Several food poisoning incidents have been reported in recent months, not only raising concerns about the food safety monitoring mechanism, but also about possible racial discrimination.
Last month, 44 people sought medical treatment after they fell ill from eating at a shaved ice store in Kaohsiung. The store was closed down briefly due to sanitation issues found during inspection, and pathogen testing on its food detected four types of pathogenic bacteria: salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Bacillus cereus.
Earlier this month, 514 people reported feeling sick after eating at a well-known Vietnamese banh mi food stand in Taoyuan. Fourteen health violations were found in an on-site inspection and the stand was shut down until it passed re-inspection.
In response to the first case, the Kaohsiung Department of Health imposed a NT$300,000 (US$9,392) fine on the store, handed over evidence to the Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office and initiated a surprise inspection program on shaved ice shops in the city.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week said it has launched a food safety inspection campaign, targeting restaurants and stalls serving “foreign cuisine,” and would inspect more than 200 businesses, especially those that sell ready-to-eat foods and salads. It is to take place through November.
While the FDA on Wednesday reported that salmonella and Bacillus cereus were found in the food ingredients from the food stand, the Taoyuan Department of Public Health imposed a NT$540,000 fine on the banh mi stand, initiated an inspection on “Southeast Asian ready-to-eat food” in the city, and is prepared to launch a local food safety and hygiene education campaign in five languages. The Taoyuan District Prosecutors’ Office also launched its own investigation.
The two outbreaks prompted local and central governments to step up food inspections on shaved ice and foreign cuisine, but even with routine random inspections held each year, food poisoning outbreaks were never rare.
According to FDA statistics on food poisoning, 499 cases affecting 4,495 people last year, 498 cases affecting 5,823 people in 2021 and 506 cases affecting 4,920 people in 2020 were reported.
Given that public sector resources are limited, random inspections can only cover a very small proportion of all the food available in the market.
The government should try to shift its effort from increasing inspections to raising public awareness, providing incentive-based mechanisms to motivate food businesses to conform to regulations and guidelines or invest in food safety.
Local governments provide different versions of food safety and hygiene handbooks for small food businesses to follow, along with checklists and record-keeping forms, but there are no incentives for them to actually fill in the forms, especially when many small food businesses are short-staffed.
Moreover, as many food poisoning victims do not seek treatment but instead complain, the government can use the Internet to find sources. In 2013, the Chicago Department of Public Health worked with a technological group to develop an app for identifying tweets from Twitter (now known as X) that are likely related to food poisoning in the city, and it responded by including a link to an online form encouraging them to report the incident. The reports led to inspections at 133 restaurants and 21 of them were shut down for health violations.
Increased food inspections should target specific types of food with higher risk of causing foodborne illness or which have often failed inspections based on scientific evidence, rather than targeting “foreign cuisine” or “Southeast Asian ready-to-eat food” in general, which raises speculations about possible racial discrimination led by the government.
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