Chinese Saying: “People Think Food To Be The Most Important Thing”
March 21st, 2007
Submitted By: Lee Smith
Found on the China Daily website, the two articles that I present here (”No Room for Laxity When It Comes To Food Safety”) and here (”Safe For All Should Be The Recipe”), are spreading wide controversy over China’s food safety issues. While reading them, there were some pretty interesting issues that were brought to my attention. Honestly, I cannot say that I am surprised by China’s issues with their food safety regulations and management. In both articles, the writers focus on China’s current problems with food safety and how they plan to deal with these issues in the future.
The major issues that have been brought forth are: contamination of food by unregulated pesticides, poor packaging and preservation, and finally infestation by parasites. One example of these issues includes a case of parasite-infested snails that sickened 87 people in a Hong Kong restaurant. Another example was industrial dye used on leather, floor polish & household chemicals was found to have been feed to hens and ducks to make their egg yolks red in color.
You might be asking why this issue is happening in an age of technology and science? According to the Chinese government, outdated production methods and laws, followed by the primitive mobility of transportation are primarily to blame. In addition to these setbacks, China currently has ten (10) different agencies regulating its food system each designated to specific areas of concentration. Overlap in these regulatory agencies often leads to grower, transporter and consumer needs not being met when problems do arise.
Fortunately China is taking action. According to China Daily many food safety authorities are beginning to enforce China’s food safety regulations and new round of food safety laws will be coming out this May of 2007.
One article makes reference to international companies being too lenient on Chinese food safety standards. This same article also mentions multinational companies such as KFC, Nestle, Kraft, Heinz and Haagen–Dazs have come under fire with China’s food safety guidelines with accusations of creating double standards for the quality of food they are producing. For example, KFC is being accused of reusing frying oil for up to 10 days and also adding a carcinogenic called magnesium trisilicate to prolong the oils’ life. (Note: this many not be a bad thing, it is just how the article presents it.)
Questions
As our food has to travel farther to get to our dinner table, how do countries as large as China and the US maintain safety?
In the end who is responsible for managing our food safety? In China it is the government, is the same true in the US?
What does the future hold for China’s food supply?
Professor Carr addendum: Good post. Critically important topic to both agriculture and business. Click on this excellent China Law blog post and its discussion thread (”Don’t Drink the Water, Don’t Breathe the Air, Don’t Eat the Food, and Don’t Wear the Shoes“) that relates to Lee’s post. Think of the business opportunities, across a variety of industries, that need to and will develop to help solve and clean up these food safety issues in China!!!
Entry Filed under: Pre-Departure, China, Misc.
5 Comments Add your own
1. Kerry Huang | March 21st, 2007 at 1:57 pm
The facts and points brought up in these articles are very scary. This kind of crack down has been going on for years. I have seen on the TV news in China an expose on a pork jerky manufacturer. The pork was left exposed outside in the sun to dry as flies swarmed about on the pork. Also, I’ve seen restaurant workers leave the bathroom with out washing their hands. Personal hygiene in China is not very big (no soap in public bathrooms, many people do not bath or brush as regularly as Americans). All these things combined makes for a dangerous eating environment in China.
As the articles have stated, the government is trying to solve the food safety problems. I think the real problem lies in health education and enforcement. Many don’t wash with soap. Why? They were not raised to always wash hands with soap. Enforcement will be difficult because there are only so many government workers and many street food stands, restaurants, open markets, etc.
In the US food safety is managed by the government. The kind and amount of pesticides is regulated. LA county requires a letter rating for all restaurants that reflects the grade earned after inspection. Some industries also have their own standards. McDonald’s sends their own people out to meat processing facilities for inspection.
I am disappointed that even large multinational firms have problems in China. It makes consumers believe that these firms do not treat all consumers the same across the globe.
Sad to say but I doubt much headway will be made in China’s food safety unless there was a large number of food safety-related deaths to cause a large public outcry. In the US we have government regulated labels that we can trust but the Chinese do not (as far as I know). As mentioned in a previous post, I always check the country of origin when shopping at the Asian supermarket. I always purchase the Taiwan or Hong Kong product over the China one even if it costs more.
2. Ryan Maaskamp | March 21st, 2007 at 5:24 pm
These food safety issues provide vast opportunities for businesses in this field. I believe the opportunity to supply an entirely new infrastructure for the food safety industry (in China) would light up any CEO’s eyes. I do have two ideas to think about before entering the market:
The task of establishing a norm seems counterintuitive to the process of marketing. Normally, we want to provide a product that stems from current norms and provides better results. As Kerry mentioned, many Chinese citizens are raised without the same sanitary norms as the U.S. So how can a company sell a product, which may be beneficial, if doesn’t fit within the habits and norms of a society? If we decided to enter the market, whom would we target with these new standards? Do we focus on younger generations in hopes of building a habit, or do we try and integrate these standards into all generations?
The last concern involves the price of these products. How will the purchase of sanitation products and better ingredients affect the price and availability of these products?
3. Meghan Girvin | March 22nd, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I think food safety is such an important issue and countries around the world need to ensure safety in order to have healthy populations. I think that the government is best suited to regulate food safety because it has the size and control to oversee an entire county’s food production. The government has the power to create laws that require food safety and the ability to enforce these laws. The articles state that the Chinese government is moving towards making their food safety laws more strict and enforcing them better so they are on the right track. Unfortunately, because China is such a large country and change takes time, it will probably take a while before food safety laws are enforced and followed to the same degree that they are in the United States. The only way to be sure that the standards are brought up in China is to enforce the laws and continue making the standards higher. Also, multinational corporations, like KFC, need to do their part by keeping the standards for their restaurants the same in all countries they operate in. If they allow their standards to be more lax in countries that don’t enforce laws as much, they are only perpetuating the problem. These issues are scary especially for people coming from countries like the U.S. where food standards are more strictly enforced. It makes me wonder if it is better to take precautions when eating in other countries like China or take the advice “don’t think, just eat.”
4. Jared Samarin | March 22nd, 2007 at 6:25 pm
I would say that these issues concerning food safety present a fantastic opportunity to the motivated business person who would like to take on the challenge. However as a farmer myself I realize that typically asking a producer to inact standards that he does not legallly need to is occassionally like pulling teeth.
In this country it takes governmental intervention on the part of either the USDA or FDA to spark a food safety change and I would expect that in China this would be no easier. I would think though that eventually with poulation growth the Chinese government will need to ensure safe and nutritious food supplies for its people. To not would be folly. With that said I would also see ag exports into China as a possible growth industry if the governement begins to regulate quality very closely. Imports will most likely not come from California because of cost but I would think nations like Turkey, Chile, and Brazil could become major players helping to feed the Chinese while American firms supply qulaity control software and equipment.
5. nanheyangrouchuan | March 28th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I’m actually going to defend China a bit in this post. The US restaurant industry is hardly a model, better, but I’ll bet most people here have worked fast food or in restaurants sometime in their lives.
I was actually in China when Haagen-Daaz got busted. They subcontracted out production and the producer simply set up an ice cream making factory in an apartment. Haagen Daaz thought that subcontracting in China gave them the same “plausible deniability” that it does in the US. Nope. Their name was dragged through a field of horse manuer and the press made it a point to show every filthy square centimeter of that apartment. This attempt to subcontract for “plausible deniability” was also attempted by Nestle’s bottled water division and KFC’s outsourced meat processing.
Living in China will make you sick. You will have severe colds a couple of time a month for the first year you live there, then you’ll be so used to the feeling you just won’t notice. Diarrhea will be a constant nuisance for you.
The best bet when eating out is to eat at better restaurants and go where the crowd goes. Nothing is gauranteed.
Also, make it point to eat spicy foods. Spices started off as germ killers thousands of years ago and people just got used to it. Even if the kitchen has glass walls, you have no idea about how the food was processed.
Make sure to budget enough money to shop at City Shopper, all of that food is imported up to 5 times the cost it was back home.
And when some company in the US or EU tells you that they “inspect” their outsource partners, they see only what they want to see and what the factory manager wants them to see.
Again, plausible deniablity.
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed