Rick Scott condemns garlic from China as a 'major threat' to US security and food safety

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., freshly reelected to a second term, is once again spotlighting something he thinks stinks: garlic from China.

Scott said in a statement Tuesday he wants several different federal agencies to investigate garlic grown in China and imported into the United States. A press release from his office — headlined “Garlic Grown in Communist China Poses Major Threat to Security & Food Safety” — made its production sound extraordinarily unsavory.

The senator’s office cited “reports that the garlic is being grown in human sewage, then bleached and harvested in abhorrent conditions often involving slave and child labor.” In a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he described the edible bulbs that are a staple of Asian, Caribbean and Italian cuisine as “Chinese sewage garlic.”

It’s not a new issue for Scott, who raised it repeatedly last year.

In a video he posted online in January, Scott held a bulb of garlic and delivered some stomach-churning remarks.

“Reports indicate that Chinese garlic is grown using raw sewage, possibly including human feces, and that the garlic is then bleached to make it appear whiter and cleaner to the eye after its growth in unsanitary conditions. It’s also processed using slave labor. Communist Chinese uses slave labor. And these poor people are forced to peel so much garlic that their fingernails — fingernails — literally fall off so they have to use their teeth to get the job done. It’s horrific. And it means that Chinese sewage, garlic should be unacceptable for human conception.”

On Dec. 6, 2023, he asked the Commerce Department to investigate the safety of garlic grown in China. On Dec. 13, he asked U.S. grocery stores to stop selling “Chinese sewage garlic.”

And on Jan. 16, Scott introduced legislation to ban the importation of garlic from the People’s Republic of China. It was referred to a committee where it was not acted on. No other senators joined him to co-sponsor the bill. He also worked to ban the sales of Chinese garlic in commissaries on military bases or having it served in military dining halls.

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on Scott’s latest efforts. Last year, an English-language newspaper in China ridiculed Scott’s assertions. The headline on a China Daily editorial proclaimed, “Paranoid U.S. politician makes joke of himself.”

A 2017 article from the Office of Science and Society at McDill University in Canada — its tagline is “separating sense from nonsense” — downplayed potential risk.

The article said at the time there was “no evidence that garlic in China is fertilized in this fashion. In any case, there is no problem with this, human waste is as effective a fertilizer as is animal waste. Spreading human sewage on fields that grow crops doesn’t sound appealing, but it is safer than you might think. Urine is normally free from the pathogens that cause diseases, while soils help to filter and clean bacteria found in feces. Actually the skin on garlic is effective at preventing penetration into the bulb. Of course it is a good idea to wash the bulb before using, no matter where it comes from.”

Chinese garlic wasn’t Scott’s only 2024 priority. He ran for reelection, winning by a much larger margin than his 2018 victory or his 2010 and 2014 gubernatorial wins. He ran for Senate majority leader, finishing third among three candidates.

Now he’s back to garlic.

In his letter this week to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Scott said he was concerned that importation of garlic from China and what he described as inadequate oversight of food products from the country.

He added that, “Chinese sewage garlic continues to flood our markets, often at prices that undermine domestic producers who adhere to far more stringent health and labor regulations.”

Scott asked the U.S. Department of Labor to include garlic produced in China in its next update to the “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.”

Scott wrote to the U.S. trade representative to express “urgent concerns about the influx of imported garlic from the People’s Republic of China.” He said the products are “flooding the U.S. market and causing significant harm to American garlic farmers, other domestic agricultural industries and American consumers.”

He said Chinese garlic undercuts U.S. farmers and “undermine(s) the integrity of our agricultural supply chains,” jeopardizes the American garlic industry and threatens U.S. food security. Allowing that to continue sends an “abhorrent message” that China can get away with breaking the rules and hurting U.S. garlic farmers.

In terms of economics, if Scott is able to get curbs on garlic imports from China, that could reduce the supply in the U.S. and raise prices. And higher prices would benefit growers in the biggest garlic-producing state in the U.S.: California.

It had 25,800 acres devoted to garlic production in 2022, according to the World Population Review. The next six states combined had 3,200 acres devoted to growing garlic. Florida wasn’t on the list.

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