Food safety scandal rocks China as report claims cooking oil carried in same trucks as fuel
Food safety scandal rocks China as report claims cooking oil carried in same trucks as fuel
Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.
Public outrage is mounting in China over allegations that a major state-owned food company has been cutting costs by using the same tankers to carry fuel and cooking oil – without cleaning them in between.
The scandal, which implicates China’s largest grain storage and transport company Sinograin, and private conglomerate Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, has raised concerns of food contamination in a country rocked in recent decades by a string of food and drug safety scares – and evoked harsh criticism from Chinese state media.
It was an “open secret” in the transport industry that the tankers were doing double duty, according to a report in the state-linked outlet Beijing News last week, which alleged that trucks carrying certain fuel or chemical liquids were also used to transport edible liquids such as cooking oil, syrup and soybean oil, without proper cleaning procedures.
Sure, China is a dictatorship, but in return they are:
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Just as corrupt in industry.
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In Decline from their once amazing rate of people exiting poverty.
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Losing all of their trade partners.
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Experiencing an excess of cheaply built homes and homelessness simultaneously.
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Are being forced out of the global tech economy.
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Fully reliant on Russian Oil.
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More likely to enter new wars every day.
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Incapable of managing their own agriculture sector.
If that is all it takes to get rid of landlords...
shrugs
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And that's not even the most disgusting thing related to cooking oil in China...
China is collapsing before our very eyes, and it's already too late to turn things around. There's literally nothing that the CCP can do to get themselves out of this hole. The demographics are cooked, the economics are cooked, the public infrastructure is cooked, the foreign policy is cooked, the domestic politics are cooked, their environments are cooked, and the list goes on and on. China is one big clusterfuck right now and we should watch everything as it unfolds and take notes on it. China's downfall is going to be the biggest and most devastating self inflected collapse in history.
We should also do the same with Russia because they're also collapsing as we speak and it might be the end of Russia as a multiethnic empire for good. We're living in interesting times people
Profits over people's wellbeing as they say in China.
Very related story Poop suction truck carried drinking water
This is the best summary I could come up with:
State broadcaster CCTV earlier this week called the alleged practice and the potential contamination of food products from left-behind fuel in the tankers “tantamount to poisoning” and showing “extreme disregard for consumers’ lives and health.”
Some also appeared to link the situation to broader issues in the country, where an economic downturn is driving social frustration and there are deep-seated concerns about the limits of accountability for powerful and government-linked entities.
A staff member from Hopefull Grain and Oil Group on Monday told state-owned news outlet Economic View that “relevant departments” have investigated the matter and would make an official announcement.
Despite rising living standards in recent decades, food safety has been an ongoing issue in China, where dozens of high-profile scandals have been reported by local media since the early 2000s, sparking tighter government regulation.
In a 2013 speech cited in a People’s Daily report last year, Xi said the ruling Communist Party’s ability to “provide satisfactory assurances on food safety” is a “major test of our governance capabilities.”
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the directive to investigate the current scandal likely came “from the very top” – noting that food safety is both a key issue linked to government legitimacy and the allegations are landing at a sensitive time when economic hardship in China is causing a more “volatile society.”
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This is obviously not good, but I don't have great intuition.
If I have a mug full of gasoline (or worse, diesel or something cruder), and reuse that for coffee, I can imagine that being bad. But a tanker truck is humongous, and the contamination would, I imagine (???), scale roughly like a surface area-to-volume kind of thing, meaning that contamination for a huge container should be substantially "better" than my coffee example. (Perhaps this scaling law is a bogus assumption though?)
Of course it is still bad, gross, and probably dangerous...
Well there's your problem podcast recently did an episode on the 1963 salad oil scandal. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K4yCXIZ32lk
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salad_Oil_scandal
Reminds me of the salad oil scandal where oil tanks were purchased and reused for vegetable oil....
This is why I refuse to purchase or consume ANY food products from China. There system can't be trusted period.
On China’s heavily moderated social media platforms, many members of the public called for product recalls and greater industry oversight.
Some also appeared to link the situation to broader issues in the country, where an economic downturn is driving social frustration and there are deep-seated concerns about the limits of accountability for powerful and government-linked entities.
“Even the cooking oil essential to people’s daily lives has now become problematic… Ordinary people cannot be properly safeguarded… Now I just want to scoff at (phrases like) ‘rule of law’ and ‘serving the people’ whenever I see them,” read one comment on China’s X-like social media platform Weibo, that garnered thousands of likes.
I thought China was heavily censoring criticism and you couldn't voice your opinions publicly? lol
Basically a food scandal has been uncovered by their media and the government takes action in the public's interest. Something you'd expect a functioning government to do. And this article makes you think it's a bad thing.
Summed up:
Despite rising living standards in recent decades, food safety has been an ongoing issue in China, where dozens of high-profile scandals have been reported by local media since the early 2000s, sparking tighter government regulation.
Based.
The entire article has so much coping and seething and was a really fun read. Thank you for sharing.