The National Taiwan University (NTU) Food Safety Center made suggestions to the government on how to improve food safety after analyzing 32 food scandals from last year.
Food Safety Center executive officer Hsu Fu (許輔) said 14 academics from different backgrounds and their research teams found five major food safety issues — illegal ingredients contained in food, pesticide residues found in imported ingredients, food products made using expired ingredients, poor campus lunch management and legal liability in food safety incidents.
Hsu said the use of illegal or industrial-use ingredients in food products was the most reported issue last year, including fermented bean curd containing a banned industrial dye — dimethyl yellow — and spices containing industrial-use magnesium carbonate.
The problem lay in the inability to regulate the “midstream” food manufacturing process, Hsu said.
While “upstream” food ingredient importers and manufacturers require registration and “downstream” food retailers are randomly inspected, the food additive companies and wholesalers in the middle are not registered, Hsu said.
“The food traceability system is not linked, so you should carefully keep record of what those chemical additive companies sold, especially if they are sold to food companies,” he said.
“Some company employees do not really know what they are adding to food, because they might be told to do their job by management,” NTU associate professor of toxicology Chiang Chih-kang (姜至剛) said, adding that some companies might not know the regulations, while others might have used illegal additives to reduce costs, but all companies need to be educated and monitored for the correct use of food additives.
Several tea beverages containing banned ingredients or excessive pesticide residues were reported last year, Hsu said, adding that academics think the problem lies with the government providing insufficient funds and personnel for the inspection of imported tea.
University animal science and technology department professor Chen Ming-ju (陳明汝) said batch-by-batch inspections on imported tea, rather than the current random inspections, could help.
The university said more research on pesticides and educating people about pesticide tolerance standards is also important.
The academics said cross-ministerial management is needed to monitor how expired food is handled (currently food management is governed by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and waste is governed by the Environmental Protection Administration), and that the establishment of food banks could be considered to reduce food waste.
Hsu said that food additives found in school lunches’ cooked rice highlighted the problem of insufficient labeling on bulk food, adding that manufacturers should be responsible for informing customers about ingredients and schools should reconsider the costs for good quality school lunches.
Law professor Lin Ming-Hsin (林明昕) said public discontent over the not guilty verdict in the case against executives at Ting Hsin International Group (頂新集團), which was accused of using tainted cooking oil in 2013, should reinforce a liability insurance mechanism, so people’s food safety rights can be protected.
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