Flash in the Pan

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities, posted a day late because of Labor Day:

• You're a Jerk When You're Drunk It's a new slogan that Finnish brewers are using to deal with young adult binge drinking and goes with a web site with pictures of a woman vomiting into her handbag. (Independent Online)


• Designated Driver A drunk man has his 11-year-old son drive him home. Police stopped them when the boy was driving the wrong way down a one-way street. (Arizona Central)


• What Am I Eating? The Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list of proposed names for foods that have received such odd translations as "steamed crap" and "virgin chicken." Wait, those weren't ... literal translations, were they? (AP)


• What Do They Do for Scotch? A group of Missouri men had a plan for stealing beer from a package store: have one of them wear a mask and do a naked hula as a distraction. Had they maybe had success getting beer earlier that day? (AP)


• No-Stench Zone A Taiwan restaurant apparently served so much of a southern Chinese dish called Stinky Tofu that it was fined for exceeding smell limits three times. (Reuters)


• The Punishment? Seconds Four Swiss prison inmates escaped when one of them squeezed through the food hatch in his cell door and released the others. Guess when he said he didn't get enough to eat he was serious. (Ananova)

Labels: China, driving, drunk, Finland, Switzerland, Taiwan, tofu, weird

The New York Times has an article today about food films - thin coatings designed to prolong food life and improve food safety:

If their work pans out, thin films woven with a thyme derivative that can kill E. coli could line bags of fresh spinach. The same material in powder form might be sprinkled on packages of chicken to stop salmonella.

Strawberries could be dipped in a soup made from egg proteins and shrimp shells. The resulting film — invisible, edible and, ideally, flavorless — would fight mold, kill pathogens and keep the fruit ripe longer.

There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with this on the surface, pardon the pun. We seen many food safety problems over the last few months, and food distributors have been spraying edible wax on fruits for years to keep them fresher, or at least looking so.

But I wonder whether all this is wise in the long run. The problem we face in food safety is mishandling, driven by the demand for food to be cheap. That results in cutting corners and things ultimately going wrong. It may be that we've always had these problems, but as the food chain gets more complex and more production gets centralized by economic forces, we're at increased risk that when something goes wrong, it does so in a big way. Look at this paragraph for a moment:

Most coatings are made from gluten, cellulose, starch and various proteins approved by the Food and Drug Administration as safe for consumption. They line ice cream cones and coat battered frozen food. A layer of film in some frozen pizzas keeps moisture from the sauce from seeping into the crust. Fresh sliced apples and other produce get coatings of ascorbic acid to keep them from turning brown.

Gluten? From wheat, perhaps? You might remember stories about the pet food problems with wheat gluten from China. Ascorbic acid? What nation has pretty much priced everyone else out of manufacturing that substance? China.

Films based on organic material are, themselves, subject to food problems. Perhaps there is some processing that make them absolutely safe, but my notion of safety has changed over the years. I don't trust that something is safe because some agency or corporation claims it is, as I've seen too many cases of fabrication of information.

Trying to find high tech ways of working around problems is only treating the symptom. We might be better off demanding that things change - not by complaining, but by investing our dollars elsewhere. Buy locally produced food by people you can chase down if you need to. When products don't need to ship and sit for weeks, they need less processing, and less processing should mean some price containment. When you don't optimize for distribution, farmers can focus on other aspects of food, like nutrition and taste. And we can all pay less attention to safety and more to living.

Labels: China, films, food safety, local

A weekly round-up of food and drink oddities:

• Weight Loss of the Mysterious West We in the US have seen our share of secret Asian weight loss measures. Now a Chinese company is facing oversight heat from seling a weight loss patch, supposedly used by Chelsea Clinton and imported from America, that oozes oil. Ew. (Reuters)


• Milwaukee Mess Some Wisconsin brewers, protesting a proposed law that would restrict the ability of brew pubs broadly selling their beers from serving food, spilled beer suds into the Milwaukee river. Fermenting protest, perhaps? (AP


• More Dinner? Three hours after running out on a $410 bill at an expensive Minneapolis restaurant, the two stopped for drinks and more food at another - owned by the same restauranteur, an ex-Judo instructor, who chased one down an alley and held him on the ground until the police showed up. (Independent Online)


• Relax, Charlie Japanese researchers want to reduce the stress of tuna after their caught so they taste better when they hit the plate. Here's an idea - have a steak special. (Reuters)


• With Its Own Paper Wrapper In one part of Beijing, the "pork" buns are partly filled with chemically softened chopped cardboard. I'm waiting for some American fast food establishment to hop on the trend. (AP)


• Put Down That Charcoal A Pennsylvania mayor got into trouble for banning outdoor grilling at night. Wonder if anyone charred him in effigy? (AP)


• Larceny - and Love Guests at a dinner party foiled an attempted armed robbery by offering the criminal a glass of wine. He accepted their hospitality, apologized, asked for a group hug, and left. (AP)


• Good Thing It Wasn't the Butter Knife An 47-year-old woman faces charges after stabbing her 86-year-old busband with a fork as they were fighting in a restaurant. (Detroit News)


• Soba Soak A Japanese spa is offering an experience of bathing in a fake giant bowl of noodle soup. Faux Pho? (AFP)


• Swell Swill A sub-$3 bottle of chardonnay best hundreds of others from around California to be named the state's best. Thousands of wine snobs are looking for new terms to describe the sensation of having egg on your face. (WPVI-TV)

Labels: brewers, California, chardonnay, China, Japan, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, noodle soup, restaurant, tuna, weird, wine

I saw a press release from a company called China Organic Agriculture, which currently focuses on organic rice. At a time when Chinese food products have caused so many health problems becasue of contamination, the idea of having that country enter the organic food supply is disconcerting. According to a page no longer on the company's site, but still in Google's cache, selling to the US is apparently one of its goals. Given the New York Times story about the widespread nature of problem foods, I think my organic purchasing will stick to home grown products.

Labels: China, imports, organic, rice

As the New York Times reports, China is far from being the single source of contaminated food, which includes:

• black pepper, coriander powder, and shrimp with salmonella from India


• crabmeat, lollipops, and dried chili peppers from Mexico so dirty that it wasn't edible


• mislabeled candy from Denmark (impounded 520 times last year)


• traces of illegal pesticides on produce from the Dominican Republic

If this has been so prevelant - and apparently making China sometimes look like a piker, why is the media just getting around to reporting this now?

Labels: China, contamination, Denmark, Dominical Republic, food, Mexico

There are news reports that China has closed down many food producing factories. Here's something from industry news outlet ThomasNet.com:

Acknowledging systematic problems in its food supply, the Chinese government said it closed 180 food manufacturers and revoked 37 processing licenses of food makers found to have used industrial chemicals and additives in food products.

The notice came in a state-run newspaper in response to uproar around the world because of industrial chemicals found in food and health products. Apparently the ingredients were used from December 2006 to May 2007. And here's an admission according to Forbes.com:

The watchdog said it had found 23,000 cases of adulterated food nationwide in the six months, or 128 a day, involving 200 million yuan ($26 million) worth of products including flour, candy, pickles, biscuits, bean curd and seafood. Eleven cases have been handed over to courts.

Good that they're doing something, but, really, so what? Amazing that the government was able so quickly to pinpoint all these facilities. That leaves me, at least, with deep distrust and a suspicion that government officials must have known about most of this all along. According to Forbes, the government "claimed that cases of food contamination were isolated," but clearly it couldn't have really thought so.

Forbes also reports that it's unclear whether any of the cases being brought to court involved foods for export. But the problem here is that you can't just look at what products have officially been designated as exports. Counterfeiting is a huge problem worldwide. "It’s happened in the food business as well," said Neil Smith, an intellectual property attorney with Sheppard Mullin, when I interviewed him a couple of years ago about the issue of counterfeiting. "In some cases, oriental food products. In a lot of cases they’ll come in from China, or Chinese herbs like ginseng products, that will be counterfeited and you’ll see those in the wholesale market or in the stores."

If "regular" food products made in China can wind up with industrial chemicals as an ingredient, why would anything think that counterfeits would be an exception? The only difference is that the people who counterfeit are by definition doing something cut-rate to fool people. I see this as a complete PR exercise, at least right now. Perhaps there is a change in attitude among Chinese leaders, but they'll have to prove it over a period of years, and not on simply as an exception to business as usual. Let's not forget the second to the last paragraph in the Thomas.net story:

Despite that, Chinese authorities said yesterday they had logged 68,000 cases of adulterated food in 2006 and withdrew 15,500 tons of substandard food from the market.

That's a whole lot of food. I wonder how many cases they miss.

Labels: China, contamination, counterfeit, fast food

Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of China's food and drug administration from 1998 to mid-2005, was removed from the position. The reason? Bribery and corruption. And on Tuesday, after pleading guilty to the charges, he was given a death sentence.

Before writing this off as Chinese indifference to the individual and having an unbalanced view of justice, realize that this situation with bad products hitting the market has been serious. For all the problems the U.S. has seen with Chinese food imports and deadly pet food, it's nothing compared with the deaths that China has experienced as the result of bad antibiotics and drugs. Then a key ingredient in antifreeze appeared in cough syrup and tooth paste shipped to Central and South America, with 100 dying last year in Panama alone, according to the New York Times account. (However, USA Today puts the number at 51, once again showing the collective objective accuracy that is the United States press.)

Zheng got richer to the tune of $832,000 ($850,000, according to the Times), not that it will do him any good now. China is under huge pressure to reform its safety record. According to USA Today, "Zheng's sentence requires review by a higher court and approval by China's highest judicial panel before he can be executed."

It could be that this is window dressing, as USA Today reports:

Qiu Feng, an independent scholar and columnist for China Newsweek magazine, wrote on the website Southcn.com that Zheng's sentence would do little to end deeply entrenched graft.

There's also a problem of counterfeit food that the papers and some other accounts mention in passing. Counterfeiting of products is an enormous problem, and one of the big categories is in food, particularly packaged Asian foods. Those simply won't be touched by improved official inspections because, by definition, counterfeit products are outside the official manufacturing and inspection systems. The deaths and injuries we've seen will likely to continue until counterfeiting itself is reduced, separately from increasing regulation.

Labels: Asian, China, Chinese, counterfeit, food safety, government

If you didn't catch the report on today's Morning Edition on NPR, you should check it out. It has a reasonably comprehensive view of how much danger Chinese food imports could present and how the current situation got to where it is. Kudos to the reporting and research.

Labels: China, food safety, NPR

According to researchers at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, the seafood in 11 coastal Chinese cities is heavily contaminated with organochlorine pesticides (DDT and similar products) as well as hexachlorocyclohexanes. Some of these :

are ubiquitous in the environment and may continue to pose health threat to both wildlife and human beings, due to their persistency, bioaccumulative
ability, and potential toxicity.

Given that China has become a major seafood exporter and that the US is one of its big collective customers, you might want to put that shrimp in a decontamination chamber before putting them on the barbie.

Labels: China, health, pesticides, shrimp