Taiwan Today

Taiwan’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2002 brought in foodstuffs from around the globe, while the food industry gained access to a wider variety of raw materials. Through the joint efforts of food product manufacturers, chefs and restaurants, Taiwan became known to tourists as a culinary heaven. But the opening of the market and free distribution of products increases the potential for a food safety scare anywhere in the world to affect food safety management in Taiwan.

The recent revelation that starch containing the unapproved chemical maleic anhydride has been used illegally as an additive in many foods has attracted great public attention.

Consumers often wonder about the safety of what goes into their stomachs, and what quantities will pose a health risk. While few foods nowadays are free of pollution, the great majority present no cause for concern. It should be understood that the small amounts of contaminants one consumes in food on a daily basis do not threaten health, because humans have always lived in a world full of microorganisms and the body has adapted to that environment.

The issue of food safety should thus be approached from the concept of risk. The public often applies the standard of zero risk when there is a threat to food safety, but zero risk is not a real possibility. Appropriate risk is the proper attitude to take, in fact. The social costs of attempting to achieve zero risk are enormous, as was seen in the controversy over imported beef containing ractopamine. The precision of modern laboratory instruments allows measurements as exact as 1 part per billion, so the minute residues found in many natural food materials are misinterpreted as contamination. But food comes primarily from nature, and our environment is not as artificially antiseptic as a pharmaceutical factory or chip plant.

It is a mistake to equate sanitation standards with health risks, because what sanitation standards represent are administrative guidelines. They are set at very low levels, dozens or even hundreds of times below levels that will result in toxicity. This buffer zone is designed so that if sanitation standards are inadvertently exceeded, there is no immediate adverse influence on human health, but the government will step up quality controls to prevent the contamination from reaching higher levels with actual health risks.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so food product manufacturers must be responsible for quality control at every step in the process. In the last 10 years or so, food product management regulations in developed countries has incorporated mechanisms for source controls, autonomous management and product responsibility, with the goal of food product traceability.

Proactive prevention by food-makers is much more effective than government inspections. The tainted starch incident has made it abundantly clear that it is extremely difficult to uncover the use of unapproved ingredients through spot checks. But in any food safety scare, law-abiding manufacturers suffer, too, once again driving home the importance of autonomous management of raw materials.

While every such incident is a blow to both consumers and the government, every crisis is also a turning point. Relevant amendments to the Act Governing Food Sanitation, along with concerted action by the central and local governments in conjunction with industry and academia, are expected to remedy the food management shortcomings revealed in the tainted starch incident, thus maintaining Taiwan’s international position as a culinary heaven.

(This commentary originally appeared in the China Times May 29.)