There go the Chinese again, out-competing us with their manufacturing prowess:

Singapore media claim that fake rice is being distributed in the Chinese town of Taiyuan, in Shaanxi province. This “rice” is a mix of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and plastic. It is formed by mixing the potatoes and sweet potatoes into the shape of rice grains, then adding industrial synthetic resins.

A Chinese Restaurant Association official said that eating three bowls of this fake rice would be like eating one plastic bag. Due to the seriousness of the matter, he added that there would be an investigation of factories alleged to be producing the rice. Meanwhile, the low cost of the fake rice is allowing wholesalers to make large profits.

Yum!

Given my prior extensive coverage of the melamine-spiked “gluten” scandal, nothing would shock me when it comes to Chinese food safety. But what I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around is how it could possibly be cheaper to manufacture rice than it is to, you know, grow it?

Though I guess there’s a kinda weird economic logic to all this, as only in a nation that pays its workers so little as to make the manufacture of fake rice viable, could there be such a strong market demand for a cheaper alternative to such a relatively inexpensive staple foodstuff.

Welcome to the Chinese Century.

27 replies on “China Takes Lead In Fake Rice Production”

  1. As much as half of all food and industrial/commercial products sold in China is fake or ersatz.

    This is why you should buy Basmati rice from India.

    … mind you, I could tell you things about corruption there, but your wiki probably doesn’t acknowledge that either …

  2. Kinda like the meat filler in the Taco Bell scandal, except Taco Bell is just tying to make money, while I think China is trying to feed its people.

    Beef is awesome to eat, but all hell will break loose if China ever comes close to level of beef consumption. So sure, eat a mix of rice and potato resin, so long as it taste good and doesnt kill you. Alot of people would rather see China eat that and boost its beef consumption.

  3. I read an account from an American merchant who worked in China in the 1870s. He got shipments of dried beans that were 25% mud pellets cast to look like beans.

  7. No need to regulate any of this- I mean, after all… the free market will adjust, right..? What’s a few hundred poisoned people, give or take? That’s capitalism!

  8. While reading The Jungle, I wondered if it was time to bring back sawdust filler. It might make a good diet fad.

    The same is probably true with plastic rice. Of course, the Chinese don’t often need diets. Maybe they could trade us for our sawdust-free sausage.

  10. @9 Penalization is different than regulation. Not that I condone this, but we could very easily keep the FDA and also institute the death penalty for those caught poisoning the food supply.

  11. This sounds like a fake news story, the kind that people latch onto immediately because it aligns exactly with what people have in their heads. Like when that story of pork-flavored cardboard buns that popped up some time ago. Yes, greedy immoral people in China have poisoned food in the past to make money, and yes, food safety is not super great there (unlike here, we never have recalls of tainted food), but that they would go to so much trouble to produce fake rice? Out of so many different materials? Rice? It just defies logic.

    If you go to that link, it says it got the news from other websites that have cited an article written in Korean called Weekly Hong Kong about a story told by the Singaporean media. Asian media outlets are not the most reliable sources of information, if you didn’t already know this. Many rumors are printed as fact, and many falsehoods are perpetuated in the service of cultural superstitions. Add to that the fact that you are reading this on the internet. In any other case, you might be suspicious, but because it’s a story about fake food in China, you swallow it without a second thought. I mean, it’s not that big a deal, really. But this doesn’t look real to me.

  12. @9 and @10 – what you forget is most businesses in China are owned 51 percent by the Party or the People’s Army.

    It’s only the little fish that get caught and executed, and those who fail to pay the proper bribes to Party member’s families.

  14. @12

    Exactly. It’s the middle-managers who get caught. When the scandal is particularly embarrassing to the Chinese elite, the punishment is death. The real people responsible also pay the executioner to do the killing.

  15. @13, yes, as long as a news article is in English, it is automatically reliable. Got a fake news story in Farsi? Just run it through Google Translate into English and it is magically rendered true. Seriously, what part of your brain is damaged so that you think your response made any sort of sense?

  16. I go to the supermarket, and of course, there’s only a few sections of real food — produce, and the butcher and fish shop, dairy. I’m one of the few buys the “real” food. Nearly everyone else in line has food that is canned, frozen, boxed…pre-made in some way…mine is raw and paper bagged or wrapped (yesterday I walked in, and the only thing I bought was a half a pound of crimini mushrooms…everyone stared).

    So, I think, I see all these mounds of steak, fish, chicken, vegetables, potatoes…and I’m one of the few people buying these things. What happens to all the rest of it?

  17. Should they lose their industrial-resin supply channel, I hear there are some sketchy potatoes available in the Tri-Cities area.

    Remember, kids, when each country focuses its production on what it does best, and exports/imports accordingly, everybody wins!

  18. @16:

    Lots of other people are buying it, you just never see them. Grocery stores would sell it if people didn’t buy it; not a very good way to make a profit that selling things people don’t want to buy.

    But more importantly, what are the health effects of consuming that much plastic? I mean, would the body just treat it as inert material (i.e. non-soluble fiber) and simply pass it through the digestive tract? Would the petro-chemicals in the plastic have any deleterious side effects? And from a purely cold-hearted economic perspective, would the cost of treating these outweigh the savings?

    Perhaps no one even knows the answers to these and other pertinent questions, but regardless, this is one helluva bad way to find out.

  19. The joke in our house is “every time a million Chinese flush their toilets, a thousand all you can eat shrimp buffets bloom in America”!

  20. @17 not if they make pollution and other actual costs have no negative cost or measure.

    Then the invisible hand of the marketplace incorrectly chooses the bad over the good …

  21. @15 you can always authenticate it via the IPv6 route info. Which you’re running in a stack on your machine, unless you’re using a really old OS, in addition to the IPv4 stack.

  24. You’re crazy if you think the US food supply is significantly better, safer, or more authentic than China’s. For every scare story like this one, there’s a dozen you didn’t hear about in the States. Infested grain, meat mixed with shit, or heaped on dirty floors, extended with straw or garbage.

  25. @15, you got that? What Will said @21? The IPv6 “route info” on your computer can tell you whether stories are true or not.

    The answer to your question is “all parts”. All parts of Will’s brain are damaged and functionally inoperable, even though the parts still move.

  26. I agree with #11. When an article is poorly sourced and “too good to be true,” it usually is. I’m disappointed that people aren’t treating this skeptically.

    This reminds me of an old chestnut from a few years ago that “some people” (unspecified) in China were supposedly creating fake chicken eggs using a toxic mix of chemicals. People glommed onto this story quickly. Of course, it defies logic that people would go to extraordinary expense to create a fake version of something that’s available quite inexpensively.

    http://www.hoax-slayer.com/fake-eggs-chi…

    http://consumerist.com/2007/05/how-to-ma…

    The same is especially true for rice. Can you imagine how much effort would go into making fake but edible versions of individual grains of rice, compared to the actual cost of growing a grain of rice? And people in China wouldn’t be able to tell the difference? This is just stroking our egos about out Western superiority over those shifty Chinese people.

Comments are closed.