zlacker

About Nestlé's poison baby formula: I though their baby formula was safe, but the problem is that they gave it away (maybe still do?) for free to new mothers in developing countries and when the mothers stopped lactating (because their own milk wasn't being drunk) they made the price hopelessly unaffordable so now the babies couldn't drink from either source, or at least needed to over-dilute the formula.

Totally reasonable to still boycott them, makes more sense than getting annoyed at Microsoft in a situation like this (which is also deserved but more minor in the grand scheme of things).

>>quietb+(OP)
That's more recent. A long time ago (and I'm working from memory, so best to fact check anything I say, because my memory is terrible) it was common to use a particular rat poison in dry milk (and I forget exactly what it was). There were certain standards as to how much rat poison you were allowed to have. It was well known that this would kill a small percentage of babies, but it was thought to be a reasonable tradeoff at the time. To be fair, it wasn't just Nestle. In Japan, the dairy giant Morinaga had the exact same problem. I believe there were law suits that dragged on for literal generations and eventually things changed.

>>mikekc+X4
This is the episode I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morinaga_Milk_arsenic_poisonin...

Which was inadverted addition of arsenic specific to Morinaga in Japan, and not Nestle. However, the committe which managed the case and dragged it on was not created by the company but the Japanese government consisting of a newspaper publisher (??), a hospital director, 2 lawyers and a human rights lecturer.

So it seems like an insufficiently related market and lack of oversight made this drag on causing many deaths and even more people crippled by arsenic. One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison.

Compare with China who executed 2 people involved in the 2008 milk scandal and gave much harsher sentences to others. Although that scandal was deliberate rather than a cover up of bad practices.

>>mikekc+X4
What's the point of even adding rat poison in baby formula? What does that accomplish?

>>grenoi+jk
My understanding was that it's while it is in bulk storage in warehouses. It keeps the rat population down. I've been trying to find evidence that I'm correct about this and like another commenter has posted, it may be that I'm confusing the Morinaga problems with Nestle. However, I was sure I heard about Nestle before I heard about Morinaga, but... My memory isn't the greatest :-(