Ready-to-use hot-pot soup bases might not be what they seem, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said yesterday.
Some do not contain the animal ingredients listed on the package labels or include animal-based products when they are marketed as vegan food, the agency said.
The agency had academic institutions send out “secret shoppers” last year to purchase hot-pot-soup base products nationwide.
Of the 54 products purchased, 32, or nearly 60 percent, did not comply with product standards and/or labeling requirements, the agency said.
“Of the deficient products, 18 failed to provide a complete list of ingredients and 16 did not contain the ingredients suggested in their products’ names, such as lamb hot pot that DNA tests showed held no trace of lamb and chicken soup that contained no traces of chicken,” Food Safety Division Director Pan Chih-kuan (潘志寬) said.
Five of the products marketed themselves as vegetarian, but were laced with various kinds of animal ingredients, which was reprehensible, Pan said.
“That may have caused some consumers who follow a vegetarian diet for religious reasons to consume animal extracts without knowing it,” Pan said.
As of yesterday, the manufacturers of 28 of 32 faulty products had made improvements, Pan said.
Consumers planning to eat hot pot on Lunar New Year’s eve should select products that are clearly labeled or make the broth themselves, Pan said.
Meanwhile, Taipei City Department of Health officials and the city’s consumer ombudsmen are to meet today with representatives of hot pot restaurants that have used duck-blood pudding allegedly adulterated with animal-feed-grade poultry blood to discuss a refund mechanism.
As of yesterday, a total of 16 hot pot restaurants in the capital were found to have purchased the potentially tainted duck-blood pudding from manufacturer Shuang Peng Food (雙鵬), including several household-names such as Tripod King spicy hot pot (鼎王麻辣鍋), Ning Chi chilly hot spot (寧記麻辣火鍋), Wulao hot pot (無老鍋), Mala hot pot (馬辣鴛鴦火鍋) and Chien Yen Shabu Shabu (千葉火鍋).
“Last year, the 30 hotels and restaurants in the city that had purchased Shu-seng’s (樹森開發) reconstituted beef mixed with beef tallow powder that had been tainted with inferior oil all agreed to offer a full refund after meeting with bureau staffers,” said Wang Ming-li (王明理), who works in the department’s Division of Drugs and Food.
Based on experience, Wang said the department is optimistic that the 16 restaurants involved in the adulterated duck-blood pudding probe would provide a similar refund scheme to compensate consumers.
Shuang Peng, which provides nearly 70 percent of the country’s duck-blood pudding, allegedly began selling adulterated duck-blood pudding in November 2012.
Investigators yesterday released a list of more than 400 department stores, supermarkets, restaurants and food vendors that purchased Shuang Peng products.
Health departments around the nation are still trying to determine how many businesses may have bought the allegedly tainted duck-blood pudding.
As of 2pm on Saturday, they had confiscated a total of 10,033kg of potentially problematic products.
Food and Drug Administration Director-General Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美) earlier said that most of the tainted products have probably been eaten or thrown out, as blood pudding has a shelf-life of just two to three days.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the