Opinion | Gutter oil scandal reveals stunning lapses in regional food safety checks
Albert Cheng says as more brands are found to have bought substandard products, officials must be pressed to conduct more stringent tests
The "gutter oil" scandal is spinning out of control. At the last count, the tainted oil has been found to have been used in nearly 250 types of food products, involving some 1,200 food companies and processing plants in Taiwan.
The tallies are set to increase, as the Taiwanese Food and Drug Administration continues to announce its sample testing results.
The crisis has exposed the incompetence of food safety regulators not only in Taiwan, but also in Hong Kong and probably on the mainland, in their failure to stop the import and export of such hazardous food products on such a massive scale over such a long period.
Hong Kong imports lard mainly from Taiwan. Our other suppliers include Canada and the Netherlands.
Those who opted for the Taiwanese product did so for one primary reason - to cut costs. As one chef told a radio show, there is a marked difference in the quality of the Taiwanese products and those from the other two countries.
The buyers at these companies should have been our first line of defence to reject the substandard products. Sadly, they have done the opposite.