Ex...you are NOT a 'layman.' You apparently are there, you know of what you speak, and you experience seems to parallel my experience EXACTLY in my time in Asia.
I think you're exactly correct when you say the East is the new Wild West, (both as a compliment and an insult.)
I know the last time I was there, as I mentioned earlier, there was a 'malachite green' scare where they were putting a carcinogenic dye in eel ponds to kill some kind of fungus or something.
Anyway, over the week or so of this hitting the news, the chicoms explained that there was no problem with the dye for domestic consumption because all of the problem eels had actually been shipped to Japan!
It's reasonable to look at the Chinese countryside (or a Taiwanese river) and assume that you are eating in the nastiest place on earth.
That said, I just can't see how the FDA, USDA or blockade will save Americans from themselves.
If you put me in a field and told me to make a diet coke from scratch, and I gave you an all natural brown fizzy liquid with zero calories, would you drink the damn thing?
Americans eat hamburgers out of paper wrappings from a mill and we think it's clean because, why? Because it's white?
I'm just saying that the entire world is dirty and singling out china ignores the reality that buying unknown stuff off some grocery store shelf leads to unknown stuff from unscrupulous people anywhere.
Hey thanks for the kind compliments!