natina
06-30-2011, 10:01 AM
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Recycled Cooking Oil Found to Be Latest Hazard in China
SHANGHAI — Regulators are investigating whether restaurants throughout China are creating food hazards by cooking with recycled oil, some tainted with food waste, and prominence given to the issue in the state-controlled media suggests that the problem could be widespread.
The State Food and Drug Administration issued a nationwide emergency notice telling health bureaus to investigate the sources of cooking oil in mid-March. The notice came shortly after a professor and a group of students at Wuhan Polytechnic University announced that they had found widespread use of recycled oil in their region in an undercover investigation. The professor, He Dongping, asserted that recycled oil was being used to prepare 1 in 10 meals in China.
Regulators are now searching for illegal oil recycling mills, and some health bureaus have begun releasing the names of restaurants and food establishments that were found to be using questionable oil.
Last November, regulators in southern China raided several workshops for turning discarded waste — possibly even sewage — into cooking oil.
China has repeatedly been hit by food safety scandals over the past few years, including contaminated milk, eggs and animal feed and the selling of diseased pigs. In 2007, the head of the State Food and Drug Administration was executed for failing to properly police the country’s food and drug industry, and China announced a major food safety crackdown.
But this week alone, state newspapers have reported that regulators found “unsafe artificial green peas” in Hunan Province and some 20,000 pounds of “toxic vegetables” in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Those vegetables had excessive pesticide residues, according to a government Web site.
In the case of the green peas, two illegal food workshops were caught processing dried snow peas and soybeans with chemicals and bleach to produce the appearance of more expensive green peas.
In the city of Chengdu, in southwestern China, food safety officials released the names of 13 restaurants that were found to be using illegal cooking oil. The restaurants specialized in hot pot, a popular simmered dish.
City residents voiced anger at Chengdu regulators for having delayed the release of some of the names of the implicated restaurants, according to the English-language newspaper China Daily.
Here in Shanghai, regulators have warned that illegal cooking oil could be a problem because a large portion of restaurant food grease goes unaccounted for.
Professor He declined to be interviewed this week. China Daily quoted one of his colleagues as saying that the authorities had pressured the professor to stop talking to the media, and that he had also received personal threats.
Huang Fenghong, deputy director of the Oil Crops Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the use of illegal cooking oil was a serious problem in China.
“Some low-end restaurants establish stable buy-and-sell relationships with underground oil recyclers,” he said in a telephone interview this week. “Some oil recyclers just dig out the oil from drains, because high-end restaurants seldom sell that drainage oil.”
Bao Beibei contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/world/asia/01shanghai.html
Recycled Cooking Oil Found to Be Latest Hazard in China
SHANGHAI — Regulators are investigating whether restaurants throughout China are creating food hazards by cooking with recycled oil, some tainted with food waste, and prominence given to the issue in the state-controlled media suggests that the problem could be widespread.
The State Food and Drug Administration issued a nationwide emergency notice telling health bureaus to investigate the sources of cooking oil in mid-March. The notice came shortly after a professor and a group of students at Wuhan Polytechnic University announced that they had found widespread use of recycled oil in their region in an undercover investigation. The professor, He Dongping, asserted that recycled oil was being used to prepare 1 in 10 meals in China.
Regulators are now searching for illegal oil recycling mills, and some health bureaus have begun releasing the names of restaurants and food establishments that were found to be using questionable oil.
Last November, regulators in southern China raided several workshops for turning discarded waste — possibly even sewage — into cooking oil.
China has repeatedly been hit by food safety scandals over the past few years, including contaminated milk, eggs and animal feed and the selling of diseased pigs. In 2007, the head of the State Food and Drug Administration was executed for failing to properly police the country’s food and drug industry, and China announced a major food safety crackdown.
But this week alone, state newspapers have reported that regulators found “unsafe artificial green peas” in Hunan Province and some 20,000 pounds of “toxic vegetables” in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Those vegetables had excessive pesticide residues, according to a government Web site.
In the case of the green peas, two illegal food workshops were caught processing dried snow peas and soybeans with chemicals and bleach to produce the appearance of more expensive green peas.
In the city of Chengdu, in southwestern China, food safety officials released the names of 13 restaurants that were found to be using illegal cooking oil. The restaurants specialized in hot pot, a popular simmered dish.
City residents voiced anger at Chengdu regulators for having delayed the release of some of the names of the implicated restaurants, according to the English-language newspaper China Daily.
Here in Shanghai, regulators have warned that illegal cooking oil could be a problem because a large portion of restaurant food grease goes unaccounted for.
Professor He declined to be interviewed this week. China Daily quoted one of his colleagues as saying that the authorities had pressured the professor to stop talking to the media, and that he had also received personal threats.
Huang Fenghong, deputy director of the Oil Crops Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the use of illegal cooking oil was a serious problem in China.
“Some low-end restaurants establish stable buy-and-sell relationships with underground oil recyclers,” he said in a telephone interview this week. “Some oil recyclers just dig out the oil from drains, because high-end restaurants seldom sell that drainage oil.”
Bao Beibei contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/world/asia/01shanghai.html