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WTF!

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-08/chinas-tainted-lard-scare-linked-to-taiwan-made-food-imports

It’s the Mid-Autumn Festival in China, a holiday that coincides with the full moon in the eighth month of the lunar calendar, and people across the country will be celebrating by going out in the evening and gazing at the sky. Tradition calls for admiring the moon’s beauty while eating sweet round cakes loaded with egg yolks and lotus seeds, wrapped in a dough containing generous amounts of lard.

In the runup to this year’s festival, though, yet another food scandal is giving Chinese reason to worry about the safety of those mooncakes. For a change, the center of the latest scandal isn’t in mainland China but in Taiwan, where the government last week arrested six people for allegedly recycling oil from kitchens and grease from leather factories and selling the mixture to unwitting buyers.

That has led Chang Guann (1498:TT), a Taiwanese supplier of cooking oil, to remove from sale more than 236 tons of oil products, according to Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration. Nearly 1,000 shops or restaurants on the island had unknowingly purchased tainted lard. Another company hit by the scandal is Wei-Chuan Food(1201:TT), a Taipei producer of everything from ice cream to MSG that has told the Taiwan stock exchange it expects to lose 79.4 million Taiwan dollars ($2.65 million) through product recalls and lost inventory. The company’s stock price plunged nearly 7 percent on Monday.

The foul play in Taiwan provides a rare chance for the Chinese government, hit by scandal after scandal involving food safety, to indulge in some schadenfreude—or, to use the Chinese expression for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, xin zai le huo. No doubt China’s beleaguered food-safety mandarins, repeatedly criticized for lax regulation of the food supply on the mainland, welcome any opportunity to point out the shortcomings of a rival.

The case is the second major food-safety scandal by a Taiwan-based company in the past year, as the state-run China News Service helpfully reminded readers; the earlier incident prompted Wei-Chuan to recall “tens of thousands of bottles of tainted cooking oil.” According to the official China Daily, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine, the Chinese agency in charge of food safety, said it hadn’t yet found any products on the mainland containing the recycled cooking oil. Still, the regulator has warned Chinese citizens against eating tainted food from Taiwan. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the South China Morning Post reported today that the local government has said at least four importers had introduced the tainted oil into the city.

The new gutter-oil scandal has “shocked local consumers” in Taiwan who expect more from their government, according to a report by China’s Xinhua news agency. “I hope the law could be revised to impose tougher punishment on those who breach food safety regulations,” one New Taipei resident told the news agency.