the port of Mombassa in Kenya is a lot closer to China than Lagos.
While Kenya produces plenty of its own milk products, it wouldn’t surprise me if Chinese dairy products somehow managed to find their ways into many of the processed dairy products. At the least, China is a major exporter of fertilizer, which often has melamine in it. Overall, Chinese goods have replaced so many of the local ingredients here because, despite cheap labor, things like awful transport or water supply infrastructure often make production costs in Africa higher than China.
My wife and I try to cook with mainly unprocessed ingredients, but the reality is that you are going to eat other things in restaurants or at friends’ houses occasionally. It makes me mad that we’ve almost certainly eaten melamine, but it makes me even angrier that plenty of poor people here are eating the stuff and might very well never even know about it.
