There are seven things to open the door. Fuel, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea—chief daily necessities. Soy sauce, which occupies an important position in life, has recently been exposed to problems such as the key indicators are not up to standard, and even products can not be called soy sauce. Food safety once again touched consumers' sensitive nerves.
Shortly after the release of the report from the Consumer Rights Protection Association of Jiangsu Province, the China Condiment Industry Association issued a strongly worded statement accusing that“ the information release behavior” violate relevant regulations, include "sensationalism" and "titled party" in the report.
In blogs and other social medias, Haitian, a company involved, is "crying out for itself". The company was criticized by name because different methods were used in calculating the relevant indicators, resulting in different identification values and detection values. Haitian believes that according to the calculation method of the testing party, the nutritional composition of its products is higher than the label, but tied up with unqualified and substandard products, which will undoubtedly damage the reputation of the enterprise. It is understood that the main component to measure whether soy sauce is up to the standard and qualified is the content of amino acid nitrogen. The higher the content, the fresher the soy sauce is; on the contrary, the unqualified products that people understand.
Although the label error does not mean that the food safety is not up to standard, but it still deserves the attention and improvement of enterprises, because food safety should not have any ambiguous zone.
For a long time, similar blurred zones have been in our lives. Taking soy sauce industry as an example, the competition between brewed soy sauce and blended soy sauce has lasted for decades. Previously, the national label did not specify how to calculate soy sauce, so consumers had to learn knowledge on their own to identify what is brewed soy sauce, and what is blended soy sauce.
However, according to the newly revised National Food Safety Standard Soy Sauce (GB 2717-2018), whichs is implemented in December this year. From December this year, blended soy sauce has been deprived of the identity of soy sauce and can only appear under the name of compound condiments. The definition of soy sauce return to the traditional sense of brewed soy sauce.
It is not only the soy sauce industry, but also a lot of similar problems in other food safety fields. For example, the controversy between salmon and rainbow trout, which triggered much discussion earlier, also caused a lot of controversy and discussion because of the unclear definition, and left a vague area in the market. The existence of vague zones not only increases the burden of consumers, increases the cost of learning, but also easily touches the tight chord of consumers'hearts.
In the final analysis, the existence of vague zones, either because of historical legacy or because of manufacturers intentionally play word games, is driven and dominated by interests. To eliminate blurred areas in food safety, we must make good use of both hands of science and law.
The science, the more scientific truth is, the more debated the truth is. With scientific knowledge as a weapon, we can distinguish right from wrong, defend black and white, and mark the traps in food safety for consumers. The law, exerts the power of supervision and formulates laws and regulations with strong enforcement, so that enterprises who act wilfully and ignore public food safety will pay the price.
