The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has pledged to pull all products manufactured with lard oil contaminated with animal feed oil off the shelves nationwide before Monday as more big-name food makers were drawn into the oil scandal yesterday.
As of press time last night, a total of 71 domestic and seven companies from Hong Kong and Macau had been found to have purchased the 24 brands of edible lard products manufactured by Greater Kaohsiung-based oil maker Chang Guann Co.
The lard oil was allegedly mixed with the 87.72 tonnes of animal feed oil Chang Guann had imported from Hong Kong this year, which was originally listed as for human consumption.
Photo: CNA
The 71 local firms include I Lan Foods Industrial Co, one of the subsidiaries of Want Want Group that manufactures rice crackers, instant noodle maker Vedan Co, snack food producer Kuai Kuai Co, Futong Food Enterprise and Haw-Di-I Foods Co.
Japanese fast-food chain MOS Burger was also drawn into the oil scandal yesterday after the supplier for its gravy and curry sauce — Magic-Food Mos Food Industry Corp — has also been implicated.
Chang Guann has been in hot water after it was found to have used 242 tonnes of recycled waste oil collected from restaurant fryers that were provided by an unlicensed factory in Pingtung County in the production of its “fragrant lard oil” affecting a total of 1,256 companies and 250 kinds of foodstuffs.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The oil scandal further escalated on Thursday after Hong Kong’s Centre for Food Safety confirmed that the 87.72 tonnes of lard oil Chang Guann Co procured from Hong Kong-based Globalway Corp Ltd this year were actually meant for animal use only.
“As of 7pm yesterday, we have identified 73 food products that have been produced with the animal feed oil, which are expected to be removed from the shelves within three days,” FDA Deputy Director-General Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美) told a news conference in Taipei.
The snowballing oil scare also prompted renowned chef Cheng Yen-chi (鄭衍基), better known as A-chi-shih (阿基師), to kneel down and apologize to the public in Shanghai, China, yesterday, after a food product he endorsed — Bull Head’s Shallot Sauce that was manufactured by Haw-Di-I Foods — was found to be contaminated with the animal feed oil.
The gesture was Cheng’s attempt to fulfill his previous promise that he would go down on his knees should any of the food products he had endorsed were implicated in the oil scare.
“I am sorry I was wrong. But I will not shed a tear because it is the responsible thing to do... In the face of such a misfortune, A-chi-shih has no complaint, nor will I evade my responsibility,” Cheng said.
Cheng’s apology triggered a wave of online criticism of the government, with many saying it should be the government and the unscrupulous companies that knowingly used inferior quality oil that should be on their knees.
In an apparent attempt to assuage growing pressure for him to step down to take responsibility for the oil scare, Minister of Health and Welfare Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) was quoted by the Chinese-language Apple Daily as saying in an interview published yesterday that the ministry is mulling raising the maximum prison term for violators of food safety laws to 15 from the current five years.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
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: