Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Good article on New York Times about New York's own history of tainted milk and the parallels with what is going with China now.

Although this is not the main point of the article, the Korean will highlight this portion:
In the end, New York milk was cleaned up. It took stronger food laws, better policing, the advent of pasteurization and the passage of the Food and Drug Act in 1906, 50 years after the worst of swill milk. Above all, it took decades, not months or years. China faces many more food scandals — to add to recent alarms like pesticide-laced dumplings and lard made from sewage — before it reaches the point where its citizens can routinely trust what they eat.
The Korean highlights this to show that social progress is achieved slowly, even when the problem is as dire as tainted milk killing babies, and everyone knows about the problem. Similarly, it will take some decades before China and Korea fix even the most prominent social problems that afflict them. (Like bad driving in Korea, for example.)

1 comment:

  1. Would you say the "bad driving" is a Korean thing or more of a "big city/bad traffic" thing?

    I live in the Seattle area and most people here drive like what I think the Queen of England would drive. They're very good and polite drivers.

    When I lived in Sao Paulo (a Brazilian city with 10+ million population) the traffic was chaotic and everybody was rude.

    And two weeks ago I was in Boston and everybody there drives like animals.

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