Alarm after Chinese vegetable dealers caught spraying cabbage with toxic chemicals

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Alarm after Chinese vegetable dealers caught spraying cabbage with toxic chemicals

Source: NewsCore

QINGZHOU, China — Authorities in China’s eastern Shandong province were Tuesday investigating claims that vegetable sellers were spraying cabbage with formaldehyde to keep it fresh.

Reports of the claims first emerged online over the weekend, Xinhua news agency reported, adding that while the probe was conducted on a local level, in Qingzhou city, the practice was far more widespread and encompassed other provinces.

“It’s a common practice to keep the cabbages fresh,” Shandong farmer Yin Lihua said. “Otherwise, the vegetables stacked tightly in their trucks would rot in two to three days.”

Cabbage is a staple of the Chinese dining table, especially in the country’s north, which includes the capital city Beijing.

In Heilongjiang province, 1,000 miles (1,600km) northeast of Shandong, vegetable seller Zhao Mingli was caught spraying cabbage with formaldehyde.

“I just did what everyone else was doing for three or four years. Vegetable dealers in other parts of Shandong and Hebei do the same,” Zhao said.

Formaldehyde was also reportedly used on mushrooms and seafood by various sellers.

Liu Shengtian, deputy chief of Qingzhou’s agricultural bureau, told Xinhua that cabbage dealers had been urged to use refrigerated trucks for storage and transport.

Liu said it was unclear how sellers who use formaldehyde could be held accountable as there was no provision for such a situation in current regulations and laws.

“It’s crucial to fix these loopholes in order to better regulate market behavior for public health considerations,” Zhao Jinshan, a Shandong-based specialist on food safety and disease control, said.

Formaldehyde — commonly used as a preservative for laboratory specimens and embalming — can be fatal if ingested and is also a cancer-causing substance, AFP reported.

China’s government has repeatedly vowed to improve food safety as people grow increasingly alarmed about the quality of what they eat, but scandals still occur due to weak enforcement and unscrupulous business practices.

Milk was at the center of one of China’s biggest food safety scandals in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products to give the appearance of higher protein content. The crisis also sparked panic in other countries that imported Chinese milk.

Last year, authorities in China arrested more than 30 people over the sale of cooking oil made with leftovers taken from gutters.

More recently, employees of a leading Chinese poultry company sold diseased ducks to consumers, while a major dairy producer sold milk with high levels of a cancer-causing toxin, caused by cows eating moldy feed.

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