China cracks down on recycled cooking oil

China’s food safety watchdog, the State Food and Drug Administration,  has ordered inspections of cooking oil nationwide as reports said up to one-tenth of Chinese supplies were illegally made and contained cancer-causing agents.

The order came shortly after a professor and a group of students at Wuhan Polytechnic University announced that they had found widespread use of recycled oil in their region in an undercover investigation. The professor, He Dongping, asserted that recycled oil was being used to prepare 1 in 10 meals in China. According to Mr He, the swill oil business is extremely profitable as the cost of buying food waste and refining is low while edible oil prices were rising.

Regulators are now searching for illegal oil recycling mills, and some health bureaus have begun releasing the names of restaurants and food establishments that were found to be using questionable oil.

Last November, regulators in southern China raided several workshops for turning discarded waste — possibly even sewage — into cooking oil.

In the city of Chengdu, in southwestern China, food safety officials released the names of 13 restaurants that were found to be using illegal cooking oil. The restaurants specialized in hot pot, a popular simmered dish.

City residents voiced anger at Chengdu regulators for having delayed the release of some of the names of the implicated restaurants, according to the English-language newspaper China Daily.

In Shanghai, regulators have warned that illegal cooking oil could be a problem because a large portion of restaurant food grease goes unaccounted for.

The city of Shanghai produces about 40 tons of restaurant food grease every day. But only about 29 tons of that grease is legally collected, recycled and disposed of, the Shanghai Greenery and Sanitation Bureau told some city legislators yesterday. Officials said that the rest of the food grease from local restaurant kitchens remained unaccounted for.  Hence, they can’t exclude the possibility that some could be used for the notorious and highly harmful business of swill-oil production.

还要让地沟油泛滥到何时？

《中国青年报》最近有关“我国每年返回餐桌的地沟油有200万~300万吨”的报道，几乎让每一位中国人都毛骨悚然。武汉工业学院食品科学与工程学院教授何东平估计，我国一年的动、植物油消费总量约为2250万吨，而地沟油的数量已占到消费总量的十分之一，按此推算，消费者每吃的10顿饭中，可能就会有1顿是在使用地沟油！还要让地沟油泛滥到何时？

地沟油：

地沟油实际上是一个泛指的概念，是人们在生活中对于各类劣质油的通称。

通俗地讲，地沟油可分为以下几类：一是狭义的地沟油，即将下水道中的油腻漂浮物或者将宾馆、酒楼的剩饭、剩菜(通称泔水)经过简单加工、提炼出的油;二是劣质猪肉、猪内脏、猪皮加工以及提炼后产出的油;三是用于油炸食品的油使用次数超过规定要求后，再被重复使用或往其中添加一些新油后重新使用的油。