How oil became the latest Chinese food scandal

Whenever I go back to China, I try to eat as much as I can – delicious Chinese food that I can’t have outside of the country, whether childhood favourites or the latest food trends. But I’m often struck by my relatives and friends who turn their noses up at many of these delicious dishes – they commonly say ‘不敢吃’ – ‘I’m scared to eat it’.

The Chinese middle class can now be very discerning about the food that they eat, and who can blame them? In the last twenty years, there seems to have been a steady stream of food safety and hygiene scandals – most infamously melamine-laced milk powder in 2008, which poisoned tens of thousands of babies. Since then, we’ve heard about pesticides being put into steamed buns to improve their texture, used cooking oil being retrieved from gutters to be reused, and lamb meat that might contain rat or fox.

The latest scandal, breaking over the last couple of months, is that of fuel tankers being used to carry cooking oil without the tankers being cleaned in between. 

So what gives? Are these scandals a particularly Chinese phenomenon? Why hasn’t government regulation or punishment worked? And how does this impact political credibility in the eyes of the middle class?

I’m joined by two brilliant guests to discuss all of these questions and more.

Dali Yang is a political scientist and sinologist at the University of Chicago, whose research has focused on Chinese regulations when it comes to food and medicine. His latest book is Wuhan: How the Covid-19 Outbreak in China Spiralled Out of Control.

James Palmer is deputy editor at Foreign Policy and author of numerous books on China. He worked for years as a journalist inside China.

For further listening, check out the Chinese Whispers episode on the gig economy – another huge labour rights issue in the country today: Algorithms and lockdowns: how China’s gig economy works.