The Consumers' Foundation yesterday warned the public that traditional snacks bought in the run-up to the Lunar New Year holiday could contain excessive amounts of chemicals.
"Unqualified snacks with chemical residues higher than Chinese National Standards (CNS) cannot be identified with the naked eye," said Cheng Cheng-yung (鄭正勇), member of the foundation's food commission and professor of horticulture at National Taiwan University.
"We call on consumers to buy packaged or branded products with clear indications of the ingredients, which should meet national standards, in a bid to avoid undue chemical residues like preservatives or sulfur dioxide," he said.
The foundation sampled 47 packaged snacks, including meat jerky, salted seeds and pistachios, bought in hypermarkets and supermarkets in the Greater Taipei area in November and early December, and nine kinds of snacks bought in Kinmen in November, including dried shrimps and salted seeds imported from China.
The foundation found that all five dried shrimp samples had sulfur dioxide above the limit of 100 parts per million.
Five brands of salted pumpkin seeds had sulfur dioxide residues above the 30ppm standard for the seeds, including the Sheng Hsiang Chen (盛香珍) and Carrefour brands. Taipei-based Chia-ho's (嘉禾) seeds contained 2,000ppm of sulfur dioxide.
While some products contain too much of certain chemicals, other products contained them but did not admit it.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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