Additives In recent years, food additives have been widely used in the food industry, such as preservative, antioxidant, welling agent and so on. But the abuse of these additives has many negative impacts on our health. Some kinds of additives can cause acute or chronic poisoning. In 1998,because of the abuse of flavoring essence, there was a large-scale lard poisoning accident in Axing Province. Even worse, some additives, such as artificial sweetener may cause cancer if you intake them for long periods of time.
Why do more and more merchants add these illegal additives to their products? According to the survey of the fruit juice market, a shopkeeper who owned a fruit juice store said,” Nowadays, the market competition is too fierce, if I run my business in a high cost and low profit way, I’ll never make a fortune. But if I use the additives to make the juice, the cost will be much lower, it’ll just be the 1/1 0 of the former one. “So, driven by the high profit, more and more merchants use excess food additives in complete ignorance f morality and law.
Yanking Gao, the professor of Food Science and Nutrition at China Agricultural University, pointed out that our food safety supervision system has some loopholes, which result in unclear responsibilities, repeated inspections and blind areas in supervision between a number of government departments which oversee the food safety. As far as he is concerned, the sale of food additives lacks a strict tracking mechanism. He also decried the invalid punishment to the merchants who are found that have used illegal DOD additives during their production procedure.
What’s more, with the development of the market economy, lots of small and medium-sized food enterprises have started and grown fast. A recent research study showed that around 70% of more than 1 million food processing enterprises are small, family-run businesses. However, their awareness of prohibition of food additives is weak. Besides, due to their lack of technological abilities and their small management structure, excessively using food additives is difficult to supervise and control.
