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When Big Factories Are Better
The scare over tainted food products from China keeps getting, um, scarier. As the nation’s government admitted Wednesday, inspectors encountered 23,000 instances of food contamination involving 180 plants around China in the six months from December through May. Why the officials waited this long to come forward is just one of many troubling questions raised by this whole affair, which started with tainted wheat gluten in pet food several months back.
This time around, the focus is on a wide array of products including flour, candy, biscuits, seafood, and bean curd, Forbes reports; those and other foods were found to contain dangerous chemical additives like petroleum by-products, formaldehyde, and a carcinogenic green fabric dye. “It was unclear whether any of the cases involved food made for export,” according to Forbes.
But if we Westerners think we’re getting squeamish, imagine what folks in China are dealing with. “Chinese people are becoming suspicious about the food they eat,” Shanghai-based writer Fuchsia Dunlop explains on Gourmet’s blog. “Some of my friends seek out vegetables with insect-bites in them, on the grounds that they won’t be drenched in pesticides.”
Both Dunlop and Forbes reporter Vivian Wai-yin Kwok cite the particularly small scale of Chinese food factories as likely causes of the safety issues. As Kwok puts it,
Most of the cases involved small, unlicensed food-processing plants with less than 10 people. Government figures show that about 75% of the 1 million food-processing plants … are small and privately owned, according to China Daily.
Here in the United States, there’s a tendency among chowish types to think of small-scale anything as good, at least when it comes to food. And “unlicensed” doesn’t seem all that terrible anymore in American foodie circles, now that there are movements dedicated to freeing treats like raw milk and mangosteens from the tyranny of FDA regulations.
But perhaps it’s as the old saying goes: You have to know the rules in order to break them (or maybe in order to break them safely). Since there’s never been any serious crackdown on illegal food-processing practices in China, the small manufacturers have apparently turned into deranged, penny-pinching molecular gastronomists, replacing food-grade ingredients with cheap industrial chemicals. Hopefully the Chinese government’s efforts to shore up the nation’s food safety won’t just fizzle after next summer’s Olympics.
Posted by | Friday, June 29, 2007 at 8:50am | 2 comments
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Big factories better? Big factories that can afford, for example, the $500,000 pasterization machines? or the propolyne oxide, banned in Canada, Mexico, and European Unions, but allowed by our beloved FDA to be used on the almonds, unlabeled?!! (by the way, why can't I find that article any more, is Chow censoring sensitive material) http://www.organicconsumers.org/bytes...
I don't think it's a matter of big factories. There has been a lot of exposes within China of those small factories that make "fake" food in the past few years. My own brother who lives in China, has become a vegetarian partly due to those knowledge. As well, there has been reports and hidden camera inside factories involving chemicals. It comes down to uncaring, uninformed people who just want to make a quick buck.
There hasn't been enough exposes on the FDA's own very same philosophy maybe because here it's more of a slow-kill. No one notices because we don't all die suddenly of violent death. We slowly develop illnesses, low immune systems, "senility"..and all the stress, hyperactivies, even outbursts of controllable anger...is that any better? Is that any more "OK"? Does that make them any better than "the small factories of China". Oh, wait, in the process of slow-kill, the Pharmaceutical companies gets to step in and keep us dependent on them..not healing us, but just keep us in this compromised existence.
I think that agricultural lobbyists who sways FDA in all these slow-kill decisions..well, maybe they run a few of those Chinese small factories on the side....hmm..am I going to be deleted, too?
The manufacturers of good, real, whole foods have their hearts in the right places whether their factories are small or large. It's better to support them than to get side-tracked by flashy headlines. We have a fundamental problem at home.
Here's the Grinder post about almonds: http://www.chow.com/grinder/3018