Swill oil reappears on supermarket shelves

2011-06-200 06:59:45 GMT2011-06-200 14:59:45(Beijing Time)  City Weekend

Yet another utterly disgusting food scandal is cropping up yet again. Originally reported in the Beijing Times, producers of illegal cooking oil are churning out bottles of reprocessed oil at the sickeningly fast pace of 200 tons a day.

To get into the gross details, illegal oil often uses swill oil, which is collected from leftover oil that restaurants throw out. In the worst cases, it can use oil gleaned from sewage drains. Leftover slaughterhouse meat and poultry fat are also common components.

But while we can understand how swill oil and its ilk popping up in a street vendor's stall, it's scary to think of it ending up on supermarket shelves in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province. It's also a potential carcinogen.

Apparently, illegal oil manufacturers are now so good at their jobs, they make swill oil appear indistinguishable from the real thing. Reporters from the Beijing Times sent samples of one factory's illegal oil to China's National Food Safety Supervision and Inspection Center, where they actually passed inspection.

For a disgusting peek at how swill oil is made, check out ChinaSMACK's photo gallery of a rather crude operation in Wuhan--the factories around us, unfortunately, are better equipped.

So pencil in a date for a cooking class and buy imported oil, because a danger we thought was over has now come back ... unless you are a everything-causes-cancer-anyway-so-why-bother kind of person.