But we don’t often talk about the food in China and how it relates to the cheap goods that are produced. Is there also such a thing as cheaply produced food which is as notoriously low quality like the products? Yes, indeed there is. Not only low quality, but dangerous.
They are actually illegal as well. Think twice about getting your food overseas, especially if the price seems to good to be true.
Here’s what to look out for:
1.Imitation eggs.
There are actual videos out there in China where they teach you how you can make 70 bucks a day making and selling phony eggs! Consuming these can lead to memory loss and even dementia as some of the chemicals used to make these are Alginic Acid, Potassium Alum, Gelatin, Calcium Chloride, water and artificial color, while the eggshells are made from Calcium Carbonate.
2. Cement stuffed walnuts.
Yep, that’s right. Turns out in 2012 a guy bought shelled walnuts in China. Inside contained pieces of broken concrete. The selling point was the weight as the vendor was hocking these heavy walnuts but they were really beefed up with concrete.
3. Pork Beef.
Since pork is cheap, some restaurants will mask it as beef. But to fool you they will use a dangerous glazing agent which doctors warn can cause deformities and cancer.
4.Phony peas.
Really? You have to make fake peas? Apparently so as in 2005 actual phony peas were found in China’s Hunan province. Turns out this was so profitable that it had been going on undetected for 3 years. In reality the peas were a combination of snow peas, soy beans, green dye, and sodium metabisulfite which is used as a bleach and preservative.
Here’s what a Beijing-based food safety expert, Sang Liwei, had to say about these peas which contain cancer causing dangerous dyes, and in which one person actually ended up dying from:
“Such toxic artificial green peas have been found in Hunan and Guangdong before, but it looks like the news didn’t catch enough attention from…
7.Mud sold as black pepper
Local mud was actually masked as black pepper, while white pepper was essentially flour. The guy in China selling these got busted, but justified his actions by saying that they “would not kill people.” Of course it never is until someone dies that mass investigations into fake foods take place, which means there are likely many more phony food products out there that we don’t know about.
8. Fake Sweet Potato Noodles
5.5 tons of this were made by one facility in China and the real ingredients were corn, paraffin wax and industrial ink to give them a purple color. In 2011 complaints began pouring in from consumers that something just did not taste right.
9.Fake Ginseng
Ginseng is hugely popular and profitable, which makes it hugely counterfeit-able. Boiling the roots in sugar adds some extra weight and the profit increases. Of course boiling in sugar could actually strip the product of it’s medicinal value altogether. Normal Ginseng will have 20% sugar, and the fake stuff 70%. So they are actually selling people sugar, masked as Ginseng.
10.Plastic Rice
Perhaps the one fake food that hits the hardest is fake rice. Somehow there is money to be made in creating phony rice. It turns out when you create fake rice from potatoes and synthetic resin, the rice will stay hard after boiling making this a red flag that you’ve been had.
SOURCE
Perhaps the one fake food that hits the hardest is fake rice. Somehow there is money to be made in creating phony rice. It turns out when you create fake rice from potatoes and synthetic resin, the rice will stay hard after boiling making this a red flag that you’ve been had.
SOURCE
