29 Jan 2007 2324H

Staying away from faat choi (髮菜)

Heard on Cantonese radio today. . . Faat choi (髮菜, which literally means hair vegetable) also known as black moss, is a kind of fungi-like, giant bacteria served in a Cantonese new year’s stew with ho see — dried oysters — along with other veggies. I think it tastes awful, it’s a terrible dish, but people eat it nonetheless, because the names for the ingredients are homonyms for “great fortune” and “good business,” real black moss is expensive, and it’s part of the Cantonese new year tradition.

Now there are even more reasons to just avoid the darn thing altogether. It’s well known that the foodstuff actually keeps the sand in the Gobi Desert and Mongolia from blowing across China, and so harvesting and continued consumption is tantamount to an environmental crime. Now, in addition, the Standard of Hong Kong reports that CUHK researchers bought faat choi at 40 stores in Hong Kong and found 14 of them to have been counterfeit. (Unsurprising in a country where soy sauce and baby formula have been counterfeited.) They also report the cyanobacteria also contains a toxic amino acid linked to degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia. It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence to read the closer:

A spokesman for the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said it had tested 10 samples of black moss between 2002 and 2005 for the presence of harmful chemicals, and found all of them suitable for human consumption.

Wholly 10 samples over 3 years, when hundreds, even thousands of kilos of the stuff may be consumed each New Year’s. No wonder there are constant crises about the food chain in Hong Kong.

It’s why I’m boycotting mainland Chinese food products. There aren’t any standards or enforcement against threats to public health, so you can’t trust anything coming out of the mainland.

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