Captain, check your sticks!
 Just think, you could be eating your Chinese food with these very same chopsticks! |
| Today’s unsafe export of Chinese goods comes from Beijing, where a factory has been recycling people’s used chopsticks and then reselling them without disinfecting them at all. Yummy. Beijing News says that officials there have seized about 500,000 pairs of the germy disposable bamboo chopsticks and a machine used to package them. The article says that the factory has been selling about up to 100,000 pairs a day. But the owner of the factory said he had sold the chopsticks for a dirt cheap 0.04 yuan a day and made around 1,000 yuan (that’s $130 US) on any given day when business was good. Not being one to shy away from 5th-grade math, I did a little calculating to check the things, and if my calculations are correct (I didn’t say I’m good at 5th-grade math), he actually sold about 25,000 pairs of dirty chopsticks a day, nowhere near 100,000. Nice math, Reuters! 1000/0.04 = 25,000, not 100,000. Now, it’s not to say that there weren’t days that he did sell 100,000 pairs of chopsticksk, but the way the article is worded, it’s clear they were going for sensationalism and panic. But still, let’s say he’d been doing this for 2 months (60 days) and selling 25,000 pairs a day before he got caught; that’d mean he sold 1.5 million pairs of nasty, already-been-in-someone-else’s-mouth chopsticks. Nasty. Oh, and he had no license to sell the chopsticks in the first place, so who knows how long it had been going on before he got caught. You could’ve used his unsafe chopsticks last month or just last week and not even realized it. You could have some weird oriental disease ravaging your body right now, as you read this, all because you decided to “go native” and use chopsticks at a restaurant. How’s that for a possible panic-inducing statement? Man, I should totally work for Reuters. |
| But it’s gonna get better, right? Probably not soon. According to the article, China “lacks the manpower to enforce food and drug safety regulations at home or for export.” But, hey! They check their imports carefully! That’s good to know. Thanks, China! |
| The article also pointed to one possible cause of the problem, saying, “A lack of business ethics and a spiritual vacuum after China embraced economic reforms in the late 1970s have been blamed for unscrupulous business practices and corruption.” Ya think? A large number of the people in China don’t believe in any higher power, but they do believe in money, so of course they’re going to be morally devoid and corrupt in their business practices. It’s to be expected that a largely godless society would react to total freedom and a lack of safeguards in such a way. It’s imperfect human nature. |
| I feel bad for the Chinese as a whole, though. I’m sure there are plenty of scrupulous business owners in a society of 1.4 billion people, but as the old saying goes, “one bad apple takes two to tango”…or something like that. I wonder when and what the next product recall/outing of corrupt Chinese businessman will be. Whatever it is, I’m not using disposable chopsticks for a while, that’s for sure. |
| Link to article |
