I am beginning to think there is something really weird going on. This past winter, toward the end, you'd go to Walmart and there would be a tall pile of roma tomatoes, and they'd have moldy ones in the pile. I often will feel veggies for firmness, the firmer, the longer they last, so often times the tomatoes were soft, not firm, much the same went on with green peppers. Some places I started seeing labels that said, grown in CA packaged in Mexico. Exactly how much packaging goes on when they come in bulk cardboard boxes to begin with, are they now all dumped into a big dumpster and sent off to Mexico to be put in cardboard boxes. It doesn't add up, it would seem cost burdensome to do it that way.
So, now on about my trip to Home Depot yesterday. I needed one fence post to replace a post leaning after a storm, it started to rot toward the bottom. The post all have this like black moldy looking appearance to them. Trying to keep a benefit of the doubt, maybe it's just dirt, I grab one and go inside. I guess I should have also noted that just prior I was looking for a lattice. I shifted through what was left of the size I was looking for, maybe there were around ten left. I found one out of ten that had perfect slats, and one that had a slight rip in a slat, all the rest were so bad you wouldn't want to use them. Both the lattice and the post came from Canada. Once I got inside with the post, I noticed it looked odd on the ends, one end was round, the other end oval. Lucky there was a guy ahead of me otherwise I may have not noticed. It's not like my first rodeo picking out fence post and I had never seen anything like it. It should have never passed quality control. I asked the lady what she thought the black stuff was, she said it looked moldy to her. I told her I was going to go out and look for one that didn't have it on it and both ends matched. I went out there and way on the bottom it looked like maybe there might be a good one. So I went back in, asked her if someone could help get to the bottom of the pile. The guy comes out there, and I told him I would rather have one where both ends match and whatever that black stuff was, wasn't on it. He said it was mold. He said when they use chemicals to keep them from rotting, if after being treated they are not kept dry, mold can grow on them. So I told him I'd go somewhere else not wanting to carry some problem that could spread home with me. But to me, that experience seemed more like third world than Canada, especially the odd ends. So now I am wondering if we aren't being given some back door slip around to stuff we normally wouldn't buy coming from some countries by importing them into countries we trust more. There's some really underhanded stuff going on with all these trade deals they are doing, like MAHA is only about removing stuff from our food that other countries ban, it's not about making Americans healthy again, and Trump's approval to allow the use again of some banned chemicals here, because if they are not banned here, there's no exemption on them being imported. Maybe it's just me, but when you have never noticed such things before, it just seems weird.