Would You Like Some Leather with Your Milk?

China has some food issues.  To name a few from the past: dodgy imports, melamine-tainted food, poison toothpaste, using plastic in food, babies growing breasts…

Why do they do this?  Much like drug-dealers, in order to make more money, food producers ‘cut’ their products…and they can get away with it.

Here’s the latest scandal exposed…

Cutting milk with leather

In China, milk is tested for protein content, as many dairy producers already cut their milk with water. Milk cut with too much water will fail the test.

To compensate for this, some Chinese dairy produces visit their local tannery to get scraps left over from the leather softening process.  They put it into milk, and it increases the milk’s protein content as measured in tests, so that they can get away with selling watered-down (and now leather-scrap-laden) milk.

Some of the chemicals that appear in this tainted milk – hydrolyzed leather proteins, sodium and potassium dichromate, the chemical hexavalent chromium (CrVI) – cause cancer.

Sadly, children are quite vulnerable to these chemicals and are often the consumers that drink the most milk. Long-term exposure to these chemicals can cause death in children.

China’s broken system

China’s social system is broken.  People are basically poisoning each other.

Here is a well-written article about some of the problems facing China’s food safety and security.

Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons by nerissa’s ring