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Food safety scandal rocks China as report claims cooking oil carried in same trucks as fuel (www.cnn.com)

submitted 5 months ago by MicroWave to c/world

271 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (18 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

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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