Maggots in the Pasta: Europe Screens Tainted Chinese Food

HONG KONG - Cypriot inspectors found arsenic in the frozen calamari. The Italians discovered maggots in the pasta. There were glass chips in the pumpkin seeds bound for Denmark, and Spanish regulators blocked a shipment of frozen duck meat because of forged papers. It has been a rough year for Chinese food exports to Europe.

At least German kids can eat their Chinese strawberries again.

Health authorities have given the all-clear after a recent poisoning of 11,000 children at hundreds of schools in Berlin and four other German states. A norovirus outbreak from a shipment of frozen Chinese berries led to severe diarrhea and vomiting, and 30 people were hospitalized.

German consumer agencies traced the outbreak to a single batch of berries. School cafeterias in eastern Germany were primarily affected, and improper food handling at industrial kitchens was seen as a possible cause.

The agencies' strawberry statement did not identify the source country, although a spokesperson for the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety told Food Production Daily that the berries “all came from the same batch imported from China.”

And a news report said the strawberries were grown, harvested and frozen in Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, in Shandong Province.

It was the latest episode in China's ongoing food-safety nightmare, which Rendezvous has chronicled, and the German newspaper Der Spiegel has now followed up with an investigation of Chinese food exports to Europe.

Those exports are growing widely and rapidly. The newspaper said Chinese food exports to Europe nearly doubled between 2005 and 2010. In Germany, food imports from China are up 26 percent since 2009.

Zhou Li, a food-safety expert and lecturer at Renmin University in Beijing, told Der Spiegel that Chinese farmers used to eat the same food that they grew and sold.

“But now that they are aware of the harmful effects of pe sticides, fertilizers, hormones and antibiotics,” the article said, paraphrasing Mr. Zhou, “they still produce a portion of their farm products for the market and a portion for their own families. The only difference is that the food for their families is produced using traditional methods.

“In fact, many wealthy Chinese have bought their own farms so as not to be dependent on what's available in supermarkets,” the story said, citing Mr. Zhou. “There are also reports of special plots of land used to produce food exclusively for senior government officials.”

The scandals over contaminated food have become a constant worry for Chinese consumers, and mainland visitors to Hong Kong regularly descend on food shops and market stalls, especially those near the border, to buy up goods that they believe are safer, notably infant formula and powdered milk. Their buying trips are so frenzied and efficient that local people derisively call them wong chong - locus ts.

Wu Heng, a graduate student in history in Shanghai, once thought food safety was an issue for other people, something that existed mostly in the media or through gossip. He said he felt “like a frog in warm water,” unconcerned about the rising temperature, unaware of the growing danger.

But a story about cancer-causing additives being added to meat got his attention in April of last year, and he and some friends started a Web site that began charting reports of food scandals nationwide.

The site crashed in its first week, reportedly from an overload of 2 million visits.

Charlie Custer of Tech in Asia visited Mr. Wu's site in May and searched “oatmeal.” He found a single story, from 2008, where some oatmeal was discovered to have 15 times the standard amount of mold.

“Oatmeal, it seems, is pretty safe,” Mr. Custer wrote. “I click on stories about milk instead, and find there are over 50.”

The name of the site is a mout hful - Zhichuchuangwai, which means “throw it out the window.” They name comes from the story of President Theodore Roosevelt having thrown his breakfast sausage out a window after reading “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel that exposed the meatpacking industry in Chicago.

“Roosevelt's act of throwing his sausage out of the window became a watershed in the history of food safety,” Mr. Wu told China Daily. “I hope my website can play a role as well in raising the alarm in our country's food safety.”

Although it generates some of the scariest headlines, perhaps deservedly, China is hardly the only global culprit in food safety. During just one week of inspections in Europe this summer, there were dozens of seized and blocked shipments, including Italian clams (E. Coli), Indian cuttlefish (cadmium), Ecuadorean tuna (cadmium again), Norwegian mackerel (parasites) and Turkish figs (aflatoxins).

That same week, French inspectors also destr oyed a shipment of insecticide-laden curry leaves from Sri Lanka. And a load of Mexican honey ran afoul of German inspectors who found that it contained a banned sulfa compound, a substance now used in veterinary medicine and once employed as a common treatment for gonorrhea.

The epiphany for Mr. Wu, the Chinese Web site founder, came when he read a story about pork having been doctored to resemble beef, which costs much more. Last week, a similar story appeared on the BBC:

Sweden's National Food Agency has issued a warning after as much as 20 tons of meat labeled as beef turned out to be colored pork.

An investigator at the agency, Pontus Elvingson, told the BBC that tests were still being done to identify the dye.

The Swedish firm Heat AB imported the meat from a supplier in Hungary called Filetto. One of the suspect batches originated in Argentina. Checks show that the dyed meat was first sold in Sweden a year ago.

D o you check the country of origin on the foods you buy? Do you reject the product - or hesitate - when you see “Made in China”? Or do you rely on food inspections to assure you of the safety?