China food safety concerns grow amid fresh claims leeks sprayed with copper sulphate
Source: NewsCore
NANJING, China — One day after Chinese authorities confirmed that they were looking into claims that vegetable sellers were spraying cabbage with formaldehyde, reports emerged Wednesday that leeks were being treated with copper sulphate.
The leeks were found in Nanjing, the capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, where a local resident told the Shanghai Daily that her fingers turned blue after she bought some leeks.
“Copper sulphate is common and cheap. One kilo [2.2 pounds] of leeks needs just a few cents of the chemical to stay fresh,” a vegetable dealer surnamed Zhu told local media.
Copper sulphate is used as a pesticide, and excessive intake can cause kidney failure, the newspaper reported, citing researchers at Nanjing Agricultural University.
The latest food safety scare comes in the wake of an investigation in eastern Shandong Province into the spraying of cabbage with formaldehyde to keep it fresh.
Reports of the claims first emerged online over the weekend, the Xinhua news agency said, adding that while the probe was conducted on a local level, 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.”
Formaldehyde also reportedly was used on mushrooms and seafood by various sellers.
Formaldehyde — commonly used as a preservative for laboratory specimens and embalming — can be fatal if ingested and is a cancer-causing substance.
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.
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