Removing fipronil
In discussing food safety, the Taipei Times’ editorial on Thursday is far too optimistic when it concludes that “we are seeing poorly planned legislation ensuring that the stable door is closed only after the horse has bolted” (“A talk about food safety... again,” Aug. 24, page 8).
You would do a better public service if you considered not just the egg, but the whole process involved.
Surely the egg does not get contaminated because somebody sprayed insecticide on it or rubbed it with insecticide.
The contaminant probably comes from the hen, and we must now go two ways: One is to figure out how the fipronil got into the hen, and the other is what might happen to the hen after “the horse has bolted.”
I see two main ways the fipronil might get into the hen.
There is the one you mention (the farmer’s abuse or misuse of the insecticide), and the other is that the fipronil was already in the chick when the farmer bought it from a breeder, a process widely used in other countries to keep the stock of laying hens up to the required level.
In this second case, one horse has bolted, and the stable door remains open for the rest of the herd to follow.
As far as what might happen to the hens, your guess may be as good as mine.
Unless the government takes care to destroy the whole lot in such a way that the fipronil exits from the food chain, the possibilities include: The hens are left to produce more contaminated eggs until they die, the farmer sells the hens to others who put them into the human food chain or the farmer uses them to feed other animals (including fish) that will go into the food chain.
That last possibility, I would expect, would require the owners to destroy the whole flock at their own initiative and expense, in such a way that the contaminant is destroyed.
In these cases we are not just closing the stable door; we are opening the doors to many other stables.
We should know better than to do that.
Emilio Venezian
New Taipei City
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