The Mid-Autumn Festival lost much of its luster this year because of the latest tainted oil scare. Consumers were shocked to discover tainted oil everywhere, after it had made its way into the products of thousands of food manufacturers, small restaurants and food stall vendors. Just like past food scares, the tainted oil scandal is the result of greedy manufacturers trying to cut costs in combination with a control system spun out of control.
An unknown, unlicensed factory in Pingtung County has been “recycling” used oil into edible oil for more than a decade, selling it all over the nation. Neither the Pingtung County Government nor the Ministry of Health and Welfare discovered what the factory was doing, despite several inspections, which points to obvious failures in the food safety control system.
Government certification should be an important link in this system. One such certification is the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) hallmark, which is meant to guarantee product quality, while another is ISO certification, which attests that the manufacturer’s production process management practices meet a certain set of standards. Food product and health agencies also have their own certifications.
However, in the current case, GMP as well as ISO certification proved useless. Chang Guann Co is an over-the-counter-traded producer of oils, but it still bought raw materials from underground factories that it knew were problematic, processed them and resold them to other food manufacturers. The company is certified to ISO standards, but as it maneuvered to find ways for its products to pass inspections regardless of their content, it has made a joke out of both GMP and ISO certification.
Small upstream and downstream companies are forced to rely on experience, smell and taste to determine whether edible oils are up to standard. This is a matter of expertise, and perhaps many companies insist on their expertise and refuse to buy cut-price, problematic oils, but others abandon these requirements.
Big brands that had bought tainted oil from Chang Guann call themselves victims, but few people have any sympathy for them because they feel these big companies should have raw material controls in place. Wei Chuan Foods, Chi Mei Frozen Food and other companies should have inspected the raw materials purchased from Chang Guann and used them only if they passed inspections. Following the recent food safety scares, they should have been even more alert in monitoring raw materials and their own final products. This is a basic responsibility, and it is also the main reason consumers are willing to pay more for brand-name products. Despite this, these companies have neglected their responsibilities and abandoned inspections to cut costs. In the end, they are shamed, their reputations will collapse and the overall loss will be many times higher than the money they saved buying cheaper raw materials.
To calm things down, government officials talked about products “passing inspection” and “causing more psychological than physical damage,” but this has failed and instead resulted in falling public trust. In the previous phthalate and copper chlorophyllin food additive scares, many companies and consumers found it difficult to understand how small volumes would be harmful, but the ongoing scandal is different: Anyone who sees a vat of recycled waste oil instinctively knows that this must under no conditions be ingested. The government’s attempts at calming the public elicited outrage among consumers, who feel the authorities failed to enforce food safety controls, but then tried to play down the incident.
The government should set up a multi-tiered set of controls integrating government, private business and consumers to introduce strict food safety controls at every level. It is clear that the government has not learned from past food safety scandals. Let this incident be the wake-up call that puts an end to food safety problems that only serve to hurt Taiwan and the Taiwanese, both physically and psychologically.
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