Florida's junior Senator is fuming about a lead-adulterated Chinese spice that has poisoned American apple sauce stocks.
On Friday, Rick Scott petitioned Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf to look further into "cinnamon with high levels of heavy metals in them" that made its way into apple sauce pouches. First discovered in North Carolina, issues with the poisoned sweet treat were found in 20 states by the end of November.
"It appears that the high lead levels were associated with the cinnamon in this product, and not the applesauce. It also appears that the company that was selling these fruit pouches was sourcing cinnamon from an Ecuadorian supplier that may have been purchasing cinnamon from Asian countries, such as Communist China," Scott writes.
The Senator, noting that there are "22 million Floridians and more than 300 million Americans in this country that could be exposed to heavy metal in herbs and spices used in common food products," posed a series of questions to the FDA. Included among them are queries about the sourcing of the cinnamon, the source of its contamination, and whether Ecuador (the country in which the apple sauce was made) was cooperating with federal investigatory efforts.
This isn't the first time that a Chinese-sourced foodstuff turned the Senator's stomach. Earlier this month, Scott slammed so-called "sewage garlic," a poopy pejorative used because in China, the product is "being grown in human sewage, then bleached and harvested in abhorrent conditions often with slave labor."
In a letter to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Scott invoked 1962's Trade Expansion Act to claim that the gross garlic could be impinging on America's national security, and that as an "interested party," he has standing to compel the Commerce Department to probe the fecal foodstuff.
"I write to request such an investigation into imports from Communist China of all grades of garlic, whole or separated into constituent cloves, whether or not peeled, chilled, fresh, frozen, provisionally preserved or packed in water or other neutral substance, and the threat they pose to U.S. national security. Food safety and security is an existential emergency that poses grave threats to our national security, public health, and economic prosperity," Scott wrote.
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