By continuing you agree to eChinacities's Privacy Policy .
Sign up with Google
Sign up with Facebook
Q: Squeamish about food?
Every food scandal I read makes me more and more squeamish about the food I eat- I can't stomach street food any more and sometimes I have to stop eating in the middle of a meal when I eat out because I remember some horrible story. Has anyone else had this? It sucks, I feel like I'm missing out on so much good food. I've been cooking at home but am considering becoming a vegetarian because I'm so paranoid...
For me, as long as the food is not cooked in recycled oil and doesn't have unidentifiable things or bugs in it, then I'll eat it. 2/3 of the food in China is contaminated with toxins and heavy metals anyway, so it doesn't matter if you cook it by yourself.
VEGETARIAN.... what about all the pesticides, at least you don't get that by eating meat, or maybe you do as the meat eats vegetables. On the other hand the vegetables suck up water that could contain antibiotics from the meat pissing all over the place.
Stiggs:
Or the highly polluted farm land and water that is loaded with heavy metals and god knows what else. Even before the banned pesticides are poured onto the crops they will have absorbed a lot of nasty stuff.
You might as well just eat what you like and accept that nothing here is 100 % safe.
Stop eating. Problem solved.
Scandinavian:
sometimes eating will make you shit until you die. we can't win
As Stiggs mentioned sadly nothing, meat or veg is 100% safe. You can't source a restaurants ingredients but you can at least eat at a clean restaurant and avoid more traditional problems such as food poisoning.
I went full vegetarian. I find the meat quality substandard (in summer, 40c, the meat stink, no cool storage...). It does not solve everything, but it helps. We cook our own food, we buy our vegetables at a market, where we never had bad surprises. I remove the skin of almost all vegetables, even radish (I set radish raw, as a snack). Short of growing your own food, it's hard to have guaranties. Sorry :/
I am very careful about what and where i eat.
No street food
no meat that i can not identify as pork, beef, lamb, chicken, through the bones.
no fish/shellfish - toxins tend to concentrate in sea food.
no KFC/Mc D because basically this food tastes like ****
there are very few decent 'western' restaurants i would eat in.
i avoid processed food - again there is no knowing what **** has been added
I peel/wash vegetables and fruit before eating.
I know when I am home that i have to eat to keep my weight up 
laowaigentleman:
Do you worry about metals and toxins present in the meat? I buy my meat and vegetables in the village from the locals. Perhaps everyone's eating tainted food here. Many people have pointed out that a lot of the people here don't look very healthy, but that could be all of the drinking and smoking.
DrMonkey:
@laowaigentleman The villagers use water to grow their stuff, and water in China is quite an issue. Unless you live high in the mountains, the water is likely to worrisome. Same goes for the soil itself.
laowaigentleman:
@drmonkey. Yes, it's the water and the soil quality that worries me the most. Arsenic, lead and cadmium present. I feel like I'm marinaded in poison whenever I eat. I will just have to start importing food. Costs a fortune though.
I used to live on street BBQ. Still have it a few times a week.
I have become more conscious of what I eat the longer I've been in China. I didn't fully appreciate the risks when I first came. Now I avoid street food and sketchy restaurants while eating at home more. But as others have said there's no way to guarantee food safety short of eating imported food.
I think it is funny about how atrocious the food quality is here. Yet one of the biggest obstacles of a Chinese person "going abroad" (If they imagine they can do it) would be that they will "miss the food." Years back, a certain phrase of that caliber was in one of the texts I was using to study Chinese too... They may miss the food, but they surely don't understand how bad it is for them! Yikes.
Most newcomer expats don't realize how bad these things really are because youth can cover their effects remarkably well. Give yourself 3-4 years on the same regimen, and you will feel a world's difference as your body starts rejecting it.
the stories are exascerbated by locals low confidence and victim attitude. every scandal gets way overblown. i'm not saying things aren't bad because of the absence of food safety regulations, but perhaps not as dismal as you're led to believe. back home, certain packaged foods would give me awful flatulence or even diarrhoea. dutch food safety laws are quite good, but it didn't prevent some unhealthy stuff getting into my shopping bag. western food scandals blow over quickly in comparison, due to confidence and a lack of hysteria. china is not the only country dropping the ball on food safety.
in conclusion, i agree that you're missing out on some tasty treats, and beating yourself up serves no purpose. outside of using some basic caution in your food choices, there isn't much you can do about the big unknown. it seems you're going overboard with caution. you're in china already, so the milk is spilled. if you can't stand the food, get out of the kitchen.
The Hui Muslim places scattered across the country are safe to eat in, I do eat this food three times per week on average and never got sick from it, it is cheap and tastes great.
