I live in the USA... in Texas, on the Gulf Coast.

Texas produces a huge variety of foods.... fruits and vegetables, rice, corn, beef, pork, lamb, bison, chicken, millet, soybeans, sugar, freshwater shrimp, farmed fish and farmed salt water shrimp. The Gulf Coast is home to fish and shrimp fleets,

So why, when I go to the grocery store, are those foods not there?

Take flounder. The Gulf produces some of the best flounder in the world.... and it is prolific. Yet all the flounder in the grocery stores is from China...

Why would I want to buy flounder from China? Three hundred miles away flounder are caught by the ton... yet the flounder in the store comes half way round the world.

And from China of all places.... Let me tell you about flounder. They are bottom feeding fish. They live on the floor of the ocean right up next to the land and catch little fishes and shrimps that swim their way.

Now China dumps 81 Billion...with a "B"... Billion tons of raw, that is untreated, industrial and residential sewage into their coastal waters a year... At least that is the amount that they admit to dumping... who knows what the true amount is... they don't know... they are estimating.

So why would I want to eat flounder that are caught in that pollution soup?

The inland waterways of China are some of the worst in the world when it comes to pollution.

http://www.xomba.com/the_huaihe_river_basin_remains_heavily_polluted

And the people who produce the food do not exercise care when raising and preparing food....

http://www.xomba.com/health_officials_in_china_warn_people_not_to_eat_mice

http://www.xomba.com/poisonous_beef_kills_one_sickens_55_in_china

They deliberately add toxic chemicals to

http://www.xomba.com/chinese_fish_dyed_yellow_with_poison

http://www.xomba.com/expose_on_cardboard_dumplings_was_it_a_hoax

http://www.xomba.com/chinese_fish_fed_cancer_causing_drugs

http://www.xomba.com/mystery_deaths_in_chinese_school_6_students_die_after_eating_dinner

So.... I don't want to eat seafood from China... and I should not have to, after all, we have a fishing fleet and we catch a huge variety of fish...

Why cant I buy fish from our fishing fleet in the grocery store...

Now, I can find Wild Caught American Shrimp... sometimes. And Alaskan seafood is sometimes available... but much of the King Crab and Snow crab is Russian caught and Chinese packed....

Most of the shrimp comes from the Far East... Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Viet Nam and China are supplying most of the seafood....

It is not much better in the produce department... much of the produce is from Mexico, Chile or Guatemala.....and China. Ginger root clinging to the dirt of China still on it.... when the finest ginger root in the world is grown in Hawaii....

I looked at some very pretty and very expensive refrigerated fresh fruit in glass jars in the produce department today....

It was from China. How can it be cost effective to ship refrigerated fruit in glass jars half way around the world.... Wouldn't it be less expensive and more energy efficient to ship it from the Valley in Texas or from California or Florida.. or somewhere in the USA....

Moving on to the canned food shelves.... China, China, China, Mexico, Philippines, Indonesia, China, China....

There I found the most astounding thing of all.... I stood in the aisle of a Walmart in Texas, where we grow rice, and held in my hand a small container of already cooked rice, packaged in an individual serving container, needing only to be heated in the microwave prior to consumption.

Rice, grown in the polluted rice paddies of China, cooked in the contaminated water of China, packaged in plastic in China made with God knows what chemicals and contaminants in the plastic, shipped half way round the world....

Absurd