China Recycling Food

Snacks made from expired animal proteins sold in vacuum-sealed packaging are collected from underground companies by food processors in Wenzhou China and sold to people nationwide as fresh food. Such recycled junk accounts for as much as 5% of the Chinese packaged food business, reported Jiangnan Times on Friday.

Wenzhou police uncovered 10 underground mills.which had large quantities of chemical additives and food coloring agents to give the expired goods a fresh look. Officers said millions of tons of expired packaged food is recycled in Pingyang County each year and sold to the public.

The expired foods are unwrapped and then bleached with cleaning powders. Then they are sold to food processors who use chemical additives to improve the appearance, repack them and sell them to grocery and package stores nationwide.

Access to information about anything that makes China look bad is hard to come by, and often just as untrustworthy as the word from Beijing.

An Asian Development Bank report from 2007 estimated that 300 million Chinese might be affected by food poisoning each year. Foodborne disease can result from consumption of food contaminated by toxins, pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites.

The Jiangnan Times article highlights Beijing’s continual failure to establish modern food safety standards as its market economy expands faster than government regulators can keep pace. Brazil can do it. Mexico can do it. India does it. Why can’t China?

New food safety regulations are currently a part of the government’s 12th Five Year Plan. Chinese consumers, many of which are moving up the income ladder faster than anywhere else in the world, are counting on it for health matters.

Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in The International Herald Tribune on Aug. 17, 2012, that, “In the absence of effective regulations and moral constraints, private profit too often trumps public good. Ironically, what is happening in China is exactly what Karl Marx described 150 years ago,” Huang said.

“Although materialism also is common in the West, religious values, along with well-developed regulatory frameworks and the rule of law, help define what is acceptable in business there. In China, the revival of capitalism has been driven almost entirely by the pursuit of wealth.”