Not too long ago in China, consumers preferred duck eggs with red tinted yolks. Market vendors would crack off the top half of an egg and display its yolk, and consumers thought the redder the better.
So, of course, farmers started feeding a carcinogenic dye called Sudan Red directly to the ducks.
I mean, there is always some theft, fraud etc. in any market (one of the oldest written records of humanity is a customer complaint about bad copper sold by a certain Mesopotamian merchant called Ea-nasir in 1750 BC), but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red, or adding melamine to yoghurt, or frying food on gutter oil seems to always be reported from China.
A lot of this was common in the US and Europe a hundred years ago, but laws and changing culture have stopped it. Just look at snake oil, or the many other “remedies”. See, eg, “ Down and Out in Paris and London” by Orwell, where among many other things he talks about how the restaurant kitchens in early 1900s Paris were extremely gross and dangerous, but because the front of the restaurants were clean, the customers seemed happy.
“A customer orders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with work in a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stop and say to himself, 'This toast is to be eaten—I must make it eatable'? All he knows is that it must look right and must be ready in three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his forehead on to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast falls among the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a new piece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the way upstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe is all it needs. And so with everything.”
China is at an interesting point because they’ve developed economically so much in the last fifty years. Their culture and law enforcement hasn’t caught up yet while the internet has, so this is shared with us.
> how the restaurant kitchens in early 1900s Paris were extremely gross and dangerous, but because the front of the restaurants were clean, the customers seemed happy.
I heard a lot of restaurants in China these days, including takeout outlets, make live video feeds of their kitchens available online so that customers can be assured that the kitchens are hygienic. Of course that doesn’t tell you about the quality of source materials.
I've ordered from such a place in Munich. The novelty factor made it entertaining to watch and at some point I could identify my order being prepared. Not sure how many people you could deceive before you start to get called out, if the feed was of a different kitchen
I’m not sure much has changed in regard to the anecdote you shared. Kitchens are under a lot of pressure to get food out quickly and finish all of an order at the same time.
I worked at a restaurant in the 90s as my very first job, and one day someone dropped a steak on the floor after it was done. I said oh dear, I’ll get another from the fridge. The cooks told me no, just wash it off and serve it, reasoning “If we bring out every else’s meal and they guy who ordered the steak has to wait 10 minutes, he’ll be mad”. My guess was that he would be angrier to know that he was served a steak that had been dropped on our filthy floor and given the choice, would probably prefer to wait for a different one.
In your story, the customer would perceive the service as inferior if their food was late. A cook, knowing that the service isn't really inferior (there was just one little snag), justifies a little action to put appearances back closer to reality.
That last sentence is a study for me. I see it in everybody including myself. Somehow we convince ourselves that our ideal is the normal and the actual reality is an aberation. Then we rationalize little efforts to hide the aberation.
It can be hard to acknowledge the truth about ourselves and accept the consequences. But it is very hard to improve otherwise.
(At the same time we need to be careful of imposing overly severe consequences for mistakes.)
My last boss worked at a sandwich shop in college (Pasadena, CA). One shift he knocked over a 5 gallon bucket of olives, which spilled all over the floor.
He was mortified, but the owner seemed unperturbed. He handed him a broom and a dustpan and told him to get them all back in the bucket.
That reminds me of a story I heard from a friend in the Midwest who worked at a factory assembling frozen Italian dinners. He said that part of his job was to sweep up spilled grated cheese from the floor so they could use it in dinners.
And yet none of those examples compare to consciously using known poisons as a replacement for or additive to real food. That’s cynical brutality on another level.
One of the tricks here is that "known" poisons are the same as "agreed-upon" poisons -- or that the definition of "poison" isn't as clear as you might assume.
If one compares the US/Canada and EU restrictions of additives with the assumption that the latter are founded, you'd come to the conclusion that the only thing North America must have more of than cynical brutality is cancer. However, while I'm not going to say they're right, there are typically plenty of folks in HN comment sections happy to say that many of the EU's food restrictions are ascientific pandering.
As a metabolic intermediate, formaldehyde is present at low levels in most living organisms. Formaldehyde can be found naturally in food up to the levels of 300 to 400 mg/kg, including fruits and vegetables (e.g. pear, apple, green onion), meats, fish, crustacean and dried mushroom, etc.
Ingestion of a small amount of formaldehyde is unlikely to cause any acute effect. The main health concern of formaldehyde is its cancer causing potential. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) considered that there was sufficient evidence for carcinogenicity in humans upon occupational exposure via inhalation. On the other hand, WHO in 2005 when setting its Drinking Water Guidelines considered that there was no definitive evidence for carcinogenicity upon ingestion.
But selecting formaldehyde for your scary example mostly just sounds scary because of it’s relation with embalming fluid. As you say, anything can be poisonous: the LD50 of many substances is surprisingly high https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples
In 1896, desperately concerned about diseases linked to pathogens in milk, he even endorsed formaldehyde as a good preservative. The recommended dose of two drops of formalin (a mix of 40 percent formaldehyde and 60 percent water) could preserve a pint of milk for several days. It was a tiny amount, Hurty said, and he thought it might make the product safer.
But the amounts were often far from tiny. Thanks to Hurty, Indiana passed the Pure Food Law in 1899 but the state provided no money for enforcement or testing. So dairymen began increasing the dose of formaldehyde, seeking to keep their product “fresh” for as long as possible. Chemical companies came up with new formaldehyde mixtures with innocuous names such as Iceline or Preservaline. (The latter was said to keep a pint of milk fresh for up to 10 days.) And as the dairy industry increased the amount of preservatives, the milk became more and more toxic.
Hurty was alarmed enough that by 1899, he was urging that formaldehyde use be stopped, citing “increasing knowledge” that the compound could be dangerous even in small doses, especially to children. But the industry did not heed the warning.
In the summer of 1900, The Indianapolis News reported on the deaths of three infants in the city’s orphanage due to formaldehyde poisoning. A further investigation indicated that at least 30 children had died two years prior due to use of the preservative, and in 1901, Hurty himself referenced the deaths of more than 400 children due to a combination of formaldehyde, dirt, and bacteria in milk.
Following that outbreak, the state began prosecuting dairymen for using formaldehyde and, at least briefly, reduced the practice. But it wasn’t until Harvey Wiley and his allies helped secure the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 that the compound was at last banned from the food supply.
The article also talks about pasteurization being discovered in the 1850’s, but would not become standard procedure in the United States until the 1930s.
Can one really say that it's "mostly" its "relation with embalming fluid" that makes it scary... in a comment containing the line "at least 30 children had died two years prior due to use of the preservative"?
Also I want to be careful not to allow lethality to be seen as coextensive with poisonousness. Non-acute effect is kind of the name of the game with additive-type doses. The bulk of the misery caused by "lead poisoning" has nothing to do with people who hit an LD50-type threshold.
But we are missing the counterfactual of how many lives were saved due to the antibiotic effects of safe amounts of formaldehyde (previously mentioned two drops of formalin). Pasteurisation dropped infant deaths by 2/3rds, so it is quite possible that overall the addition of formaldehyde saved many lives (hard to tell without more study of whatever facts are available).
Nonetheless, the pasteurization movement was gaining steam. In 1909 Chicago became the first American city to enforce a compulsory milk pasteurization law, despite strong opposition at the state level. After vehement back-and-forth editorials, prolonged political maneuvering, and a typhoid epidemic blamed on raw milk, New York’s commissioner of health followed suit in 1914 with the enforcement of a previously adopted ordinance. Seven years later the city’s infant mortality rate dropped to 71 deaths per every 1,000 births—less than one-third of the rate in 1891.
Disclaimer: I am an armchair scientist, so I know nothing about the subject beyond my few searches. I am just trying to follow up on a “fact” that seems to be very biased. Even in modern times with strict standards and far far better systems of protection and antibiotic interventions, raw milk causes problems:
Raw milk and raw milk products can be contaminated with bacteria that cause serious illness, hospitalization or even death. From 1998 through 2011, 148 outbreaks due to consumption of raw milk or raw milk products were reported to CDC. These resulted in 2,384 illnesses, 284 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. Most of the illnesses were caused by E. coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella or Listeria. A substantial proportion of the raw milk-associated disease burden falls on children; among the 104 outbreaks from 1998-2011 with information on the patients' ages available, 82% involved at least one person younger than 20 years old.
This used to be common in parts of Europe as well. There is a book called From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee—The Dark History of the Food Cheats, from the food journalist Bee Wilson [1], which tells (among many other things) a lot of stories about arsenic poisonings in 19th century London, caused by the usage of certain red dyes in food. The saying that certain regulations are written in blood comes from these kinds of stories.
China has moved from the 3rd world to the developed world in just 30 years. Their laws and social development have yet to catch up with their economic development. Most of the people in any kind of power position are in their 50s-60s ie those that grew up in a very harsh world. It will take another 20~30 years for it to change.
> ... but stuff like poisoning your customers with Sudan Red
I obviously am not in favor of using potentially carcinogenic dyes in foodstuffs, but in the case of the minute quantities of Sudan dies that would find their way into the eggs, I think "poisoning your customers" is a touch strong. Poisoning your ducks, maybe.
Sudan dies are listed under Directive 67/548/EEC [1] as a Category III carcinogen. The description of that designation is:
Substances which cause concern for man owing to possible carcinogenic effects but in respect of which available information is not adequate for making a satisfactory assessment. There is some evidence from appropriate animal studies, but this is insufficient to place the substance in Category II. [2, p.19]
My understanding is the studies on Sudan dies showed potential carcinogenic activity in mice but not in rats. [3]
When the Germans did a risk assessment on imports of certain spices from India with Sudan dies they said:
The assessment that the risk of cancer is probably very low in the case of occasional consumption of foods with a low level does not, however, mean that there is no risk at all. [3]
Again, probably still shouldn't eat, but I think a little perspective is healthy here too. You're not gonna die from having a couple of red eggs.
Same goes with India as well.
I have always wondered about this, may be it is the trade-off between getting caught and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass to act in unethical ways.
>> and the sheer desperation to make money that tilts the moral compass
A very western sentiment. We often deride the quest for profits, demonizing people who put profit ahead of something more noble like safety. But in places like China "profit" is life. China has seen starvation in living memory. In countries without social safety nets a failed business likely means utter destitution, very often leading to physical violence. The people who run restaurants, and certainly the people who work in them, are not chasing profits because they want to drive nice cars. They are chasing profits because they too want to keep eating.
Wild. I was a kid in 1985, so not interested in wine yet, though Austria is right next door.
There were several recent affairs in Europe with adulteration of suspect booze in the black (or gray) market with methylalcohol. That would fit right in.
Well that might be a concerted effort to keep your attention turned away from all the similarly nasty things happening in your own country. In my country I think about older examples like the Swill Milk Scandal of the 1850s but more recent efforts like “ag-gag laws” that make it a crime to document the brutal conditions inside slaughterhouses and food processing facilities. This isn’t just a “China” problem.
Not just Chinese markets, but Chinese products today, such as the cat food and melamine issue, and baby formula. Consumable Chinese products should have a warning label
And if it was sold by volume they'd just be using some other type of filler. Outside of rigorous regulation it's hard to figure out how to fix this sort of thing. But then you end can also end up with massive factory farms or meat processing plants etc that can min/max the penalties against the profits, not to mention corrupt inspections.
And still happening in Europe and the United States today.
Canthaxanthin is very commonly added to farmed Salmon, to change its natural colour from grey to pink. Known to cause eye diseases in humans, it is also linked to several types of cancer in humans, but not proven as a carcinogen.
And though Europe has banned the Azo food colourings, they are still perfectly legal to add to food in the US. And though their effects are mostly on children, it is specifically childrens' foods and snacks to which these bright colours are added.
Europe has indeed banned some Azo food colorings, however canthaxanthin is not one of them, as far as I am aware. The EU has evaluated the safety of it on multiple occasions and found it safe to consume at the levels used in the food supply.
> Known to cause eye diseases in humans
Extremely excessive intake of tanning pills containing canthaxanthin was shown to cause accumulation of deposits in the retinas of a small number of individuals. Once the intake of pills was stopped, the condition completely cleared up in all individuals effected.
... when taken in massive doses as a skin-tanning supplement. As far as I know, there's no evidence whatsoever of side-effects in humans when eaten in the quantities typical to those involved in produce like salmon/eggs.
wasn't the social credit system supposed to fix this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System (i mean it looks like a 'big brother' system, but it was introduced with the objective of fixing abuses like this)
One of the "nice" things about China's one-party and nakedly authoritarian nature is that the corporate veil doesn't really exist: if the Chinese government one day decides that the CEO of a company deserves to have their social credit measured against some set of civic outcomes produced by their company, then there's nothing stopping them from doing so.
So, of course, farmers started feeding a carcinogenic dye called Sudan Red directly to the ducks.
* http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/189567.htm