Many products in Asian supermarkets are made in China - we try to buy from brands that manufacture in other Asian countries if possible, or the USA.

Some examples: - spices and condiments for chinese cooking, - seeds, nuts, and canned vegetables that are not common here - asian meat preparations like fish ball, vietnamese beef ball

This seems to be pretty prevalent in the Asian-American population. I wonder if this is filtering out to the general population.

I've been told many times by members of the older generation to never buy food made in China. Stories (rumors?) of plastic mushrooms and polluted ingredients abound.

I did that until I discovered the Lao Gan Ma (Old Godmother) brand of chili sauce.

It’s just too good to care.

Is this the stuff with the little garlic bulbs in it? What’s a fair price to pay?

They have a couple different flavors. My favorite is the one with peanuts in it. I don’t recall seeing garlic bulbs.

It looks like this:

http://nymag.com/strategist/article/lao-gan-ma-best-chili-sa...

At Asian supermarkets, they should be less than $5. I usually see them them at Ranch 99 (a Chinese chain supermarket) for 3.99.

But the price can vary if you go to a predominantly Korean or Vietnamese supermarket.

For a while one of the frozen vegetables packages in Costco listed one of the countries of origin as China (IIRC they stopped selling it due to ironically a Listeria outbreak from a us sourced vegetable and I ate all of my recalled package because safe handling/cooking is adequate treatment). Also go to Asian markets for spices and other staples and make sure to get stuff sourced in Korea, Japan, Taiwan or USA.

I've seen garlic from China in non-Asian supermarkets before.

Same, I saw it in Seattle. Which is mind-boggling because tons of garlic grows on the west coast

Yes, on the other hand have heard how shipping stuff to/from China is so cheap that Tyson got permission to ship frozen chickens to China for manual processing, then shipping the processed chickens back to the USA because it might be economically feasible at some point though they probably just use that to force down labor costs in the USA. https://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/10/curious-case-chinese-chi...

China grows an enormous amount (~80%) of the world's garlic so it's not that surprising.

Aldi in New Hampshire has garlic from China, as of last year at least.

This is the most obvious one: http://mummums.com/ At one point, you could even find it in WholeFoods.

I'm sure there are more in terms of processed food. I used to look at processed food packaging for babies and toddlers very closely. There are actually a lot of processed foods where the country of origin is just not listed. If you read carefully most of them just list the country where the food was packaged and not where the ingredients were sourced. When you call them to ask, their customer reps have no answer. Emails go unanswered as well. It could also be just be sourced locally, but they just suffer from a lackadaisical PR dept.

I wouldn't be surprised if cod & tilapia from China end up in the US restaurants and supermarkets as well