Thursday, July 12, 2007

Check out those buns!

According to Al Jazeera, Chinese food producers have now been selling buns made out of some rather unsavory materials:
Fake steamed buns made from up to 60 per cent waste paper and cardboard have become the latest food to join a growing list of health scares in China.

The bogus buns were exposed in a report carried on China's state-run television network CCTV.

The CCTV reporters found vendors chopped up waste cardboard and mixed it with fatty meat to produce the buns, known as "bao zi", in a Beijing backstreet factory.
To get the right consistency the cardboard was shown being soaked in caustic soda, a poisonous industrial solvent.

The owners told the reporter they then mixed it with about 40 per cent fatty meat and the flavour enhancer monosodium glutamate before selling the bao zi in nearby markets.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've heard McDonald's has industrial spies in China trying to get the recipe.

Anonymous said...

Good god. What next? We probably don't want to know.

I'm now having issues with products purchased at my formerly unimpeachable natural and organic food store here in the leafy Willamette Valley. When things purchased at a natural and organic food store with a formerly excellent reputation can make you sick, where do you go?

All of this is making me take the oft-heard environmentalists' claim that we all need to try to "re-localize" and grow our own food more seriously, even if that idea sounds about as alien to this perpetual suburb-dweller as white-water rafting.

Clayton said...

jen

Check to see if you have any food related allergies.
The 5 most common are corn,dairy, tree nuts, gluten and soy. I've met and worked for people where wheat/gluten allergies have put them in the hospital

Anonymous said...

Oh, I'm quite familiar with my various and sundry allergies and sensitivities, Clayton. The product that made me sick was actually a bottle of vegetable juice (from a local distributor, no less) that I thought tasted a little funny (read: vaguely fermented) even though it was almost two weeks out from its pull date. Yes, I was unwise to consume it, but I'd never had a problem with products purchased from this store before, or this particular brand of juice.

It's like a Sinclair Lewis novel out there, kids.