Wen 丨 cloud has no heart
Recently, a live broadcast of ready-to-eat bird's nest with goods has aroused great concern, and "instant bird's nest is actually sugar water" has become a hot topic. However, in law, "instant bird's nest is essentially sugar water" is not illegal.
"Ready-to-eat bird's nest" is just a daily name, there is no legal definition, and there is no national standard. As a prepackaged food, it requires an "implementation standard" and a "product category" to be determined. When a product does not have a national mandatory standard, the enterprise can formulate an "enterprise standard" to the regulator for the record. Corporate standards can be recognized as long as they do not conflict with the mandatory standards involved.
For example, this "instant bird's nest" that has aroused public concern, as long as there is bird's nest ingredients, the product name can also pass - as for how many bird's nests there are, because there is no national standard, manufacturers can decide for themselves. In this product that was questioned, the amount of bird's nest added did not exceed 0.1%, that is, in a bowl of 100 grams of "instant bird's nest", the content of bird's nest did not exceed 0.1 grams. Some of the more expensive ready-to-eat bird's nest products on the market will have a higher content of bird's nest, but the content in each bowl is generally a little more than 1 gram.
In the "Product Category", the manufacturer of this product chose "Flavored Beverage" - a very broad and easy-to-satisfy category that can be produced by factories with beverage production qualifications.
As a "flavored drink", it means that other flavor ingredients and excipients can be added. For example, bird's nest and water are flavorless, so adding rock sugar has a widely accepted - flavor. Bird's nest has the shape of a gel after cooking, if you really rely on bird's nest, then the amount that needs to be added will be very large. Therefore, the manufacturer added other "excipients" sodium alginate and calcium lactate. These two food additives form a gel, which is what we see scooped up by the spoon in the live broadcast. For the majority of consumers, the name of "bird's nest" plus this "gel form like bird's nest" will automatically make up for "bird's nest". However, the manufacturer did not say that it was formed of bird's nest, and everything was just the consumer's "brain supplement", so it was not illegal.
However, because calcium lactate is used as a food additive, the allowable scope does not include "liquid beverages", so this belongs to the "use of food additives beyond the scope". In this regard, this product is in violation.
Calcium lactate is a nutritional enhancer that can be used in beverages as a calcium supplement. Therefore, as long as the manufacturer uses it as a "calcium nutrition enhancer" and marks the content of calcium in the nutrition composition table, it will change from "food additive" to "nutritional enhancer", which will also comply with national norms.
Another typical example is a solid beverage sold as "special medical milk powder".
Solid drinks are a very broad category. Any solid powder raw material that meets food standards and can be drunk with water can be produced and sold as a "solid beverage". Therefore, it is not difficult for a food factory to obtain the production qualification of "solid beverage". The "special medical milk powder", that is, "special medical use milk powder", because it is aimed at special groups of people and meets special needs, it is quite difficult to obtain its production qualifications.
"Solid beverage" and "special medical milk powder" production process equipment is the same, the product form is also no difference, so many manufacturers who have not obtained the "special medical milk powder" qualification, although in accordance with the "solid beverage" product category and production standards to label, but in the marketing publicity in accordance with the "special medical milk powder" in the sale. Salespeople directly or indirectly guide consumers to think that it is "special medical milk powder", so they can sell high prices according to special medical milk powder.
Because the product label is "solid beverage", the product standard is also "solid beverage", so it is not illegal in supervision. Similar situations are not uncommon, such as misleading "juice drinks" into juices, "lactic acid bacteria drinks" as yogurt, and so on. The regulations provide specifications for production and sales, with the goal of requiring manufacturers to provide consumers with true and accurate food information. However, no matter how accurate the information, consumers also need to be able to understand correctly, otherwise just look at the advertising or product spokesperson's mouth spit lotus, it is inevitable to be misled, the straw as gold.
(The author is a doctor of biological and food engineering in the United States, a popular science writer, and the author of series of works such as "The Truth About Eating")
Source: Xinhua News Agency