Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The question too few ever ask: what makes Always Low Prices, Always Walmart’s knock-off brand Great Value such a great alleged value?
For one thing, because they offshore their industrial shrimp production to Third World vendors with no safety standards who literally employ child slaves (more on that coming up).
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All that Great Value, of course, comes with often-unseen costs — to name but two, the destruction of American companies and jobs to save a buck and, from time to time, a little radioactive Cesium-137 found in Walmart’s shrimp products sourced from an Indonesian conglomerate that couldn’t care less about food safety standards, as happened earlier this week.
Via U.S. Food & Drug Administration (emphasis added):
“Product and stores affected
Certain raw frozen shrimp products processed by PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati (doing business as BMS Foods), a company located in Indonesia, and sold at Walmart stores in AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MO, MS, OH, OK, PA, TX, and WV.
These products include the following product names, lot codes, and best by dates:
Great Value brand frozen raw shrimp, lot code: 8005540-1, Best by Date: 3/15/2027
Great Value brand frozen raw shrimp, lot code: 8005538-1, Best by Date: 3/15/2027
Great Value brand frozen raw shrimp, lot code: 8005539-1, Best by Date: 3/15/2027…
If you recently purchased one of the impacted lots of Great Value raw frozen shrimp from Walmart, throw it away. Do not eat or serve this product.
Distributors and retailers should dispose of this product and should not sell or serve this product.
If you suspect you have been exposed to elevated levels of cesium, talk to your healthcare provider.”
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But I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer.
What matters most here is that Walmart’s press relations people, with no incentive to deceive the public, assure their valued customers that, actually, their health and safety is a “top priority.”
Via CBS News (emphasis added):
“Walmart said it is recalling some frozen shrimp after the Food and Drug Administration warned that the seafood items, sold under the Great Value label, are at risk of radioactive contamination and shouldn’t be consumed…
“The health and safety of our customers is always a top priority. We have issued a sales restriction and removed this product from our impacted stores. We are working with the supplier to investigate,” Walmart said in an email to CBS News.”
You can bet your bottom dollar that some Walmart lobbyist is on the phone with their liaison at the FDA at this very moment, demanding to know which bureaucrat’s palms they have to grease to make sure their shrimp never gets quality-tested again.
However dystopian you might imagine industrial shrimp “farming” is, it’s probably worse.
Via Fast Company (emphasis added):
“The other ugly, not-so-secret truth about shrimp farming is its close ties to slave labor, especially child slave labor. Shrimp farming, peeling, and other industry operations in and around Thailand have been consistently discovered using the labor of enslaved people, mainly migrants from Burma and Cambodia, to produce shrimp that will eventually end up being sold at major U.S. retailers. Slave labor is so deeply embedded within Thailand’s seafood export industry that human rights advocates say the industry would probably collapse without it…
The people formerly enslaved by these operations report witnessing and living under threat of graphic violence and working alongside children too small to even reach their workstation…
Unchecked water pollution can lead to weakened immune systems, and in extreme cases, death by asphyxiation or poisoning; high population densities in shrimp farms contribute to the spread of disease among the living crustaceans.”
Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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Author: Ben Bartee
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