Is Beijing's Bread Safe?

原创 Charles L. theBeijinger

Food safety is again back in the spotlight after a Shanghai bakery was shut down by city authorities after it was discovered to have used expired flour. Once well-regarded by the Shanghai expat community, the Farine French bakery now lies in disarray with eight of its executives detained by police and all four of its stores shuttered.

With such a high-profile bakery incriminated for lax food safety standards, can the same thing happen here in Beijing?

Despite not being a staple of the traditional diet, bread and other baked goods has become wildly popular in China, expected to reach sales of USD 69 billion this year. As seen by their locations scattered throughout the capital, Chinese bakeries like Holiland, 85C, and Bread Talk dominate the market with localized pastry specialities flavored with Chinese ingredients that are often much sweeter than their Western counterparts.

Although they specifically cater to the Chinese market, the domestic bread and pastry industry has also fallen into the same food safety scandals that continually plague the country. An undercover television news report revealed in 2015 that a Bread Talk franchise in Shenzhen violated numerous health safety standards like reusing its cooking oil, while across the border the year before Hong Kong had its own bakery food scandal when pineapple buns sold at Starbucks and 7-Eleven were suspected of being made with gutter oil.

Without the use of undercover journalism or whistleblowers as in the case of the Farine scandal, it is difficult to tell what is going on behind the scenes of a local bakery. And yet, finding out what goes inside a Beijing baked good is as simple as reading a list of ingredients – evidently something most of us don't make a habit of doing, considering the consequences.

Baking WeChat channel Baking Style (i烘焙) recently published a mini-report on the ingredients found in breads and pastries sold in Beijing convenience stores. And while Baking Style is not above promoting its own products by crticizing mainstream bakeries, it's clear that Beijingers should reconsider making baked good purchases from their neighborhood 24-hour convenience shop.

The ingredient label of bread products from Family Mart, 7-Eleven, Lawson, Good Neighbor, and Quik were given the once over, and although they had some recommendations, the outlook is not good.

One of the few recommendations mentioned in the mini-report is Kwik's chocolate cake (shown above), a dessert that features a tiramisu quality as well as a list of ingredients free of food additives (save for an acidity regulator). As well, Lawson's pineapple bun (shown below) is praised for featuring natural butter as part of its ingredients, something not seen throughout the rest of the sampled baked goods.

Here's where the list of baked goods you should stay away from begins.

Instead of butter, Family Mart's cheesecake uses margarine as does a bread sold by Quik. Meanwhile, 7-Eleven's own brand of shredded pork meat floss bun (shown below) lists the use of "high-grade margarine." For those of us watching our health, this is significant as margarine has been shown by a scientific study last year to be more dangerous than butter. The trans fats found in margarine are said to be much more unhealthy than its yellow cousin, raising the risk of death by 34 percent.

As commonly seen in prepared foods, many of these baked goods contain emulsifying agents as in Family Mart's tiger-skinned cake roll or Lawson's own brand of double-layer cheesecake and "thousand-layer" cheesecake (both shown below). Even though they are beneficial in making food more moist and soft, scientific studies have shown that emulsifiers can interfere with intestinal microbes, causing digestive disruptions that may make individuals to gain weight.

But that's not the worst of it. The Lawson convenience store cheesecakes have also been found to contain hydrogenated vegetable oil, an ingredient that poses such a high public health risk that it is already banned in Denmark and Switzerland. Although it is responsible for giving many prepared foods its signature "good consumer mouthfeel," the trans fats associated with hydrogenated vegetable oil also come with a number of health risks.

The Harvard School of Public Health has said trans fats can cause overactivity in the immune system and lead to chronic illnesses like stroke and diabetes. The New England Journal of Medicine said 5 grams of trans fats a day – the average amount consumed by the average American – can raise the risk of heart disease by 25 percent.

It seems the worries only increase as the ingredients to these baked goods are revealed. The label for 7-Eleven's shredded pork meat floss bun contains a staggering seven lines, requiring the erudite learning of a chemist to keep track of all the food additives and preservatives.

And yet, as scary as it is to read what these ingredient labels are telling us, it's far more horrifying to think of what they aren't telling us.

Two baked good products sold by the Good Neighbor convenience store franchise, the "New York" cheesecake and the ingot-shaped shredded pork meat floss wrap, both have a list of ingredients that contains just four items. Although these two sets of ingredients aren't the same (this isn't Taco Bell), neither of them happen to contain any powdered ingredients like flour.

The saying "What you don't know, can't hurt you" probably does not apply in this case.

Hopefully, Beijing won't have to witness a bakery food scandal like Shanghai did last week. But when it comes to bread and pastries sold in Beijing convenience stores, the risk to public health is as clear as its label – well, usually.

Hopefully China will soon standardize ingredient lists so food producers won't be adverse to put a label on it. It could prove to be too difficult a thing, but then, it's not like they're millennials.

Images: Anyv.net (360doc.com)

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