I have quite some things that I wanted to blog about over the past one week…but everything has given way to the hottest food safety issue this week… the case of melamine-contaminated milk and milk products from China (actually I dont remember what I wanted to blog about;PP)…after all, how can this food person leave out such an important issue in her blog?
And to summarize it all especially for those who were too busy to read every single details (but I bet everyone reads, due to the widespread use of such products as well as the love for milk and dairy products…but anyway, melamine, is a plastic compound that has a high content of Nitrogen, and is used either consciously or unconsciously to mask the low content of diluted milk…(why do they dilute the milk some may ask? well, all for the name of profit, money…you make more money by selling milk diluted with water..and you have more to sell…but what happen then is that for the diluted milk to pass testing (to qualify as ‘milk’ there must be a certain minimum level of protein content)..and melamine helps by ‘mimicking’ with its high Nitrogen content…what can you say if farmers are using it on milk without really knowing too well that melamine is poisonous? (well, guess they should know it sub-consciously still, how can anyone not know if the substance they add into a food is edible or not, or in this case, even toxic?!
so yeah…all in all…cheating leads to no where…manufacturers who cheat will not last long…they may squeeze through for a year…or even longer depending on the nature of cheating…but still I believe, as the Cantonese saying goes, “Paper could never contain fire”…and this fire will probably burn a while more, but the ‘burn-scar’ will last for many, many years to come certainly…
and such incident has sparkled my intense interest even more, that I should pursue my interest in food safety training…I have already been using this issue as an example in my training today…and probably in the coming sessions of training too…”all that has been done cannot be undone” but we could learn a great lesson from this…and use this as a good example to tell our own food handler and factory staffs…never to let anything similar to happen…I was listening to 988 this morning and callers were saying that they no longer have confidence in China’s food and other products…some even said they never believed in China food products at all…I would honestly said neither have I…but then again, this does not mean that our own local products are a lot more superior…especially since the Malaysian food industry is made up of SMEs (small medium enterprises)…and people in this field would know about examples of malpractices as well…but just that some are just never made known to the public…as I stay longer in the industry there were more food that I will phase out…most critically I would say try to avoid highly processed foods if you could…if you ask me for examples…I must say that I can’t forget fish balls, meat balls, prawn meat, minced meat (used for har gao, siu mai..dim sums)…
and if I write any longer, you’ll find that you can’t really eat anything else anymore;PPP *even food in restaurants have risk of chemical contamination, mind you, due to their practices, from my previous experience / observation*…what’s more food from hawker / street – worse…well, but then again…if on the other hand scientists are predicting that Earth would not stand another 50 years…perhaps you wont bother too much about all these melamine, or what ever that could get into our foods?! well, something to ponder on…but I myself will never be able to put off my wary eyes when it comes to food…*occupational sickness*
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