There is a tub of honey sittting on my kitchen table. It comes from China – the first time I was buying Chinese honey as all  other brands of honey had gone up in price.

But after the Chinese milk scandal I am not sure what to do with that tub of honey. Maybe after some weeks of staring at the tub on my kitchen table I would be able to get over the guilt of throwing it out and waisting, a quite possibly harmless, tub of honey .

I can’t help thinking the risks that parents are forced to take when buying products that have been ‘enriched’ chemically.

Which reminds me of the good old days….I know, I know all the arguements in favour of modern tecnology and how it has enabled the world to feed millions more people or saved millions more from starvation and from ill health. Do we keep count of the millions who suffer ill health and pain because  this  technology is used knowingly as bad for health, as the the manufacturers of Sanlu Milk had done to their own people in China , because of greed, individual or corporate?

This is not the first instance either of babies put at risk.

Remember the 1970s scandal, also centered around infant milk formula? Apparantly a munfacturer’s recommendations to  nursing mothers to switch to its infant formula milk products, led to the alleged deaths of about 1.5 million babies each year as a result of  the formula being mixed with contaminated water.

Perhaps mothers will revert to the good old fashioned way of feeding infants- and go back to breast milk.

Anyway to go back to the good old days. I was five when I and my four siblings ( you can guess the ages of the four) went to visit our grandparents in India. Upon our arrival my grandfather bought a cow to provide us with fresh milk every day and we ate fresh eggs from chickens who had the run of the place. These days when I look at the eggs in the supermarket shelves it is hard to come by eggs which have not been enriched one way or another!