“The company said the toothpaste, imported from South Africa, was sold in discount stores in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland.” And to make matters worse the paper trail created by the product has left investigators in most of these cases holding little more than worthless pieces of paper of the invoices of origin. Coke used to have a great slogan, “It’s the Real thing.” But anymore, do we really know if it’s the real thing or not?
Sadly for us all, the chances of being affected by tainted or fake products is greater today than it has ever been. To add insult to injury by the time anyone figures out the tainted source the companies responsible are either out of business or not on American shores where any type of justice can be achieved. And make no mistake about it we have enough problems with products we manufacture here in our own country which are having dire consequences on our health.
Welcome to the global supermarket. Its open 24/7 and we Americans are its best customers. We get our products and our food not from just here in the good old USA, but from the world. We feed from a table that knows no time zone or product credibility anymore. Your peaches are from Greece where it is summer and the asparagus is fresh in from Chile. You sip from a bottle of water that hails from a Swiss Aquifer while reading a paper printed in Canada, written by a Journalist in San Francisco, and edited by a master’s degreed literary agent from India. Are we being too foolsih to think that the same standards that apply here in USA are the same ones being up held in other parts of the world?
The Ludites fought the industrial revolution in England. They of course failed. Not just to hold onto what it meant to be a craftsman, but onto being able to trust those who made the products to not put safety before sale! We as well face a similar scenario. In our zest to get the best price; the quickest and largest assortment of products imaginable has silently empowered corporations to be the ones who insure our safety. In our new world when consumer protection agencies have their funding cut; we dismiss this as a sign of the times. Companies are asked to police themselves. Some do a good job. But others like the toothpaste manufacturer didn’t. It truly is a world gone trustless!
Counterfeiting occurs of everything for sure, but the new global market seems to have few policemen out their monitoring it, and that right now is perhaps the scariest thing we have had to deal with in a long time. Bone Apatite”
The Time Pieces 