Country of Fake Foods

It’s like Harrods to sell English tea blended with cheap Chinese green tea or Hilton to inject old Aussie beef in 100% American fresh beef hamburger. Fake ingredients in the food sold in common department stores or served in “high class” hotels have been shaking the credibility on their bland value. It is not simply a matter of retail sectors, but about skepticisms of fundamental recognition on food safety in this country.

A hotel chain in Osaka area announced later last month that its franchised restaurants had been serving frozen-preserved fish as “fresh fish,” as if they were recently caught in the sea, or imported cheap prawn as “Japanese Shiba prawn.” It is usual that when someone reveals fake commercial activity, guilty others are consecutively coming up after that. Following the hotel chain, famous hotels and department stores revealed their wrong information about food ingredients, apologizing to the public through press conference pretending to be innocent in those activities. The facts included injecting fat in “beef steak” for liaison, calling imported lobster “Japanese spiny lobster” or serving retailed orange juice as “fresh juice.”

One top manager of department store chain, apologizing with deep bow to TV cameras, explained that they knew the ingredients had been changed in order to balance prime cost with retail price, but forgot renewal of information to their customers. Stop kidding consumers. Knowing there was no customer who can distinguish Japanese prawn from black tiger shrimp in a piece of terrine, they must have cheating buyers. That is everyone’s idea.

Government is also fooling the people. The Secretary General of Consumer Affairs Agency, Hisa Anan, told that the hotels and department stores were the first class retailers and she wondered why they had done that kind of things. Food safety has been the greatest cause of food policy in Japan. In the name of “food safety,” Japanese government had been blocking American beef, resulting in protecting wagyu ranchers and retailers in Japan. While protecting specific interests, the government kept its people innocent on what they had really been eating.

Consumers need to be smart on this kind of system of the society. As long as bureaucrats are firmly connected with specific interests, there will be no true information coming out. Do not be pretended by the name of “first class.” The bigger a retailer grows and sells great amount of foods, the further it will be from “first class” quality. Be sensitive about identifying who produced a food you are eating. If you cannot know where it came from, avoid having it. Though it sounds hard to do that, it is about health of you and your loved ones.