If you’ve been following the news, you would be well-aware that the Ministry of Health and Welfare has been saying that eating out is an exercise in mettle and courage, seizing the day and welcoming the unexpected, because you only live once.
My editor, a middle-aged office worker who seems interested only in living once but for a long time, was having none of it. For weeks now, he has been asking vendors what’s in their food and whether the ingredients are safe to eat. Last Tuesday, he challenged me to try it as well.
“You can put a pillow under your shirt so they think you’re pregnant,” he said, adding that this could make vendors more willing to open up.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
I did not do this, but maybe that’s an idea for the next person. Over two days, I visited 15 food vendors in Taipei, initially expecting a pleasant time. I soon found out how wrong my initial assumption was.
>MOM-AND-POP SHOPS
One of my first stops was a bright little self-owned eatery near the Technology Building. It serves hot snacks like pork intestine with tofu.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
I ordered, then paused at the counter. “Do you mind if I ask what type of cooking oil you use?” I asked the employee closest to me.
She was busy and moved away, bagged an order and rang up another. After a while, she looked up and saw that I was still there. “It’s lard-based,” she said.
I asked her for the name of the supplier, and she shouted out the question to another woman.
“We make it ourselves,” said the other woman.
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“The way everybody else does. That’s how we make it,” she said with the intensity of a gardener who, sun-beaten and hands full, is trying to shrug off a cloud of gnats.
I ate my order and then it was off to the next stop, which, incidentally, also said they made their own oil — which, quite honestly is all hard to believe, since the process of making your own cooking oil is a complex and time-consuming one. If small shops were making their own cooking oils, they most likely would have made a big fuss out of it and marketed the fact as a major selling point in order to attract customers.
Further down the block, a frail-looking woman was chopping vegetables at a street stall. I asked her for a recommendation from the menu, and she responded in Chinese with a slight Vietnamese accent. We talked about the dishes some more before I asked about the brand of oil she uses. The conversation morphed, nearly instantly, and she switched to speaking in Vietnamese, making it impossible to continue.
CULTURE OF CAUTION
In all of these cases, the vendors were small mom-and-pop stalls or self-owned storefronts, and of the 15 vendors I visited, seven were street-side stalls like the Vietnamese woman’s noodle stand or other self-owned small businesses. The people here, who eke out a living on razor-thin margins, were visibly uncomfortable and often evasive with their responses.
They have good reason to react in such a manner, however. Part of the reason might be that the right answer today will be the wrong answer tomorrow.
“Every day there is a new problem,” said a noodles vendor outside Taipei Main Station, who said only that he uses a brand that is certified safe.
“Today my supplier is safe, but tomorrow they say it’s not safe, who knows? I can’t move my suppliers in and out through a revolving door,” he said.
Meanwhile, health authorities have been emerging from the woodwork, checking old registries and conducting spot-checks.
In the second-to-last oil scandal, central authorities reported over 1,200 food providers and 1,300 on-shelf food products tainted by “gutter oil.”
Last Friday, Taipei health authorities reported 30 restaurants and 62 unnamed night market vendors that have used products contaminated with oil originating from Ting Hsin International Group (頂新國際集團), the latest unscrupulous oil manufacturer. In some cases, small vendors who had their names revealed went bankrupt, said Taipei City Department of Health Commissioner Lin Chi-hung (林奇宏).
FRANCHISES AND CHAINS
In contrast to smaller street vendors, workers at franchise or chain vendors were far more prepared — in some cases trained — to respond.
Eight of the 15 vendors I scouted out were chain breakfast joints, franchise hot-pot outlets and other eateries with central resources for weathering food scares.
At a J&G Fried Chicken (繼光香香雞) in Taipei, one employee said that they use soybean oil, and another added that the supplier is Taisan (泰山), which he was “certain is very problem-free.”
Yeh Po-hong (葉柏宏) is the supervisor of an Eight Way (八方雲集), a pot stickers chain that pulled its curry stickers and dumplings in September upon finding that one of their upstream suppliers was connected to the scandal-touched Chang Guann Company (強冠).
“We’ve been holding training courses for workers, and headquarters passes down news to us so I can make sure staff knows what’s in the food,” Yeh said.
His outlet is inside the Eslite Bookstore at the Taipei Main Station (誠品站前店) commercial complex, which imposes its own layer of regulation, he said.
On my separate visit, staff at the station-based Eight Way were able to answer questions about suppliers and their pot sticker chain. Across the street at Shin Kong Mitsukoshi (新光三越), food service workers were also ready with answers.
“But really, nobody has asked,” said a woman at a Marugame Seimen (丸龜製麵), an udon and tempura chain restaurant.
Among the 15 vendors, none said they have encountered customers with questions about their ingredients.
“When it comes to food safety, the ones who aren’t worried, aren’t worried,” said an Eight Way food service worker. “The ones who are worried have simply stayed away.”
In a climate of don’t ask, don’t tell, positive information can’t circulate and help boost a food sector that needs some good news. Last month, the Ministry of Economic Affairs estimated that the oil scandals have already cost Taiwan’s food sector an estimated NT$12 billion in lost sales, and that wasn’t taking into account all companies affected.
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