To promote persimmon cakes, which are being produced early this year due to a plentiful harvest, the Sinpu Farmers’ Association is to host a persimmon-themed hiking tour in Hsinchu County’s Sinpu Township (新埔) tomorrow.
About 1,000 people are expected to take part in the hike, which is to begin at Sinpu Art Square (新埔藝文廣場) at 7am and continue to the Jinhan Persimmon Education Park (金漢柿餅教育園區), where participants are to learn about the plant and how to make persimmon products.
The 5.6km-long walk is to take participants through 13 persimmon processing factories, as well as a persimmon-themed studio, an organic bookstore and a traditional market that has more than a century of history.
Photo: Huang Mei-chu, Taipei Times
Although the tour was planned for 1,000 people, everyone is welcome to join, association head Tseng Ting-hsi (曾庭熙) said.
The township’s Hankeng Borough (旱坑) has the nation’s largest persimmon industry and every year, its 13 processing factories turn 1.2 million kilograms of persimmons into 420,000kg of cakes worth NT$100 million (US$3.24 million), he said.
This year’s harvest has been particularly fruitful due to little rain, so the factories have begun making cakes earlier than usual and are to sell them for longer, he added.
A persimmon festival is also scheduled to be held next weekend in the township.
The festival is to include a fashion show of persimmon-dyed clothing and the launch of a new persimmon-flavored ice cream, among other events.
Visitors would also be able to purchase other persimmon products, such as bread and tea.
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