Chinese food safety regulators in the southern city of Shenzhen have found carcinogenic mildew in peanuts and cooking oil, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.
The cancer-causing substance, called aflatoxin, triggered public concern this week after milk giant Mengniu Dairy Co Ltd said last weekend its Sichuan plant had destroyed products found by a government quality watchdog to contain it.
Aflatoxin occurs naturally in the environment and is produced by certain common types of fungi. It can cause severe liver damage, including liver cancer.
Xinhua reported that the Shenzhen market supervision bureau had said it found up to 4.3 times of the permitted level of aflatoxin in peanuts sold in two supermarkets and one frozen food store, and up to four times the allowed level of aflatoxin in cooking oil in four restaurants.
Fungi and the aflatoxin they produce can infect crops before harvest or during harvesting and storage. The tainted crops then enter the foodchain either directly, or indirectly via animal feed.
On Thursday, food safety officials recalled cooking oil produced by three companies in the southern Guangdong province because they may contain excessive levels of aflatoxin.
These incidents are the latest in a string of safety scandals to hit China's food industry in recent years.
In 2008, at least six children died and nearly 300,000 became ill in China from drinking powdered milk laced with melamine, an industrial chemical added to low-quality or diluted milk to give misleadingly high protein readings.
SOTT
SIGNS
OF THE
TIMES
OF THE
TIMES
Welcome to Sott.net
The World for People who Think
It's not just some Chinese, of course. Western countries used to have the same problems with processed foods before safety standards and testing were put in place. Then, the food industries captured all of their regulators and many processed foods are now equally as dangerous, if only in different ways. It might not kill you today, but it will over time.
Buy from local sources of food - farmers' markets for produce and butchers' shops that source grass-fed beef and well raised pigs and fowl. And grow you own, as you can. If you can grow flowers, you can grow produce - potatoes, lettuce, beans, onions, tomatoes and so on. If you have local farmers, make friends, and buy from them.
But China has driven a lot of its rural population off the land and into big cities, in order to earn foreign exchange, and it is having trouble feeding the masses well. It also suffers massive local government and regulatory corruption, and only rarely are problems reported in the western media.
In the wake of the melamine scandal, China executed a few people who had exported tainted protein that ended up in pet food in the US, killing thousands of dogs and cats.
I suspect that I might have lost a cat to that crap, if it had eaten from a neighbor cat's food left outside. If that was what killed him, then I'll be glad to say that the Chinese government did not execute enough of those people who were responsible for that. May they burn in hell.