Thursday, September 25, 2008

i have long discontinued eating any foodstuff from you-know-where, years before their melamine-tainted dust settled on aisles and aisles of our supermarket shelves. 

reading this is what made me stop. below is an excerpt taken from the above-titled non-fiction, written by a well-known journalist and radio presenter of that country, as she moved from precinct to precinct, tracking down some of the ardent listeners of her program, and exposing the plight of women there.

while the rest of the contents of this book continue to be obstructed and obscured amongst countless networks of dendrites, this little excerpt continues to traumatise me til this day.
needless to say, its more than a little successful in putting me off all edible products of that country.

'...'Xinran,' he said, 'have you ever been inside a sponge cake factory?'

'No,' I replied, confused.

'Well, I have. So I never eat sponge cake.' He suggested that I try visiting a bakery to see what he meant.

I am impatient by nature, so at five o'clock the next morning I made my way to a bakery that was small but had a good reputation. I hadn't announced my visit, but I didn't expect to encounter any difficulty. Journalists in China are called 'kings without crowns'. They have the right of free entry to almost any organisation in the country.

The manager at the bakery did not know why I had come but he was impressed by my devotion to my job: he said that he had never seen a journalist up so early to gather material. It was not yet fully light; under the dim light of the factory lamps, seven or eight female workers were breaking eggs into a large vat. They were yawning and clearing their throats with a dreadful hawking noise. The intermittent sound of spitting made me feel uneasy. One woman had egg yolk all over her face, most probably from wiping her nose rather than some obscure beauty treatment. I watched two male workers add flavouring and colour to a thin flour paste that had been prepared the day before. The mixture had the eggs added to it and was then poured into tins on a conveyor belt. When the tins emerged from the oven, a dozen or so female workers packed the cakes into boxes. They had crumbs at the corners of their mouths.

As I left the factory, I remembered something a fellow journalist had once told me: the dirtiest things in the world are not toilets or sewers, but food factories and restaurant kitchens. I resolved never to eat sponge cake again...'

so you see, trouble's been brewing long before coffee beans were ground, my friend...

r.z 9:02 PM  0 comments