Is it woke to worry about where we buy stuff from?

We should certainly concern ourselves with where our food comes from.
Asparagus for example is flown to the UK from Peru where it is grown in the desert using water pumped up from the world's fastest depleting aquifer. This is done by large international agricultural conglomerates part owned by British supermarkets who are the major importers of Peruvian asparagus.
Even the COOP who pride themselves on their fair trade chocolate and coffee are guilty of this and my local store doesn't sell locally grown asparagus even during the fairly long British season for the crop.
The depleting aquifers have put local Peruvian farmers out of business as their wells dry up and of course most of the profits from the huge asparagus farms are exported along with the produce.
It is completely unsustainable and within a short time large areas of previously productive land will be unfarmable.

No. it's not woke to want to know the origins of what you buy and what you consume.

Since reading an article in Der Spiegel about bulk food imports into Europe from China, Mme D has not bought any food items made in China or any food products whose provenance is unclear.

An extract from the article follows:


The Hidden Price of Food from China
By SPIEGEL Staff

In recent years, China has become a major food supplier to Europe. But the low-cost goods are
grown in an environment rife with pesticides and antibiotics, disproportionately cited for
contamination and subject to an inspection regime full of holes. A recent norovirus outbreak in
Qufu, the city in China's southwestern Shandong Province where Confucius was born, isn't exactly an
attractive place. But its fields are as good as gold. A few weeks ago, a shipment of strawberries left those
The air above the cities of the Chinese heartland is blackened with smog, as trucks barrel along freshly
paved roads carrying loads of coal from the mines or iron girders from the region's smelters. Fields stretch
The chili pepper and cotton harvests have just ended, the rice harvest begins in two weeks, and garlic will be
ready in April. Thousands of female farm workers are kneeling in the fields planting the next crop of a
"Garlic is eaten everywhere," says Wu Xiuqin, 30, the sales director at an agricultural business called
"Success." "We sell garlic all over the world, and increasingly to Germany." The going price of a ton of white
garlic is currently $1,200 (€920). The Germans, says Wu, insist on "pure white" product, and they want the
Well over 80 percent of the garlic sold worldwide comes from China. The "Success" farm produces 10,000
metric tons a year. Based on what she's seen at food conventions in Berlin and elsewhere, no country on
Earth can compete with China. Her company supplies peeled, flaked, granulated and pulverized garlic, says
Wu, and it has now added ginger, chili peppers, carrots, pears, apples, sweet potatoes and peanuts to its
China, which already sews together our clothes, assembles our smartphones and makes our children's toys,
is now becoming an important food supplier for Germany. Since China, as a low-wage country, doesn't
exactly have a good reputation among consumers, the food industry usually doesn't mention the origin of
the products it sells. Many Germans only realized how much of the food on their plates is harvested and
produced in China when thousands of schoolchildren in eastern Germany were afflicted with diarrhea and
vomiting two weeks ago in an epidemic thought to have been triggered by Chinese strawberries

I wouldn't buy any food from China - I had a friend who moved to Shanghai from the Middle East and one of their biggest problems was the amount of counterfeit food, especially baby food and formula.

Support your local farmer.

Its certainly a concern that we don't produce enough food to feed the nation . Population growth only increases the reliance on imported food and being woke will be the last of our worries .

As for other goods its hard to see what is and whats not from here or there and I dare say most people don't even look before buying .

It's very likely that the pizza you buy in a chain outlet or a supermarket consists of ingredients sourced in bulk from China, including the frozen base, and will come in a box labelled 'Lovingly hand-baked by artisans in our own kitchens'.

The Chinese used to put melamine in baby formula which caused kidney damage in infants.

The report is based a lie that the person who told it to the BBC has now admitted it is false. There is not a million false detentions in Xinjian. There never was. The number was said to come from a calculation from some proxy measure, or at least that was the excuse for the error when it was proved to the researcher he was wrong. I think the truth is far simpler, which is it is a CIA lie, and they paid the researcher to shit the world with it, and fools carry on repeating it without any backup evidence what so ever.  

I've seen solar factories in China. Few people work there. It's 80% robots. Those that do work there have easy jobs just watching over the robots and dealing with errors in production. The factories tend to be very new, very clean, very high tech and the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed. 

Anyway that's the long version. The short version is the BBC talks shit. Slave labour is closer to home. www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3SDkE9cIys