BEIJING -Chinese police have arrested 32suspects for producing and selling illegal cooking oil in a cross-province crackdown ,the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement Tuesday .
More than 100tonnes of such oil ,made from leftovers dredged from gutters behind restaurants ,were seized after busting a criminal network spanning 14provinces ,the ministry said .
Police began their investigation in March after residents in Ninghai County of eastern Zhejiang Province reported that a group of people were buying leftover oil from local restaurants .
A worker said his factory used water contaminated with sewage or leftovers from restaurants to make waste oil which was sold in markets.Guizhou native He Yong was nearly burned to death after falling into a hot oil tank while trying to collecting recycled oil from the top of the tank at a factory in Dongguan in Guangdong Province last month. The accident occurred on only his fifth day on the job at the workshop. At the hospital, he claimed the factory was producing illegal cooking oil -- a substandard product recovered from kitchen leftovers. The factory produced the oil with sewage from underground sewers, he said."We had to remove sewage from the trenches and septic tanks, and then distill the oil from the water. Then the factory ships the oil to some wholesale markets in Shenzhen or Dongguan. I heard that the oil was being used for cooking."Reporters from the newspaper said that while visiting the factory with police and investigators, they discovered "extremely disgusting raw materials. They had a foul smell and they were mixed with rubbish, plastic bags and even sanitary napkins."
Some supposedly edible cooking oil on store shelves in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province is being produced from so-called gutter oil and swill-cooked oil, Chinese media have reported.Swill-cooked oil is waste animal oil and oil that has been used several times - usually by restaurants - for frying.According to Beijing Times, some producers of the illegal cooking oil that is made from the gutter oil and swill-cooked oil are processing nearly 100 tons of their substandard and possibly dangerous oil each day. An insider told the paper that the raw materials for the illegal oil include swill, oil that has been repeatedly fried, leftover pieces of pork from slaughterhouses and poultry fat. The oil is then blended and bleached.(Kegiatan di kilang pengeluaran minyak masak daripada sumber kotor dan jijik. Sumber: Very Vietnam )
Million tons of swill-cooked oil back on table
Read this before you eat at Chinese restaurants next time. Every year, two to three million tons of swill-cooked dirty oil, soaked with poisonous carcinogens have sneaked back to our dining tables through an underground muck-money network so rampant that it's an open secret in the industry, the China Youth Daily reported Wednesday.
A deadly toxin found in swill-oil is aflatoxin, which is among the most carcinogenic substances ever known and is 100 times more poisonous than the forbidding white arsenic.
The stomach-turning news report quoted a veteran food professor as saying "about one in ten meals" at the country's restaurants is cooked with such dirty oil, a calculation based on China's annual oil consumption of 22.5 million tons.
"You must have eaten the swill oil as well," asserted He Dongping, a professor on oil and toxin with central China's Wuhan Polytechnic University, and also a leading specialist with China's Food and Oil Standardization Administration, who has spent over seven years on an up-hill task -- how to detect and stop the despicable practice.
According to an undercover investigation in Wuhan by nine senior students of professor He, the conspiracy starts at night when swill-fishers hollow out the stinking hogwash from urban sewages, followed by filtrating, heating, subsiding, dividing, and then in the morning comes out the clear-looking "edible" oil for unwitting customers.
Each fisher could fetch up to four barrels at a time, nearly 300 yuan ($44) easy money every night or over 10,000 yuan ($1,465) a month, a lucrative deal too tempting to resist, especially so when the business was in a trouble-free "anarchy" state, said professor He.
