Reflections on the 'Tainted Milk' Incident
A single Sanlu infant formula has been turned upside-down by a single melamine; the affair has not only thrown dairy products into general doubt but spread to the political plane, where ill-meaning politicians have used it either to stir up trouble or to slander China — wanting to blow a small matter into a big one, slow China's economic march, and even shake the foundations of Chinese society. As for these little ants trying to shake the great tree, anyone who can see will laugh them off. Set against today's China — politically harmonious and stable, economically advancing fast, with rising national confidence and a fuller international image — the outcome speaks for itself.
I would venture to say: China will gain more from the "tainted milk" affair than it loses. The reason is simple. The reform and strengthening of food-safety monitoring, and the popular spread and rise of safety consciousness, will substantially lift the safety of China's food supply, and will sound a quality bell in other industries too. The general examination and prompt treatment of those harmed have averted longer-term, graver consequences. And the dark dealings and corruption in production, distribution, and oversight — these too will be pulled up root-and-soil, beaten back, and cleared out. When a matter rises to the political plane, the depth of its meaning will exceed expectations.
In my view, there is in fact one point worth being on guard about. In the "tainted milk" we found melamine — but we stopped only at the level of Western food-and-drug ingredient testing. In reality, by the theory of Chinese medicine, a food also has rising, descending, sinking, floating, and warming, cooling, cold, hot natures that modern science has no way of perceiving. The problems hidden along that axis are routinely overlooked. After the tainted-milk affair, everyone switched to imported dairy. They forget that those products only attest to the safety of their ingredients — they don't necessarily benefit health.
So far as we know, in the United States and other Western countries the rate of infantile eczema reaches 80–90%, often treatment-resistant and lasting a lifetime. The cause is probably not the climate-and-environment: in our country, from south to north, from coast to interior, climates of every kind exist — yet I have never heard of children's eczema being so prevalent in any one region. So the "science" of formula-feeding science is something I would really doubt.
I would propose, starting from this tainted-milk affair, that our food science go a step higher. We should pay special attention to the effects of consumption — just as new drugs must have clinical trials before approval, foods should be tightly tracked and widely investigated. We must not just chase along behind the foreigners. Otherwise our food safety remains incompletely secured. One day we may find that imported foods have done us deeper, longer-term harm.
When it comes to food safety, our country has conditions superior to other countries'. We can draw on foreign experience and lessons; we also have the theory of Chinese medicine, a rich food culture, and a vast store of folk dietary habits and recipes. To build, by person, by place, by time, by produce, by condition, our own food-safety system and develop our own distinctive food-safety science — this should be the responsibility of food-science researchers, and even more, it should be among the un-skippable duties of the relevant government departments.
A blind faith in foreigners has cost us a great deal already. But the story of imitating the Handan walk keeps playing: we never learn the new gait, and we forget the way we used to walk, and so end up crawling home. Among us there are always some who delight in crawling along behind the foreigner sniffing his wind, who count it an honor to let out a few imported breaths and earn the foreigner's faint smile. May such people not enter our government offices, and certainly not have a hand in writing the policies that govern us.
September 30, 2008