Netizens on Food Safety
Tainted milk. Poisoned milk. Radioactive spinach1. Contaminated mantou. Fake wine. Additive-addled pork. Genetically-terrifying strawberries2. Heavy-metal rice. And most of that just in the past few weeks. It seems that even as food prices continue to rise, the quality is going down the tubes. Or at least, we’re finally learning what kind of food we’re paying so much money for. In the wake of today’s news about the contaminated mantou (steamed buns) and the ongoing story of the poisoned milk in Gansu, here are some selected3 netizen comments on food in China.
It’s worth noting these comments are all from Sina Weibo, not Twitter, which means they’re accessible within China, and that the harsher comments may have been deleted by Sina’s censors.
Comments
“After the [poisoned milk], there came mantou and bread [contamination]…how am I supposed to buy food after this?”4
“Even little children know that food has an expiration date, do they really mean to suggest that law enforcement officials [responsible for inspecting the food safety at these factories] didn’t discover [that expired mantou was being used to make more mantou]? That’s impossible! “
“Barf!”
“There’s no big scandal here, don’t be alarmist. Isn’t this just inserting some dye for color? Isn’t it just putting expired mantou back to work? What is that, it’s no big deal…As a great Chinese citizen, as the descendants of Yan Di and Huang Di, as the Chinese who have successfully made it to this point, you’re not even willing to eat this, and you’re not ashamed?”
“Take the people from the [relevant] government department out and shoot them. Why is it always the media that discovers this stuff first?”
“Any food may have something added to it, so why aren’t the higher-level leaders nervous? They think that of course the common people must eat from the same special, environmentally protected stock that they do. From Sanlu5 to Shuanghui6 to mantou7, what high-level official has been investigated or forced to resign? The common people are forced to determine for themselves whether even basic foods and drinks are poisoned or not. Leaders of the food safety [department], have you no sense of shame? If those food inspection officials who shirked their duty aren’t executed, the problem of contaminated food will never disappear.”
“If sea cucumber or abalone was contaminated, that would be one thing; you could just not eat it. But if even bread and steamed buns have problems, what can we do? Actually, we’re a little strong; even in this kind of environment we can subsist. We have nothing to fear from 2012, whatever happens, it won’t be any worse than things are now.”
“[It turns out that] at the apocalypse, it is humans who will destroy themselves.”
“China itself is a society of mutual poisoning, a society of mutual pain-infliction. You add some [poison] to the milk, I put sweet additives into expired mantou, he puts additives into the food he feeds his pigs, oil, crab, rice, duck eggs…even if the milk manufacturers don’t drink milk, they eat mantou. Even if the mantou makers don’t eat mantou, they eat pork. Even if the pork farmers don’t eat pork, they drink milk. In the end, we’re just hurting ourselves. The nation is in peril, inviting ridicule and shame. “
“[With regards to the mantou contamination], I feel this is abnormal, [but] but it reflects a normal phenomenon in the Chinese food industry. The moral logic in the Chinese food industry is that as long as the consumer doesn’t immediately die of the poison, it’s acceptable to pursue the maximization of material gains by any and all means available. [Past examples of this] seem to include: pickled veggies, chicken feet, salted meat, sausages, dumplings, milk powder…”
Conclusion
There really are virtually no positive comments about this — unsurprisingly, people don’t like eating expired garbage or drinking poison — but even I was surprised by some of the really harsh ones. I’m not sure food in China is any less safe today than it was five years ago; in fact, if anything, I’m inclined to suspect it’s actually safer. But the fact that we’re hearing about it (CCTV is obviously on the hunt, and good on ‘em for it!) and the confidence in the government (which seems to be low and ever-dropping) have combined to create a food consumer market that views everything they hear with skepticism. So far, it’s led to mostly angry microblog posts and a run on iodized salt (even though it’s totally useless and the government had been saying that). Clearly, it’s a contentious issue, though, and if these scandals keep popping up, one wonders if the government will consider picking a high-level sacrificial lamb or two to take the fall.
- Which, actually is safe to eat, but still… [↩]
- I saw a report on this on CCTV a month or so ago that has put me off the things entirely, but I can’t seem to find a link now. [↩]
- Yes, I selected them. No, they’re probably not representative of the entirety of China. That said, I chose them more or less randomly, and translated every single one that I read save really short or repetitive ones, and one which contained some really poetic language I had no idea how to translate. [↩]
- It’s worth noting that there are tons of comments like this; I’ve just translated this one to represent them, but I came across a lot more. [↩]
- The guys who brought you melamine-milk [↩]
- The guys who brought you pork with illegal additives [↩]
- There is a clever play on words in the Chinese text here, but I can’t think of a good way to translate the joke into English [↩]
[...] Geek translated some Chinese netizens' comments on food safety. [...]
thanks for that interesting glimpse into recent comments on food safety.
[...] Geek translated some Chinese netizens' comments on food [...]
C Custer,
It think China is taking food safety seriously. While there’s a systematic failures in the tainted milk failures in 2008, it didn’t happen this time. This tainted milk producer is a local producer where some people who have an axe to grind with a milk producer intentionally tainted the milk.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/xinhua/2011-04-12/content_2281393.html
When I buy a loaf of bread from my local store here in the states, how do I know that the government had inspect them? They don’t. I am glad that people are posting pictures and video exposing those people who are intentionally tainting the food supply and they should go to jail. The company who made those tainted steam buns is probably out of business.
“I’m not sure food in China is any less safe today than it was five years ago; in fact, if anything, I’m inclined to suspect it’s actually safer.”
I wish I could share your optimism, but the reality is that higher demand is causing shorter supplies and higher prices. With higher prices, there is increased incentive to cut corners in order to maintain or increase margins. Whoever is getting squeezed the most in the supply chain is going to be cutting the most corners.
If anything, I expect to see even more food scandals in the future.
Eh, that’s just good capitalism
J hit the nail on the head exactly. If I recall, food supplied to functions attended by Politburo level types is sourced from special farms with very serious quality control management, in contrast to……
pug_ster: Yeah, the recent poisoned milk was a case of murder, essentially, rather than a systemic failure. Not so for the (more recent) mantou case, though, which is what most of these comments are about (I think I took one or two from the feed for the milk story, but the rest are all mantou related).
I’m not sure I see your point about food in the US…food is inspected by the FDA, same way it is in China. The difference appears to be that the FDA does a better job, since food in the US doesn’t tend to be poisonous (at least not in the traditional sense, although most of it is so fattening it might be called a kind of poison…)
Anyway, I agree it’s good that people — mostly, it seems to be CCTV reports — are looking into this, but I agree with the commenter above that it SHOULDN’T be the media who is always catching these problems. There are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of officials whose job it is to police this industry and ensure food is safe…what the hell are they all doing if CCTV is able to scoop them so constantly on their own turf?
China, we are what we eat
五毛党
[...] riso e per finire fragole geneticamente terrificanti, è l'elenco stilato da C. Custer nel blog ChinaGeeks [en] attingendo ai commenti in Sina Weibo [versione cinese di Twitter] sulla scia delle notizie [...]
It would be interesting to see how China will deal with public health concerns. In the past, for large cases the government would make an example of the food company executives (I think the CEO of the original tainted milk scandal got life sentence?) while shielding the officials from the Chinese equivalent of FDA. In the US if I remember correctly nothing happened to the executives of the company which made tainted peanut butter, which also killed scores of people. However one would think that after the scandal broke the US FDA would have improved its process. The problem with China is the the system is far more corrupt, so one would expect that the Chinese FDA officials have been bought off. This means that even if the process is improved the effects maybe minimal. Ultimately, to calm the public I expect a medium level official to be punished for corruption.
The paranoid, conspiracy theorist speck of my brain just lit up: assuming the media regulators are dominated by the far-left, hardline, anti-reformist parts of the CCP, what if the state media has been allowed/encouraged to report on the chaotic mess of the not so state controlled economy to build the case to reverse the economic reforms believing that the good old command economy will work now that there’s more money in the bucket. This would be kind of like reporting on Taiwan and India’s democratic governments and using them as an example to not go to democracy.
Between the “food safety gets better” and “more demand makes food safety worse”, I like to believe it’s getting better with the media (state controlled and otherwise) doing the work of PRC’s FDA cleaning up the field but it’s probably constant. We just didn’t hear about the old cases and new unexposed incidents will startup and await exposure.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-04/14/content_12323657.htm
The tainted buns are recalled and 5 people who worked in the company arrested. Considering that you need a license to produce the buns in the first place, I don’t know how can the Chinese government do more regulation.
@ pug_ster : Right, because once you give someone a license to make something, that license magically prevents them from ever making that product with illegal/unhealthy ingredients.
It’s either that, or that magic doesn’t exist, and so the government should probably do some kind of regular, undercover inspections (hey, if CCTV can pull it off, I’m sure the CCP can) to ensure standards are being met.
I forget which of those is the case, though
Obnoxiousness aside — sorry, I just couldn’t resist — I see what you’re saying, and I agree that once the news of the tainted buns got out, the government reaction was quick and more or less appropriate (I am shocked to learn that no food safety officials were arrested, though! ). I think the problem people have with government regulation is that it had nothing to do with this issue being reported. Like most of the recent food safety problems, it was caught by the media, and then the government reacted to that. If the media hadn’t noticed it, we’d all still be eating really gross mantou right now, and that’s the problem. The government reacting to news like this is better than nothing, but it ought to be the government, not the media, that’s actively policing this stuff, sneaking cameras into factories and stuff like that.
Shut up, folks. A leaded mantou a day keeps foreign rule away. It’s either the current diet, or subjugation by the imperialists.