trying to kill us

Today I learned that Chinese companies purposely spike their food products with chemicals to make them appear of higher quality. People are taking this opportunity to fuss mightily about the uselessness of the FDA for letting tainted food into the US, and I've fussed about them more than once here, but I don't see their ineffectiveness as the real problem. The real problem is that we buy food products from countries where soaking such things in chemicals sounds like a good idea.

I also learned that red wine vinegar is less acidic than white vinegar, and that technically (and cheaply) you can make white vinegar with no wine, just acetic acid in the right concentration. Neither of those facts tells me why some EIs swear red wine vinegar will decontaminate anything, but white vinegar won't. Maybe it's that natural vinegars have more kinds of acids, and that does something, but my resident chemist is asleep, and since us moldies have trouble with fermented products anyway, it may not even matter.