THERE were eye-opening conversations on Japanese table manners when my host feted me during a press tour of Japan in early May.

In Japan, as is often seen in TV dramas, the patriarch in a family eats first, then comes the turn of other family members. This privilege is also extended to headmasters of primary schools at lunch.

Isn't that privilege a step too far, I asked, when it is applied in schools where equality should be preached? "This is not a privilege," replied my host Mr Hamada. "The food the students and teachers eat is the same. Headmasters are obliged to taste it first to tell if it's safe and clean for pupils to eat."

This arrangement, if imported, would certainly be welcomed by the Chinese public. After all that is said and done to tackle food-quality scandals, only more of them are uncovered.

Perhaps it's not a joke when some netizens argue that the only way to guarantee food safety is to make officials guinea pigs to test possibly tainted food themselves. Only then will they really start scrutinizing food quality, and taking serious actions.

Netizens will find to their dismay that this proposition of intertwining the fortunes of mandarins and plebeians has no chance of being realized. Some of our pampered civil servants just cannot lower themselves to eat the same food as ordinary folks.

Xinhua reported last week that a few government agencies in Zhejiang have been almost monopolizing the consumption of produce grown on organic farms in the province.

Suichang, a hilly backwater in western Zhejiang, recently made headlines for being turned into a near-exclusive purveyor of organic produce for some powerful officials in Zhejiang and beyond.

According to a village cadre surnamed Weng, his village supplies a slaughtered pig every other day to their urban official patrons, who even require delivery of the pig's blood that can be cooked into tofu-like edible gelatins, known as blood pudding.

It is reported that the patrons include the provincial land and resources office and the agricultural and hydraulic bureaus. They have designated Suichang as their food supplier because of its high altitude, unpolluted environment and most importantly, the free-range way of raising swine, whose meat tastes better than that of porkers on industrial farms where they are fed growth hormones and chemicals to grow leaner meat.

Locally grown vegetables and fruit are also sought after by officials, who appear to have lost faith in produce on the market.

Hence, they came with contracts in hand, promising impoverished farmers a way to get rich by providing food for them. Xinhua reported that the eco-agrobusiness in Suichang has been subsidized and enjoys policy support.

Perhaps realizing that its image as a private supermarket for the powerful is unflattering, Suichang's agricultural authorities denied the report on Sunday, saying they never attempted to curry favor with superiors with any special scheme of food provision and are open to public and media scrutiny.

Despite the furor the "organic" expose triggered, this news item is noteworthy not because it reveals the hypocrisy of double-dealing officials who pledge whole-hearted service for the people yet turn themselves into a privileged class.

Such cases of exclusivity bestowed on officials have never been rare from time immemorial.

Pecking order

In ancient China, the quality of food one got to eat depended on his/her place in the pecking order. An exquisite, sumptuous meal was the luxury of emperors, feudal lords and mandarins, and the ordinary people, the poor and everyone else had to scrape by on coarse food.

Even today, a few privileged individuals can still enjoy brand liquor or cigarettes available only in limited supply at a time when the income gap is widening.

As living standards are on the rise, the newly affluent public has become somewhat jaded with tales of officials' champagne tastes. Ordinary people can now afford shark's fin soup and abalone, something unthinkable just 10 years ago.

What they cannot easily buy with money are several social benefits that are still linked to one's connections to power. It is widely known that to register their children in some top primary schools in Shanghai, parents have to be well-connected with the education authorities.

The dearth of hospital beds is a source of complaints about the health care system, but rooms in the city's best hospitals are available when the patients' families have official friends to lobby for them. Money alone sometimes won't work.

Cadres themselves do not have to vie with ordinary folks for these coveted resources. When they fall ill, they stay in separate VIP rooms. Their children are groomed in exclusive schools to become second-generation officials.

That's why the scandal in Suichang sparked an uproar fiercer than expected, for it's not merely about a batch of specially supplied pork, greens or watermelons, but about fair access for all to what has become scarce: safe food.

A widely cited reason for public anger is that if officials eat uncontaminated food, how will they develop any visceral empathy toward the general populace that consumes additive-laced pork and vegetables containing excessive residues of pesticide and cooked in gutter oil? How can they be serious about quality oversight if they are insulated from danger on dinner table?

These are all reasonable and pressing questions that privileged government officials need to answer. We often see glad-handing cadres visit wet markets as a sign of their close ties to the people.

That affinity is in doubt now that many of these politicians are discovered to be totally out of touch with people's concerns and plight.

China will remain a society institutionally favoring the privileged for a long time to come. Such obsequious deeds as reserving an overpass for senior apparatchiks only, as reported recently in Shanxi Province, will almost certainly be repeated in one form or another.

The root cause is perhaps that after thousands of years of obeisance to authority, priority conferred on leaders is taken as a given.

This belief is encouraging our officials to explore fresh ways to demonstrate their "uniqueness," not only by acquiring material luxury goods, but also by prerogatives that carry symbolic significance.