BEIJING | To eat, drink and be merry in China is done at your own risk: Weddings increasingly end with trips to the emergency room.
At an April wedding banquet in Wufeng, more than half of the 500 people in attendance went to the hospital; doctors blamed pork contaminated with a steroid that makes pigs grow faster and leaner.
During the May Day holiday weekend, 192 people from two weddings elsewhere in Hunan fell so ill they had to be hospitalized.
Since 2008, when six children died and 300,000 were sickened by melamine-tainted baby formula, the Chinese government has enacted ever-more-strict policies to ensure food safety.
It hasn’t helped. If anything, China’s food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre.
In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie. Experts pointed to phosphorescent bacteria, blamed for another case of glow-in-the-dark pork last year.
Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded “like landmines” after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.
The mass poisoning at the April 23 wedding in Wufeng village prompted provincial authorities to decree that samples of ingredients must be inspected in advance for banquets with more than 100 people.
It’s doubtful, however, that anybody will heed the regulation — China is famous for promulgating laws that are never enforced. There is no equivalent of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; myriad agencies reporting to various ministries.
“We have a saying in China that ‘food is the people’s god,’ so obviously it is very scary for ordinary people when things like this happen,” said Xiao Andong, a veterinary feed expert with the Hunan Institute of Veterinary Feed Control. Xiao was one of the investigators in the wedding poisoning case.
Clenbuterol, the suspect in the wedding poisoning, was banned in pig feed in the 1990s, but it is still used under the name “lean pork powder.”
“The profit margin is bigger than drug trafficking if you add the lean pork powder to the pig food,” said Zhou Qing, an author and dissident, who has styled himself as China’s equivalent of Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel “The Jungle” exposed the horrors of the U.S. meatpacking industry.
In 2006, Zhou published a book about the Chinese food industry that would extinguish the heartiest appetite. He wrote about foods tainted with pesticides, industrial salts, bleaches, paints and, especially nauseating, imitation soy sauce made from clippings swept up from hairdressers’ floors.
Although Zhou’s book has been published in 10 countries, it is not available in China.
Even victims are punished if they complain too loudly. Zhao Lianhai, who led a campaign for safer baby formula after his son developed kidney stones as a result of the melamine-tainted baby formula, was sentenced in November to prison for “inciting social disorder.”
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