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Food

China Has a New System for Detecting the Sketchy Additives and Dyes in Its Food

Shanghai’s food and drug watchdog has invested in a new testing system that it hopes will stem the seemingly never-ending problem of food scandals. This new “instant testing system” can detect the presence of illegal food additives.
Photo via Flickr user Daremoshiranai

Food scandals have become a pretty common occurrence in China. The most notorious may be the tainted-baby-formula scandal of 2008, but then there was the story last year of meat from the 1970s being smuggled across the Chinese border. And who can forget the 2013 incident when 16,000 diseased pig carcasses floated down the Huangpu river?

According to Shanghai Daily, Shanghai's food and drug watchdog is getting serious about this problem. The agency has invested in a new testing system that it hopes will stem the seemingly never-ending problem of food scandals. This new "instant testing system" can detect the presence of illegal food additives, the agency says.

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Now in a pilot program, the Chinese authorities say the system can identify substances like clenbuterol, also known as "lean meat powder." Clenbuterol is a banned animal feed additive that can cause nausea and dizziness if eaten. It can also reveal the presence of malachite green dye, a synthetic dye often found in fish. One highly touted benefit of the system is that it shortens the time needed to test for illegal substances. For example, the testing time to determine the presence of tainted or artificial meat will be reduced to 12 hours, down from several days, reports say.

The data that is collected from the new testing system will be directly transferred to a central monitoring platform. Dozens of local food producers, restaurants, and markets have already tested the new fraud detector, according to Peng Shaojie, an official with the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration. The pilot program that is taking place now allows local Shanghai consumers to have their food tested free of charge. After a trial period of a year, the system is expected to be implemented fully in 2017. Peng points out that the new system will allow for a larger amount of data to be processed much more quickly than was previously possible.

Chinese consumers will likely welcome the new testing system, as they have long lived with uncertainty about exactly what's in their food. But whether the test will be able to deal with the entire breadth of China's food-fraud woes remains to be seen. To cite one recent—and shocking example—of the complexity of China's food fraud craziness, 35 restaurants across China were recently found to have been illegally seasoning their food with none other than opium poppies.

READ MORE: China Is Finally Taking Food Safety Seriously

Yup. Five restaurants are being prosecuted now while 30 others are under investigation, according to the China Food and Drug Administration.

Chefs in numerous restaurants have long been sprinkling ground poppy powder in any number of dishes, seemingly to keep their customers coming back in droves. Because the seeds contain low amounts of opiates, it is unclear how much buzz the seasoning is delivering, but the restaurant owners must think it keeps customers coming back, judging from the pervasive nature of the problem over the last several years. It also doesn't hurt that powdered opiates are nearly undetectable when mixed with ingredients such as chili oil and require laboratory testing to be identified. Back in 2004, roughly 215 restaurants were shut down in Guizhou province for spiking their dishes with the addictive additive.

Seems to us that in addition to Shanghai's new food-adulteration test, they may very well need drug-sniffing dogs if they want to clean up all of the food fraud problems that are plaguing the world's most populous nation.