So what is the deal re: food safety in China? Is all the food tainted and riddled with weird chemicals, or is some of it overblown Western news propaganda? I mean, millions of Chinese people still need to eat, right?!

I have been all psyched up about moving with my family to Kunming this Spring. Almost done with my TEFL cert. Ready to apply for jobs. Making a list of what to pack. Happy music playing in my head as I envision life in Kunming for the next few years... BUT every time I mention to someone that I plan to move to China, they look at me like I have three heads. Their main concern: food safety (ok pollution is another one). I'm going to be eating fake rice, fake eggs, noodles made of detergent, meat with traces of human hair.

I did read that Salvador's has an organic partnership with a local farm.

Any thoughts?

Yes there are issues with food safety. But you can work around most of them. Food fraud is becoming more common globally, possibly due to the increased prices of food. Not all of this fraudulent food is potentially harmful, even though some of it may seem revolting.

Basically, if you eat at home you will have a much cheaper and safer food experience. You can bet your life you will get a dose of the runs at some time, but that is true in most developing countries.

Any fruit and veg. that you buy, make sure you wash it well. You are more likely to get fake dry grocery from the small shops, and much less likely to get fake goods from the big supermarkets, it has been known.
Imported milk is on the market now, and is available in the larger stores, and many expats buy this.
Meat, if you buy beef at the market where you can see the whole cuts, you will be ok.
Pork is tricky because of the hormones and anti-biotics. We buy from a local market where we know the farmer raises her own pigs.
Chickens here are scrawney and generally used for soup. Big plump chickens are available, but these are from factory farms.
Frozen meat and fish generally comes from factory farms or is imported, and is often full of water. However, if you buy the catering packs of frozen fish from Metro (wholesaler), there is generally no added water.

Most of the fake bulk items, like rice etc. are sold to restaurants or are found in processed food.

One thing you will find is they do not refigerate things like we do in the West. I have found many times what we ate for supper one night my wife is going to serve me the next night or 2 days later without it having been stored in the frig. After having had Diarrhea after most times eating at local dining places and even at home on my last trip to the states i picked up some anti-diarrhea pills at a costco store and it has been one of best purchases i have ever made. I take one of those little pills before going out and have went 5 months now with only having been sick a few times. Also convinced my wife to quit buying my meat at local markets and started buying at larger grocery chains like Metro, WalMart,etc. which has helped a lot. Like tigertiger said if you are cautious you will be fine.

Hi Ningsi,
What can a TEFL certified teacher earn in Kunming?
Thanks!

The problem with the supermarkets are about the same. When you shop at Metro for example, you see all the meats nicely displayed in their frozen cases. Just like home, you may think. But have any of you ever seen a refrigerated truck on China? They are VERY FEW because people will not pay the higher cost of shipping goods in these trucks. So ask yourself how does frozen meat get to Kunming? The answer is regular trucks, which after 4 or 5 days on the road, the product arrives thawed out. The metro re-freezes it in the store. Hence food that is freezer burned, meat dry and tough, or worse, laden with bacteria.
This is why most restaurant food tastes so bad. It is just not fresh like getting food in HK, Xiamen, Shenzhen, or Shanghai where it is properly shipped in and consumed at port of entry. Kunming is way down the shipping line and thus will always have sub standard food quality by virtue of the logistics to get it here.
So on ALL fronts, where ever you buy food, it's a crap shoot.

Places like the OLD Silverspoon, Greenlake Hotel bought meats direct from the importer in Shanghai and Bejing and then it was flown into Kunming. Stayed fresh and delicious which set them apart from everyone else.

I think bucko is right because I recently tried a frozen ribeye steak from carrefour and it had a very odd texture.

Fresh and frozen food at Carrefour and Walmart is actually really bad. I now only buy packaged processed food or home supplies there.

If the thawed chicken pieces aren't sold by the end of the day, they take it back to the store room to refreeze it and display it again the next day. They also spray bleach on them so that the colour makes the chicken appear fresh. They also use lemon to cover the bleach smell.

The chicken breasts at the Walmart in Beijing Lu yesterday looked like frozen pieces of boiled chicken. Like bucko said, it was probably freezer burned.

I am not sure about here, but in Beijing, they usually turn off the meat and seafood freezers at night.

Vegetables and fruits aren't fresh either, they are stored in the cold room., and it often seems like they buy the reject batches from suppliers.

If the pieces of roasted meat are also not sold, they put them in a plastic bag using that plastic glove that was probably used the whole day and was in contact with different objects. I wouldn't eat the pickled vegetables either.

The transparent boxes that contain nuts, candy and other snacks sometimes have small cockroaches in them.

People also play in the boxes that contain rice or dried beans with their bare hands.

I've also seen mice at Carrefour in the soft drink section when it was nearing closing time.

Regards fresh meat.

Most meat at the wet market is killed late at night or early morning. Usually the latter. Buy your meat early, before it has been sitting around too long. Especially in the summer.

For eating out. You can set your watch (almost) by Chinese mealtimes. The world stops at 12 noon and 6pm. If you get to most restaurants a few hours after these times, the food has been sitting around in a warm kitchen for longer than might be safe.
If you get to the chow house a little before 12 and 6, you will beat the long wait for food, and it will be (hopefully) fresh.

I would never buy any bulk food. Just stand by the bins for 10 minutes and watch the legions of children and adults that play with this food. It is very dirty and disgusting.

Main issues;

- Pathogens (bacteria such as Coliforms) due to lack of attention to food safety principles in farm gate to plate principle (HACCP, SQF2000), and also GMP for food manufacturing.

- Uncertified verification of heavy metal levels in food articles destined for food manufacturing processes. Basically the raw materials manufacturer uses the 'MS Word Edit' laboratory and pdf's their product specification to the food manufacturer.

- The only time food gets checked in China and even in developed countries such as USA and Australia, which is considered one of the most stringent for food saftey is randomly, and if not at all unless there is a public outbreak of some kind eg. food poisoning. Do not go to bed at night thinking government food departments are checking every single product.

- FSANZ (Food Safety Aust. and New Zealand) who set standards as per prescribed legislation only consider it 'thorough' to test dairy products once ever two weeks, per manufacturing line. They only test for microbiological hazards such as E. Coli, Salmonella, Shingella, Listeria ).

- What do Chinese food manufacturers do? Raid foreign food markets for products like cereal based baby food from Australia, instead of addressing the key issues in food safety.

- Use of higher levels of pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals than used in developed countries such as Australia

- More alarming is the use of feed antibiotics to livestock animals as a measure to promote growth rate. These antibiotics are also used in humans. Thus, sub-optimal consumption (yes, there are 'acceptable levels of antibiotic residues in meat' of commonly used antibiotics causes the natural selection of resistant forms of these bacteria as the weak ones easily die and these 'super bugs' end up causing new forms of illnesses like gastroenteritis of which new antibiotics need to be developed (can you see the trend here for pharmaceutical profits?), as the ones currently infecting you are immune to the current antibiotics being used.

- The culling of 'sick' or processing of dead chickens and pigs for food retailers such as McDonalds and KFC.

Summary; Foreigner's in China buy international food at international supermarkets, eat local vegetarian or organic.

Of course let us be fair on China, where do you think they learnt this technology from? No-one ever questioned who the foreign (NZ based) joint venture company was in the 2008 melamine milk scare was ..., I guess alot of money buys you a backseat in the press room.