Daily Lessons from Life 03 May 2013 - China nabs 900 over food scandals

"China nabs 900 over food scandals - AFP 3 May 2013

BEIJING: China has detained 900 people for meat-related crimes including selling rat and fox meat as beef and mutton, the public security ministry said, in another blow to the nation's food safety.

News of the three-month operation added to a string of scandals that have galvanised public concern, from recycled cooking oil to dangerous chemicals in baby milk powder.

Altogether there were "382 cases of water-injected meat, fake mutton and beef, diseased meat, toxic and harmful meat products", the ministry said on its website on Thursday.

"Nine hundred and four suspects were arrested, more than 20,000 tons of various types of fake or inferior meat products were confiscated."

The crimes ranged from sellers in eastern Jiangsu province making fake mutton from fox, rat and chemicals, and others in southwestern Guizhou province mixing hydrogen peroxide solution with chicken claws.

The public security ministry said the sting was part of a wider probe into food safety issues, from the discovery in March of thousands of dead pigs floating down a Shanghai river to the problem of "gutter oil". Cheap recycled cooking oil is available nationwide, made illegally from leftovers scooped out of restaurant drains.

One of China's greatest food safety scandals hit in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill.

In another recent incident, US fast food giant KFC was hit by controversy after revealing some Chinese suppliers provided chicken with high levels of antibiotics, in what appeared to be an industry-wide practice."

For those who are religious, say little prayer for PRC Chinese before your sleep. Many innocent Chinese will need that.

Lessons for me are:

1. it is a big country with 1.3 billion people. 900 napped is nothing. Hopefully these are the lots and others are clean living, law abiding, morally upright and honest business people trying to make some decent money serving their fellow country men and women;

2. some would say it is FAT hope, in a land where you don't use to see FAT people when it was less developed and less commercialized 30 years ago, to have such unrealistic thinking as in item 1 above. Well, without hope, there is no motivation to move forward!;

3. is this 3-month sting operation the start of many more or just the end of it all? will the law enforcement agencies and officials be relentless in pursuing such twisted minded business people who had no conscience to speak of? while we acknowledge that relying on enforcement will only achieve COMPLIANCE (doing the right things when someone is watching) while everyone should be pushing for COMMITMENT (doing the right things when NO ONE is watching). Will the business people wake up to the ideas that if they want to make it a sustainable and continuing business, they must keep to being ethically and clean. The 'dark way' may make you more money in a shorter time but it will DEFINITELY shows you up - not if it will but WHEN it will. Of course, if the business people is a 'fly-by-night' one-off operation, COMMITMENT will never be there.

May we eat in peace when we know that business people have commitment to keep the foods SAFE and still make decent commercial returns for their labour and investment. Amen?