- Last month, AP journalists followed and filmed trucks loaded with freshly peeled shrimp from the Gig shed to major Thai exporting companies and then, using U.S. customs records and Thai industry reports, tracked it globally. They also traced similar connections from another factory raided six months earlier, and interviewed more than two dozen workers from both sites.
U.S. customs records show the shrimp made its way into the supply chains of major U.S. food stores and retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Whole Foods, Dollar General and Petco, along with restaurants such as Red Lobster and Olive Garden.
It also entered the supply chains of some of America's best-known seafood brands and pet foods, including Chicken of the Sea and Fancy Feast, which are sold in grocery stores from Safeway and Schnucks to Piggly Wiggly and Albertsons. AP reporters went to supermarkets in all 50 states and found shrimp products from supply chains tainted with forced labor.
In other news: The world continues to run on practices that the average person only finds negative due to the fact they are no longer exposed to them living in nice, comfy, cities where the most horrible thing they deal with is a line at the gas station. If the average person knew about the slavery used to make so many of our products, the conditions the people who work in the factories that make our stuff were held in, the sheer amount of environmental destruction we create, the way animals are treated in the "meat factories' we get our hamburgers from, they would be horrified. However, if they were truly well informed, and knew the costs of not doing those things, it is likely the status quo will never change. Stuff like the above isn't done because people are evil, those things are done because they are the best way for things to happen, the actions of a thousand people in a thousand different situations, with a thousand different motives. Some examples, of course, are crossing the line, such as literal slavery. However, things like bad conditions in developing nations, or chick grinders are things that truly do make the world better, not worse, in the long run, through being the only/best way to humanely kill thousands of baby chickens, or being the only way in which these developing nations will become developed. Strangely like the story in "the giver". We put the moral burden, the pain, the guilt, on those who aren't us, so we can live a more happy and productive life.