Chinese Noodles

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.

Yummy! Pure Fat Chocolate!

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Chinese Food

From About.com, good  post here. I have had these things and they are a delight. They are pretty hot during certain times of the year, but they are always good.

“Thousand-Year Old Eggs
If the thought of eating food that could have been served to an Emperor during the Song dynasty offends your culinary sensibilities, relax. Thousand-year-old eggs aren’t really that old. A more accurate name for this pungent hors d’oeuvre would be salted or preserved eggs. Thousand-year old eggs (also called century eggs or hundred-year old eggs), are made by preserving duck eggs in ash and salt for one-hundred days. This turns the white of the egg a darkish gray color, giving the eggs an ancient appearance. Definitely an acquired taste, thousand-year old eggs have a strong salty flavor.”

No Wonder they Called the Stadium, The Birds Nest

Chinese are preoccupied with their sex drive, sexual prowess etc. And, they will eat anything to prove it. See below from about.com

“Bird’s Nest Soup
The chief ingredient in Bird’s nest soup is the nest of the swiftlet, a tiny bird that lives in caves in Southeast Asia. Instead of twigs and straw, the swiftlet makes a nest from its own saliva – the only bird in the world to do so. Harvesting these nests requires great skill – men must balance on tall bamboo poles to grab the nests from inside the dark caves. Like sea cucumber, bird’s nest actually tastes rather bland. Its recent rise in popularity comes from its growing reputation both as a health tonic and an aphrodisiac.

Getting Their Grub on in China

This is at the Hai Di Lau restaurant, quite good service there.

Breakfast

Beijing and the northern provinces like dumplings and noodles, especially for breakfast. In Chongqing, in the Sichuan province, they eat rice and a fried wrap, called dou jiang. Also the northerners are bigger usually and eat more carbs.

China Responds, Cracking down on Toxic Cooking Oil and Chopsticks

According to the Chinadaily, the chicoms have heard and are responding..

“The State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), China’s food safety watchdog agency, has issued two emergency notices to its bureaus nationwide to crack down on the use of swill-cooked oil and disposable chopsticks, both highly unhealthy products.

The urgent circulars, posted on the agency’s website on Thursday, followed recent news reports that these practices, for long a lightning rod for the watchdog’s dragnet, remain a perennial headache.

Eating in China

Pretty cool restaurant in China, but unfortunately, its now out of business. It seems that most businesses fail within one year .

Eating Dirt- Respecting the Dead in China

This is from wackychina, I have never heard of it, but apparently in this village, they eat the soil that is from around the shrine.

“Villagers gathered at the shrine to worship, when they had performed their rites, they continued to eat the soil of the shrine. The weirdest thing was that it wasn’t just one person who ate of the soil. Old people, children, middle aged people, even pregnant women ate it. Sick people ate soil, and so did healthy people. They all claimed that it had miraculous effects! The soil could cure sickness, but would be good for healthy people too. This really shocked me! From what I’ve heard, this is a tradition that’s been kept going for generations by the locals”.

“The worst thing is, so many villagers eat this soil, I’ve been told  that a few years ago, they even laid the King of Remedies’ coffin bare (by eating away the earth covering it). (…) To eat soil is a tradition that dates hundreds of years back, who would have thought it’s still going on? These people really have a problem, why eat soil when you’re ill? And why has no one tried to stop it?”