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Back to basics to stop food scandal
By People's Daily |
June 14, 2011, Tuesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
FOOD scandals are everywhere, from China to Japan to Germany. One would ask: In a big, big world today, can we find a small table of safe food? It seems that no country can perch above the peril of poisonous food.
And food scandals are not new. They are an inevitable result of unbridled industrialization that began to infect China about 30 or 40 years ago. At that time, you could still see horses on the streets of even big cities. Grandpa Zhang or granny Liu would drive a horse to deliver fresh eggplant, tomatoes and eggs to your dinner table. You would be sure that the food was free from fertilizer and pesticide.
Now, you want to eat more. In winter, you want watermelons. In Beijing, you want coconuts from Hainan Island. And voila, you are satisfied, as the food supply chain and technology become ever more complicated.
When you eat something, you will no longer envision a couple of honest farmers. Instead, you will be lost in chain of endless interest groups - a seed company, a fertilizer company, a food additive company, a logistics company, and even a drug company (many animals take drugs to grow fatter and faster, you know.).
In a word, we have more to eat now than we did 30 or 40 years ago. Sounds great? But we pay a price because we often don't know where our food comes from.
What China, and indeed the whole world needs to do is more than toughen up regulation on food security. A fundamental way out of the quagmire of food scandals is a change of our diet back to the most simple and natural: eat less but fresh.
And food scandals are not new. They are an inevitable result of unbridled industrialization that began to infect China about 30 or 40 years ago. At that time, you could still see horses on the streets of even big cities. Grandpa Zhang or granny Liu would drive a horse to deliver fresh eggplant, tomatoes and eggs to your dinner table. You would be sure that the food was free from fertilizer and pesticide.
Now, you want to eat more. In winter, you want watermelons. In Beijing, you want coconuts from Hainan Island. And voila, you are satisfied, as the food supply chain and technology become ever more complicated.
When you eat something, you will no longer envision a couple of honest farmers. Instead, you will be lost in chain of endless interest groups - a seed company, a fertilizer company, a food additive company, a logistics company, and even a drug company (many animals take drugs to grow fatter and faster, you know.).
In a word, we have more to eat now than we did 30 or 40 years ago. Sounds great? But we pay a price because we often don't know where our food comes from.
What China, and indeed the whole world needs to do is more than toughen up regulation on food security. A fundamental way out of the quagmire of food scandals is a change of our diet back to the most simple and natural: eat less but fresh.
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