John K. Yasuda, On Feeding the Masses: An Anatomy of Regulatory Failure in China

Excerpt

John Yasuda, an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Culture at Indiana University, makes a major contribution to the literature on food security with his first book. China has the world’s largest population, some 240 million farms (most are small, less than 1 ha), and millions of processors and distributors. Until the 1980s, food hygiene problems were manageable because there was too little food available to be concerned about its safety. Only in the 1980s, with the huge expansion of food markets making China the world’s fourth largest food producer, did safety become an issue. In recent years, sensational food incidents included hams soaked in pesticides, baby formula contaminated with melamine, Sudan red dye in foods, poisonous mushrooms, carcinogenic cooking oil, tofu spiked with sewage, insecticide-laced dumplings, buns loaded with pesticides, clenbuterol poisoning, chlorine-tainted cola and cadmium combined with rice (Table 1.1, p. 6). These incidents give China’s food products a poor international reputation. As President Xi Jinping said in 2013:“If OUR party can’t even handle food safety issues properly, and keeps mishandling them, then people will ask whether we are fit to keep ruling China” (p. 1 epigraph). …