Another reason why you need to know chemistry in China
Alia | April 27th, 2012 - 1:51 am
It is yet another story about food safety in China, but this time, it’s “good news”.
Open any media in China today and you will find enough news about toxic foods to wonder whether it’s safe to eat anything in China. Two latest items that received the most media attention are toxic drug capsules made of gelatin extracted from waste leather scraps and preserved fruits made with excess flavoring, coloring and bleaching agents.
Some people work around the toxic drug capsules by DIY drug wraps using buns and cakes. But one netizen on Sina Weibo seems to find the ultimate solution.
“I just found a perfect pair. Those toxic drug capsules have Cr6+ (hexavalent chromium), and the toxic preserved fruits have pyrosulfite, which is a strong reducing agent and can oxidize Cr6+ to Cr3+ ( trivalent chromium), something everybody needs. So now you see, if we eat both toxic drug capsules and toxic preserved fruits, instead of being poisoned, we actually take in some useful minerals that are beneficial to our bodies – kill three birds with one stone. In China, we say good fortunes come in pairs. How’s this pair?”
The Weibo post got re-posted nearly 90K times within one day and attracted more than 8K comments. Someone from Guokr, China’s leading science and technology social network even listed out the reaction equation:
The conclusion? The reaction requires an acidic environment, which, luck us!, makes our stomach the perfection place for the two toxic items to work out some miracles.
CCTV exposed the two news consecutively for a reason! And that is why not many Chinese people die from all the toxic foods they take in everyday. As an old Chinese saying goes, “like curses like” (以毒攻毒).
Stories like this are why I love Chinese netizens – they are the king of wry sarcasm.
help foreigners to buy cheap items from china…
[...]Another reason why you need to know chemistry in China | Offbeat China[...]…