Yummy

June 27, 2011 12:27 PM

From steroid-spiked pork to glow-in-the-dark meat to recycled cooking oil collected from sewers: China wrestles with food safety problems. 'China's food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre': 'In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie.' 'Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded "like landmines" after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.' 'Until recently, directions were circulating on the Internet about how to make fake eggs out of a gelatinous compound comprised mostly of sodium alginate, which is then poured into a shell made out of calcium carbonate. Companies marketing the kits promised that you could make a fake egg for one-quarter the price of a real one.'

'In 2006,' 'Zhou Qing, an author and dissident.' 'published a book about the Chinese food industry that would extinguish the heartiest appetite. He wrote about foods tainted with pesticides, industrial salts, bleaches, paints and, especially nauseating, imitation soy sauce made from clippings swept up from hairdressers' floors, sold for 5 cents per pound and sent to factories that extract from it an amino acid solution. Zhou wrote that fish farmers confessed to pouring so many antibiotics and hormones into their ponds that "they never eat the fish that they farm."'

'To make some breeds of fish mature more quickly, aquatic farmers feed them ground-up birth-control pills, which cost virtually nothing because of China's strict limits on family size.'

'Last year, He Dongping, a professor of food sciences at Wuhan Polytechnic University, in Hubei province, published results of an investigation into the recycling of discarded cooking oil, which was being scooped out of sewers outside restaurants, reprocessed and then sold at a fraction of the cost of fresh cooking oil. He found that one in 10 restaurants in his area bought the recycled oil, even though it was known to contain a carcinogenic fungus.'

Chinese authorities passed tough food safety laws that include the death penalty, but enforcement is lacking, except for a few high profile showcases. 'China is famous for promulgating laws that are never enforced. There is no equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: A myriad of different agencies reporting to various ministries, including the Agriculture Ministry and Health Ministry, tend to kick responsibility from one to another. Offenders are not usually prosecuted until something goes badly wrong, as in the baby formula case, in which two people were executed.'

Instead, it seems Chinese officials have simply clamped down on reporting about food safety, imprisoning and persecuting not only journalists reporting critical stories, but 'even victims are punished if they complain too loudly. Zhao Lianhai, an advertising executive who led a campaign for safer baby formula after his son developed kidney stones as a result of the melamine-tainted baby formula, was sentenced in November to 2 1/2 years in prison for "inciting social disorder."'

posted by VikingSword (48 comments total)

'China is famous for promulgating laws that are never enforced. There is no equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:

The journalist contradicted herself, there.
posted by Bathtub Bobsled at 12:32 PM on June 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

And this is why I don't buy food from China anymore (and as little as anything else as possible).
posted by curious nu at 12:55 PM on June 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

They sure do sell us a lot of seafood in spite of this.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:57 PM on June 27, 2011

To be fair, watermelons and pumpkins do occasionally explode once they reach a certain size. That's not an indication of nefarious goings-on.
posted by Nomyte at 1:02 PM on June 27, 2011

Yeah, wait till our corporate masters get a hold of this--$$$profit$$$!!

Soylent, anyone?
posted by BlueHorse at 1:02 PM on June 27, 2011

Something something deregulated utopian paradise something.
posted by yeloson at 1:02 PM on June 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

When you have well over a billion people who are generally not able to communicate too well with each other (partly due to wildly lopsided technology rollout and partly due to such a situation being preferred by the political higher-ups), it's easier to brush such things under the rug in the name of economic growth, since mostly it's not the rich and the connected who have to suffer the consequences.

Let's all welcome China to the 1890s United States. Until China has its own "The Jungle" moment (don't hold your breath), products will become increasingly shoddy and the government, rather than clamping down on producers of poisonous goods (below a certain public awareness threshold), will continue to clamp down on the whistleblowers.
posted by chimaera at 1:05 PM on June 27, 2011 [5 favorites]

The invisible hand shakes China's.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:09 PM on June 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

Which only goes to show that it's not red meat that you have to worry about, it's the purple meat.
posted by storybored at 1:09 PM on June 27, 2011

The "fake egg" thing was discussed here previously and was believed to be a hoax.
posted by defenestration at 1:18 PM on June 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

chimaera: "When you have well over a billion people who are generally not able to communicate too well with each other (partly due to wildly lopsided technology rollout and partly due to such a situation being preferred by the political higher-ups)"

I'm not an expert on the subject, but my understanding is that there are quite a few dialects spoken in China, far beyond the widely-recognized Cantonese/Mandarin split. The difficulty of communicating in China seems a lot more fundamental than the technological/governmental aspect of it.
posted by schmod at 1:18 PM on June 27, 2011

And don't forget the apple sauce in the our public school cafeterias:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110529/SUB/305299984
posted by T10B at 1:19 PM on June 27, 2011

I find myself wondering about the price of motor oil vs. cooking oil, and wonder whether some unscrupulous Chinese food company somewhere has acted on that.
posted by crapmatic at 1:19 PM on June 27, 2011

Reminds me of this story:

a wholesaler brought over some camel humps. Rong asked the wholesaler to cook it and let the kitchen staff taste it. Everyone said it had good texture and told Rong to try it. Rong hesitated and took one bite. I saw Rong secretly spit the meat into the sink drain. From then on, the camel humps became a hot dish in the restaurant. Many customers came back repeatedly and ordered the dish. I liked the texture and snacked on the dish from time to time using the excuse of tasting for flavor. Rong smiled and asked if I really liked the camel hump dish. The question came out of nowhere. I was confused and asked her what was wrong. She chuckled, "Those so-called camel humps are in fact breasts from female pigs." I was quite shocked by what she said and did not believe her. Rong smiled and told me that the wholesaler had admitted it to her. She had been keeping it a secret all this time.

Many similarly disgusting stories at the link...
posted by JoddEHaa at 1:21 PM on June 27, 2011

Applesauce!
posted by T10B at 1:23 PM on June 27, 2011

Many similarly disgusting stories at the link...'

Hmm. I'm still trying to decide if I can really get behind the idea that camel humps are somehow less disgusting a primary ingredient for a dish than pig breasts. Gak.
posted by saulgoodman at 1:28 PM on June 27, 2011 [7 favorites]

I'm not an expert on the subject, but my understanding is that there are quite a few dialects spoken in China, far beyond the widely-recognized Cantonese/Mandarin split.

If I understand correctly, most of these dialects share the written language. Even something as simple as a national newspaper that wasn't under the CCP's thumb would go a long way to integrating information across the regions and ethnicities. I don't discount the language barriers, but I still think that technology availability and governmental media control have more to do with it than just the spoken language issue.
posted by chimaera at 1:29 PM on June 27, 2011

Surely you got camel humps and pork mixed up in that story...
posted by zeoslap at 1:30 PM on June 27, 2011

An excerpt from Barbara Demick's next article:

"Until recently, directions were circulating on the Internet about how to grow a kitten inside of bottle to control its shape, much like a bonsai tree is shaped through trimming. Companies marketing professional services promised they could make a custom shaped kitten in three to four months."
posted by defenestration at 1:30 PM on June 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

And this is why I don't buy food from China anymore (and as little as anything else as possible - curious nu

The problem is we don't know where our domestic food manufacturers are buying their ingredients. Four years ago, at least 64 people (mostly children) got sick because the imported from china seasoning used in Veggie Booty was contaminated.
posted by vespabelle at 1:44 PM on June 27, 2011

This is why I told my mother to stop buying the kids candy from the dollar store. Anything edible made in China goes right into the trash.
posted by MikeMc at 1:44 PM on June 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

The Chinese culture of buying and creating counterfeit products has really gotten out of hand!
posted by mikeh at 1:47 PM on June 27, 2011

Wow! They sure have gone way beyond what we Yanks could do with "mud pies". And you might actually get some nutrients from the soil.
posted by bonzo_dog55 at 1:59 PM on June 27, 2011

On another note:

'In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie.'

I see a new generation of superheroes coming our way!
posted by bonzo_dog55 at 2:03 PM on June 27, 2011

saulgoodman: Hmm. I'm still trying to decide if I can really get behind the idea that camel humps are somehow less disgusting a primary ingredient for a dish than pig breasts. Gak.

I suspect that this story has more to do with pork being sold as not-pork to Chinese muslims.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 2:06 PM on June 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

It seems the "soy sauce from human hair" claim came from the same journal and author as the "fake egg" claim.

The author is Alexander Tse-Yan Lee and the journal is (was?) called The Internet Journal of Toxicology. It's all been taken down, unpublished, etc. It appears that there was no original research. You can still read it on archive.org, though.


It appears that a fair amount of this stuff in this article may be bunk.
posted by defenestration at 2:07 PM on June 27, 2011 [4 favorites]

*the stuff
posted by defenestration at 2:09 PM on June 27, 2011

Human hair is a pretty standard ingredient in baked goods all around the world.

Someone's waste product is someone else's cheap ingredient.

Our daughter drinks a lot of Apple juice, it's been getting harder and harder to find standard apple juice that doesn't come in a plastic bottle from Chinese apples. Neither of which made me super happy.

I also eat a lot of Chinese fake meat. I know I'm going to grow a 2nd head or something like that one of these days.

I wish we had a FDA that was testing for these things.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 2:18 PM on June 27, 2011

JoddEHaa: ""Those so-called camel humps are in fact breasts from female pigs.""

Well, "hump" and "pork" are synonyms, after all.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:25 PM on June 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

From the archive.org'ed "counterfeit eggs are a hoax" post, linked above:

Update: May 8, 2007 - Robert J. and I are both very curious about why there are two similar articles about food related tampering from China are written by one "Alexander Tse-Yan Lee". One article is about the fake eggs and other was about soy sauce made from human hair.

Both articles were originally published on the Internet Journal of Toxicology, and then later removed from the site without any explanation. Matter of fact, the only places these two articles still existing are on various bloggers' sites and Archive.org.

To get to the bottom of this, Robert J. contacted the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Fouad Kasim Mohammad, of the Internet Journal of Toxicology for some answers. (42.7 KB pdf)

Dr. Mohammad replies:
"The articles I supervised the review process upon them were not acceptable for publication. They were briefly published online by mistake by the publication staff; thereafter withdrawn."

The only other source on these two stories are reports from something called "Weekly Quality Report" on China Central Television (CCTV). Does anyone from China know anything about that program? The rest are articles and blog posts citing "research" that was mistakenly published.

I wonder if Zhou Qing had any other sources for his book.
posted by defenestration at 2:42 PM on June 27, 2011

The book was called “What Kind of God: A Survey of the Current Safety of China's Food”—I had to go digging for that as the LA Times article didn't think it was worth mentioning—but I cannot find a place to buy a copy or read any of it. Just people quoting from it or nominating/giving Zhou Qing awards. His quoted claims of hair-swept soy sauce and counterfeit eggs are so similar to the previous unsubstantiated claims that the whole thing seems rather fishy.
posted by defenestration at 3:00 PM on June 27, 2011

I wonder if Zhou Qing had any other sources for his book.

I wonder how reliable any information coming out of China is, when it deals with subject matter that's politically sensitive, and where researchers are routinely pressured by authorities. A retraction that has anything to do with a Chinese national is not the same as a retraction here in the U.S..

Widespread food scandals, such as the mass poisonings at weddings cited in the article, or indeed scandals that come to light because food items were exported abroad, even for pets, are present in such numbers that it's hard to argue that it's all a campaign by shadowy dissidents bent on besmirching China's food production practices.

That's the risk one takes in reporting from countries where information is controlled. You never know how much is true, how much exaggerated, and how much underplayed.

Incidentally, the author of the FPP article, Barbara Demick, is a highly respected journalist with extensive experience of reporting from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and most notably has compiled a carefully researched book on North Korea, called "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea", a book I've read, and can actually recommend. At the moment, she's Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, so the reporting here is from someone who is in the country in question.

Again, it's hard to know exactly how much faith to put in information you get, when the power of the state is as bent on denying you access. Perhaps it would have been easier to sit far away on another continent and speculate from that perspective, but the readers must decide for themselves how much stock to put in any piece of reporting.
posted by VikingSword at 3:01 PM on June 27, 2011

VikingSword: I'm only talking about two of the claims (swept-hair soy sauce and counterfeit eggs). She didn't do any research related to those claims, she just took them from Zhou Qing's book.
posted by defenestration at 3:04 PM on June 27, 2011

There was also a story a couple years ago about shredded cardboard used to make fake ground-meat fillings for steamed buns, which was similarly discredited…
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:04 PM on June 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

My father is Chinese-American and we are both very tired of the hidden subtext "Things Chinese Eat Are Gross" (probably to be met with at the FreeRepublic link, which I didn't click because I don't want to use brain bleach). I am glad to hear that the story about soy sauce made from human hair, which has circulated very widely, is probably also a hoax.

As aforesaid, conditions in the United States in the late nineteenth century were no better, and possibly worse, given the limitations of agriculture in those days, before the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Congress left the gross anecdotes out of the bill, but there's certainly room for artificial eggs, or rather artificial milk, in which milk was diluted with water and chalk or flour were added.
posted by bad grammar at 5:22 PM on June 27, 2011

There's an extract from Zhou Qing's book in English on this page, but from a brief search it looks as if this is all that's been translated to date. There's a two-part article on food standards, also by Zhou Qing, here and here. A quick skim doesn't indicate it will do much to clear up the validity of what he's saying, but it looks like interesting reading nonetheless.
posted by emmtee at 5:44 PM on June 27, 2011

On closer almost-2am inspection, the first and second links there are the same, either a book extract mislabelled as an article or vice versa: part 2 of the article at chinadialogue.net is either a further extract or a separate article, however.
posted by emmtee at 5:56 PM on June 27, 2011

My father is Chinese-American and we are both very tired of the hidden subtext "Things Chinese Eat Are Gross"

There's a difference, I think, between this dubious "hidden subtext" and the very real lack of environmental and food standards in China, and the intentional covering up of these low standards in order to export as much as possible.

conditions in the United States in the late nineteenth century were no better

True, but the US got it's act together- in 1906. Time for China to do the same.
posted by dave78981 at 6:00 PM on June 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

JoddEHaa writes "Many similarly disgusting stories at the link..."

Neither camel hump or pig breasts seems all that disgusting to me. But then I've partaken of head cheese, beef tongue, haggis, and pork rinds from time to time. As poor kids we often had chicken feet soup.
posted by Mitheral at 6:05 PM on June 27, 2011

A worrying amount of foods are imported here in Korea from China. People are justifiably worried about it, because there isn't a week that goes by without some exposé on TV about the latest horrible crap that's getting passed off as edible.

Almost every restaurant you go to has signs up that say in large letters that all of their rice or veggies or meat (or whatever -- usually all of the above) is domestically produced. Many of them are probably lying -- enforcement of food safety isn't great but is improving -- but the pervasiveness of the signs point to how important an issue it has become here in recent years.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:33 PM on June 27, 2011

I don't mean to deny the reality of the adulterated food or those who are being harmed by it, but in the United States, where the likelihood of people eating such food is much lower, there does seem to be an anti-Chinese tone to the articles. Do I need to spell out that xenophobia frequently focuses on the alien people's food?
posted by bad grammar at 6:46 PM on June 27, 2011

I wonder if Zhou Qing had any other sources for his book.

I know Zhou Qing and talked with him about translating his book during the run-up to its publication in Chinese. He did a lot of field-work and interviewing with small producers as well as working from secondary sources.
posted by Abiezer at 6:50 PM on June 27, 2011 [2 favorites]

I love my local farmers market. I love the food from the garden I coop.
posted by Oyéah at 6:56 PM on June 27, 2011

stavros, we had the same thing a couple years ago here in Japan. There were problems with frozen food (gyoza) and vegetables from China having unsafe/toxic ingredients. The signs claiming domestic ingredients, you're probably right about at least some of them being untrue. Here in Japan, we've had labelling scandals, with foreign meat and produce being labelled as domestic.

Between having to worry if the food from China is toxic, or if the vegetables from Japan are irradiated, or if the food from the States is tainted with e. coli, I've mostly just given up trying to figure it out.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:57 PM on June 27, 2011

...but in the United States, where the likelihood of people eating such food is much lower...

The urban markets I go to have a lot of produce and seafood that originates in China, and who knows what big food companies put in their manufactured and packaged products in order to keep costs down?

Also:

China is now the single largest exporter of seafood to the United States, and the country is a particularly important supplier of shrimp and catfish, which have historically been two of the 10 most consumed seafood products in the U.S.

Do I need to spell out that xenophobia frequently focuses on the alien people's food?

The concern is not over what the food is, just that it's possibly poisonous. It's not xenophobic to want the food you import to not be life threatening.

But way to play that race card.
posted by dave78981 at 8:07 PM on June 27, 2011 [1 favorite]

I don't mean to deny the reality of the adulterated food or those who are being harmed by it, but in the United States, where the likelihood of people eating such food is much lower, there does seem to be an anti-Chinese tone to the articles.

I think the likelihood of people eating such food probably depends a lot on where you live and where you shop. If you're in an area with a lot of Asian immigrants and their American-born kids, there are likely to be a lot of Asian groceries and a lot of imported Asian food products sold.

We used to buy imported foods at the local Asian groceries regularly until a couple of years ago when I came across reports that the raisin cookies we'd just bought two tins of had been recalled for melamine contamination due to use of Chinese milk.
posted by Lexica at 8:16 PM on June 27, 2011

Here is an FDA alert from 2007 when ALL farm-raised fish/seafood from China was banned, sight unseen, against import into the United States. This was during Bush II, when all manner of de- and ignoring-regulation nonsense was going on, and this was still serious enough to get through all of that. I don't know what the state of the ban is today.

Something to think about when you hear parts of your government calling for the disbanding of the FDA, EPA, and the like.
posted by curious nu at 9:07 PM on June 27, 2011 [3 favorites]

*the stuff
posted by defenestration at 2:09 PM on June 27 [+] [!]

Jeebus, they're making THAT too? We may soon have bigger problems on our hands...
posted by FatherDagon at 12:59 PM on June 28, 2011 [1 favorite]