Taiwan's Food Safety Crisis Is Real and Renaming It Won't Help

Taiwan is facing overlapping food safety emergencies, and public confidence in the government's ability to manage them is collapsing.

Soybean oil produced by Central Union Oil Corp. (中聯油脂) has been found to contain benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) — a Group 1 carcinogen — at four times the legal limit. Follow-up testing detected three additional harmful polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Because Central Union is one of Taiwan's largest suppliers of base oils, the contaminated product flowed into four of the island's best-known oil producers — Formosa Oilseed Processing (福懋), Fwusow Industry (福壽), Taisun Enterprise (泰山), and Namchow (南僑) — where it was processed into soybean salad oil, blended cooking oils, and baking shortening.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), under the Ministry of Health and Welfare, expanded precautionary shelf removals to some 380 downstream businesses — restaurants, bakeries, and retail outlets — and the recall reached school and kindergarten catering services across Taiwan. President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) issued a stern public statement, and Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) eventually apologized as the government launched source tracing and product recalls.

By then, the damage was done. Nearly two weeks passed between the contamination becoming public and the Premier convening a cross-ministerial response meeting. In that window, tainted oil traveled from a single factory through major manufacturers, into retail channels, onto restaurant tables, and into school cafeterias — leaving parents and Taiwan's vast population of daily diners-out in a state of collective alarm.

The parallels with Taiwan's 2014 "gutter oil" scandal — in which recycled waste oil, likewise containing a Group 1 carcinogen, entered the food supply — are impossible to ignore. At the time, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), then in opposition, accused President Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) government of "structural dysfunction" and demanded sweeping precautionary recalls. Ma and then-Premier Chiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) apologized repeatedly; Health Minister Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) resigned, and FDA Director-General Yeh Ming-kung (葉明功) was reassigned.

Today, with the DPP in power, the standard has quietly shifted. The government is pursuing liability against the companies involved while shielding its own officials from accountability. Were it not for sustained media scrutiny, the ruling party appeared content to let the crisis fade from view.

Public anxiety has been compounded by regulatory decisions made even as the oil scandal unfolded. In April, the FDA announced revisions to Taiwan's pesticide residue tolerance standards covering as many as 174 substances — including a sixfold relaxation for certain pesticides and a fourfold loosening for lemons and sweet oranges. The government called these "routine adjustments." The popular Facebook commentary page Engineer View Politics (工程師看政治) blasted that framing as cover for political concessions under an unequal Taiwan-US arrangement, cataloguing what it called the administration's ever-growing "kneel-to-America list" and asking acidly: "Are we an American colony? Do we owe the United States a great deal of money?"

The latest flashpoint is apples. The FDA has clarified that the pesticide at issue is fenpropathrin (芬普寧), not fipronil (芬普尼) — two chemically distinct compounds that some critics had conflated. The correction is legitimate and worth making. But it answers none of the questions that matter: Why were the limits relaxed? On what scientific basis? How do the new standards compare internationally? Where is the risk assessment? A terminology lesson does not dissolve public doubt — and a government that spends more energy policing vocabulary than explaining its decisions only deepens the suspicion that something is being obscured.

That suspicion has context. Since Taiwan and the United States signed their reciprocal tariff agreement (ART) — a deal this board has argued ceded food-safety review authority to Washington — reports have emerged that Taiwan may loosen its ban on imported sprouted potatoes and admit American peanuts duty-free. President Lai publicly dismissed the reports as "rumors from abroad." In fact, the story was broken byAgrilJouney News (上下游新聞), a Taiwanese agricultural news outlet whose subsequent reporting showed the damage was already material: in June, farm-gate peanut prices opened down roughly 30%, a ten-year low, as traders priced in the expected imports — a collapse the outlet estimated threatens some 30,000 farming households. Calling homegrown journalism foreign disinformation does not make it so.

The DPP government has developed a distinctive approach to politically sensitive food imports: change the name, then change the subject.

When Taiwan agreed to admit American pork containing ractopamine — a leanness-enhancing feed additive banned in many jurisdictions — the debate was conducted under the shorthand "ractopamine pork" (萊豬), with acceptance framed as the price of progress toward a Taiwan-US free trade agreement. When the government moved to lift restrictions on food from areas near Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant — framed as a step toward joining the CPTPP trade pact — "radiation-affected food" was rebranded in Chinese as "fortune food" (福食), the character for Fukushima doubling as the character for good luck. In both cases, the rebranding was executed more carefully than any food safety review.

The logic extends to exports. Pineapples and grouper shut out of the Chinese market were repackaged as symbols of democratic solidarity. Yet when a local official sought mainland buyers for atemoyas — known locally as sugar apples — he risked being branded a conduit for "united front fruit" (統戰釋迦), a reference to Beijing's political influence operations.

The Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer once told of the village of Chelm, which faced a sour cream shortage before the festival of Shavuot, when blintzes with sour cream are traditionally served. The elders passed a resolution: henceforth water would be called sour cream, and sour cream would be called water. By the festival, Chelm had no shortage of "sour cream" — but the housewives began complaining that they could not find any "water." Taiwan's government has mastered the Chelm solution: renaming scarcity as abundance, and hazard as fortune, depending on who is selling and who is buying.

The government's reflex when criticized has followed a predictable sequence. First, it targets those raising problems rather than the problems themselves — the Ministry of Health and Welfare has pressed for critical social media posts to be taken down, and persistent questioners risk being labeled spreaders of "false information." Second, it attributes public alarm to disinformation from mainland China. Third, it assigns no ministerial accountability: every cabinet member remains securely in place.

Even now that some oil products have been cleared to return to shelves, it is fair to ask whether consumers will trust them. The more fundamental question is why this government keeps treating public health as a bargaining chip in trade and politics — something to be adjusted, rebranded, or quietly conceded — rather than as a non-negotiable baseline of governance.

That question deserves a direct answer. Renaming things will not provide one. （Related： Beijing Watch | Inside Henan's 'Siphon Enforcement' Truck Seizures ｜ Latest ）

Original Article in Chinese