Ketchup diplomacy and foie gras delivery

We read a fair amount of China-related news, and it's hard not to get a bit apathetic about it all, since so much of it seems to revolve around the same few topics. Slate's article, however, touches on something we don't normally hear about: China's tomato products industry.:

China, it turns out, now grows more tomatoes for processing—the kind that get turned into ketchup, pasta sauce, salsa—than any place in the world besides California, and maybe Italy. The precipitous rise of the country's tomato industry, which scarcely existed a decade ago, is wreaking some havoc.

On the Access Asia site we found, in their newsletter, a short posting about foie gras. It turns out that much of the foie gras produced in the world, and which an unsuspecting consumer might think is even French, is actually manufactured in China. Unfortunately mass production means force feeding geese and other unpleasant things.

Photo from ernoldiño