China Puts Lime in Flour- Unsafe Chinese Products

WTF?

They complain about KFC coupons, they make fake eggs, peas and such, and now add lime to flour, just because it is cheap. You can hear the groans of humanity pulling at its seams with each news item in China.

BEIJING – Recent investigations have found that some bleaching agents widely used in flour production contain as much as 30 percent pulverized lime, a substance that has been linked to health problems.

Local insiders, who were worried the material would cause serious harm to public health, reported that pulverized lime is added to the bleaching agent produced by the Yuzhong Food Additive Company in Rugao in East China’s Jiangsu province, the report said.

Reporters then collected samples by visiting the company. Follow-up tests confirmed that some 30 percent of pulverized lime is used in the bleaching agent, the report said.

“Before the Spring Festival this year, the company purchased four trucks’ worth of pulverized lime, with each truck carrying 40 tons. An average of 1 jin (0.5 kg) of pulverized lime was added to every 4 jin of the bleaching agent,” a local insider was quoted as saying.

The normal price of bleaching agent is 11,000 yuan ($1,611) per ton, but the one from the Yuzhong company was only sold at only 9,000 yuan per ton.

Such news did not surprise some people within the industry. “Their low prices resulted from adding pulverized lime,” a salesperson from another bleaching agent company in Henan said upon learning about the other company’s lower price.

Most of the country’s bleaching agent companies are located in Henan. The Yuzhong company owner, surnamed Chen, said the bleaching agent was mainly sold to big-scale flour manufacturers in Shandong, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces.