In addition to the cooking oil and rice mislabeling, news reports over the past few days have raised issues about fake honey and fake rice wine. Any bets on what the next food scandal will be?
Fake fruit wine and rice wine, Dalien brand, made by Datong Changji.
The real concern is about what is going to happen with the millions of liters of fake oil, fake soy sauce, fake rice wine and so on…
Everyone seem to believe that there is a factory or whatever able to recycle all this sh…t.
REALLY!!
I am thinking about, new packaging, new label, new brand and everything to the night market… In this way nothing is lost, still SOMEONE making some cash and that is it.
Another sex scandal on TV for the coming weeks and all locals will forget about it.
Quiet simple.
What happens to it, look for the discount signs at Carrefour. Everything was getting discounted yesterday, the oil, the soya sauce, the honey…
Very true. 
This thread is from 2007. A few Westerners looked at an imported bottle of olive oil, compared the price to imported olive oil bottled in Taiwan and asked “how can this be?”". Taiwanese are not like that. They see the low price and buy. Cheapness does not get you far, cf. sidewalks with bathroom tiles, ridiculous wiring outside the wall, unmaintained vehicles and many more similar cases.
I have suspected the honey for a long, long time. Real honey is an expensive commodity elsewhere, and usually sold in small bottles. But here, it’s cheap and sold in relatively huge bottles.
If one was to buy real honey in a carton the size they sell the. In Taiwan it would cost you a 1000 NTD and up!
But even now they have labels on those cartons claiming its been tested and approved as real honey.
What they do is add sugar and water (or something similar). Real honey doesn’t flow so quickly, it’s obviously diluted.
The problem is that many consumers have been educated by the food companies to expect larger amounts of food than is possible for the price.
They are also very confused on what the real food should taste and look like, it’s a process I guess. Bread and wine and milk and coffee knowledge has improved a lot over the years.
Something like oil takes longer and the labeling confuses the hell out of customers, there are conflicting messages in the health establishment and media, plus good oil IS expensive if you are going to cook with it everyday.
Milk.
The cottonseed cakes, they were originally meant to be motor oil. Let them fulfill their purpose.
Milk’s a good guess. I’ve been buying imported milk for a while now.
There has already been a mini-scandal involving 瑞穗 brand milk.
link?
I am suspicious about the honey we get from relatives living in the mountains in Nantou.
I found this webpage: How to Verify the Purity of Honey ?
Sharing with you. wikihow.com/Verify-the-Purity-of-Honey
I like the flame test and absorption test especially. Easy to do.
Nice link. Did you test the honey?
And now the cooking oil scandal has spread to Wei Chuan, one of the oldest and trusted brands in Taiwan.
I’m really interested in this. Thanks!
Not to mention the food at chain convenient stores that shall not be mentioned, cookies, high end restaurants, etc…
In summary, we’re doomed.
It’s gotten so big, that Carrefour has started stocking lard. Seems it’s about the only thing you can trust these days because you can make lard at home by getting fat from pork dealers and heating it at home. Lard used to not sell very well and is rarely carried because most regard them as unhealthy, but recently they’ve been selling like hot cakes. In the old days that’s all Taiwanese used as cooking oil when they were poor, so I guess there’s that nostalgia factor too…
I like lard anyways, they’re very effective at preventing food from sticking to a frying pan. If you have a steel/cast iron pan or wok 1/4 tsp of lard works better than 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in terms of non-sticking power!