It seems yet another food scandal has rocked China.
Last week, Shanghai’s state-owned Dragon TV investigated a Shanghai-based food processor that works with Yum Brands Inc, the supplier for such haute cuisine as KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s. It took footage of workers using meat that fell on the floor, as well as mixing several-months-old expired meat with fresh meat, before giving it to Yum’s local division, Yum’s No. 1 Business Unit. The meat may be bad, but the irony—delicious.
The same report said that staff at the facility allegedly kept two record books. One was doctored for the benefit of any inspectors that dropped by.
And just to make everyone in China that much more confident in Western brands, the supplier, Shanghai Husi Food, is a unit of the OSI Group, an American food producer.
The scandal has grown, too. OSI also supplies to Burger King, Starbucks, Papa Johns’, Domino’s, and Subway, though the latter two said they did not use meat from Shanghai Husi, despite online reports saying otherwise. IKEA also used Husi Food, but says they ended their contract with them earlier this year. But, even if you don’t eat at these places, Husi did serve restaurants in the Shanghai area.
So clearly, this is unacceptable and Yum and McDonald’s have apologized. This will never happen again. Just like the last time they said this would never happen again.
Yum Brands was just beginning to recover from a scandal in 2012 when its Chinese suppliers had pumped their chicken full of excess antibiotics. I wonder if they were trying to compensate for meat that somehow has been exposed to unusual levels of bacteria.
And yet, American firms enjoy doing business with Chinese food processors. In 2013, US Smithfield Food, the world’s largest pork producer, was sold to a Chinese company. This was just a few months after 16,000 dead pigs mysteriously washed up in a Shanghai river, most likely dumped in the water by pig farms upstream. Yes, of course we want Chinese food processors handling U.S. pork!
Earlier this year, Walmart also had problems with its Chinese suppliers. They were forced to recall their donkey meat products, because they found fox meat mixed in! I feel like this scandal could just as easily have been finding donkey in your fox meat.
Last year there were hundreds arrested for food safety crimes in China. One of the bigger scandals involved rat and fox meat being passed off as beef and mutton.
As of now, Husi has been shut down and Shanghai police have reported five arrests, including the head of Shanghai Husi Food. Word is he will be chopped up and turned into Chicken McNuggets.
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