Paranoid US politician makes joke of himself: China Daily editorial

Talk of excrement and excretion will often raise a laugh or perhaps a nose twitch of disgust. US senator Rick Scott has managed to achieve both of those by saying that Chinese garlic "poses grave threats to our (the US') national security, public health, and economic prosperity" because it is grown in sewage. His scatological scaremongering has not only made him the butt of jokes but also led to people looking askance at his willingness to stoop so low with his muckraking just to try and smear China.

Senator Scott and his team have evidently not done their due diligence. He referred to "online videos, cooking blogs and documentaries" showing how people in China use sewage as fertilizer. Scott seems not to know that back in 2017, the Office for Science and Society at McGill University in Quebec, which attempts to popularize and explain scientific issues, had already concluded there is "no evidence" that sewage is used as a fertilizer for growing garlic in China. It added that: "In any case, there is no problem with this".

Although it might not sound appealing, animal waste is an effective fertilizer. The fermented waste of most animals commonly seen around a farm serves as good fertilizer for plants because it's a rich source of nutrients. That's true of human waste as well.

It's just part of nature's grand carbon cycle.

As the US Environmental Protection Agency points out, throughout history, people who raise livestock and poultry have used manure as a fertilizer and soil amendment, as it "contains many useful, recyclable components, including nutrients, organic matter, solids, energy, and fiber". It states that today manure is being used "in more ways than ever to mitigate many of the environmental impacts that result when manure is treated as a waste".

In China, garlic is grown in large fields, some of which, such as those in Qixian county, Henan province, can be as large as 46.7 square kilometers, for which all fertilizer must be processed by factories to be spread on garlic or any other plant.

All this information is easily found online, but Scott's team has chosen to ignore the facts in favor of portraying the humble bulbous herb as a ticking time bomb in the stomachs of US diners.

If it wasn't for the fact that they seem to earnestly believe the excreta that emerges from their mouths one might be led to believe that it has become something of a competition among some in the US Congress to see who can come up with the most preposterous notion for a threat from China that the more credulous among the US population are willing to swallow. Unfortunately, rather than being a cozy clubhouse wager, it seems the US politicians uttering such remarks are the gullible embracers of such conspiracy notions.

Chinese garlic is not a threat to US national security or the health of US citizens having people in positions of power who are willing to give credence to such ordure is.