Do You Know Who Your Next Meal Is Coming From?

One might detect the pungent scent of a trade war brewing.

The former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, discovered last week that it's an extremely bad time to get blamed for any of China's food and drug safety problems. He had been convicted of taking bribes in exchange for helping drug companies evade regulation. Sentenced to death in May, he confessed his crimes in a written statement, vowed to return the bribe money, and pleaded for leniency. He proved unpersuasive; the government announced Tuesday that he had been executed. We can only imagine what he was given for his last meal.

Now, pull way back for the panoramic shot: This is a complexifying world in which no single person can grasp more than a tiny scrap of the economic and social systems that sustain us. We can no longer read the code. We don't know the origin of the thing we hold in our hand. We know only that it has a funny aftertaste.

We have become end users of stuff we don't understand that comes from factories we've never seen in cities we've never heard of full of people whose language we don't speak and whose names we can't pronounce.

"There's a world below our level of awareness that affects everything we do -- the quality of food we eat, the water we drink, the clothes on our back," says Robert Clark , a professor emeritus of government at George Mason University. "They're delivered by systems that are so complex, most of the people who are actually in the system don't understand them."

Consider the pet food calamity. One of the country's biggest pet food companies, Menu Foods, decided it needed a new supplier of a single ingredient: wheat gluten. It turned to a Las Vegas company named ChemNutra that specializes in importing food and drug ingredients from China -- stuff like potassium sorbate, L-Cysteine USP29 and L-Glycine USP28 .

ChemNutra bought wheat gluten from something called Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., in Jiangsu province. The gluten from Xuzhou Anying was contaminated with melamine, the industrial plastic that ChemNutra believes was intentionally put into the wheat gluten to make it appear to be higher in protein. By the time U.S. inspectors reached the manufacturing plant in China, it had been closed and scrubbed clean. The melamine played a role in sickening or killing an unknown number of pets across the United States.

"There but for the grace of God go people," says Hubbard, the former FDA official. "That same kind of contamination could have killed 4,000 or 5,000 people."

More bad news for the China brand: A New Jersey company recently recalled 450,000 potentially defective Chinese tires. And fireworks made in China reportedly malfunctioned at half a dozen different Independence Day events in Northern Virginia, with one errant shell injuring 11 people in Vienna. There's obviously the danger here of consumer jingoism: The demonization of "Orientals" has a long history. In the post-World War II era, "Made in Japan" meant, for a long time, cheap merchandise. It was a pejorative term, until the Japanese started cranking out cars and televisions and consumer gadgets that were flat-out better than ours.

Merchandise from mainland China didn't start arriving until 1980. The country has recently seen an economic boom built on exports. But many of us do not know much about China other than that it's where our shirt came from, and that it has a Great Wall. Historians will say that China invented paper and gunpowder and the compass and fireworks and a bunch of other cool stuff, but many Americans think of the Chinese inventing ways to counterfeit Hollywood movies. We know that there are something like 1.3 billion Chinese, but we'd be hard-pressed to name a single one of them. Who among us, today, can name China's president, or prime minister, or Supreme Leader, or whatever he's called? Here's a stumper: Is China still communist?

Of course there are people who are highly informed, such as George Mason University government professor Frances Harbour, who was so disgusted by the working conditions in Chinese factories that she tried to boycott anything made in China. Her boycott lasted about a year before she gave up. She realized that China wasn't the only country with sweatshops. And she found it hard to go without Chinese merchandise.

"I would have had to make my own clothes, practically," she says.