Shanghai Seizes 188 Tons of Evian Water
Of all the scares China endured recently– Olympic boycott, a dip in the soaring stock market, contaminated pet food– those in the Middle Kingdom now have a new reason to fret. That pink, 30-yuan bottle of spring water you buy at one of Shanghai’s finer restaurants might be just as nasty as the stuff in the Chinese tap. Wednesday, Shanghai customs officials seized a 118-ton shipment of Evian mineral water. The French-made bottled water was found to have excessive amounts of bacteria, said Danone, Evian’s Paris-based parent company. Interestingly enough, Evian claimed the reason for the seizure was that China uses a different set of guidelines than the World Health Organization when examining food and beverages. To that, I would say that in my brief experience living in China, it appears that the food safety standards here are some of the most lax in the world. I once got a piece of pork with a pig hair on it. That water had to have been mighty funky to get confiscated. An Evian spokesperson told the media, “We need to reassure consumers that the microbial flora existing in our products is totally safe.” Uh, no you don’t. Because none of your customers have the faintest clue what microbial flora are. Just tell them it’s French and it has something to do with glaciers and natural springs and they’ll drink it. But the better question is, and something that’s bugged me for a while now, is that in a country where the tap water is unsafe to drink, why at a nice restaurant in Shanghai, is a 4-dollar bottle of Evian my only option for water? Maybe because idiot rich people buy it, thinking its microbial fibers are better than those in the domestic brand. Well now you know that the microbial flora in Evian might not be microbial flora at all. It’s nasty bacteria. Nasty bacteria that originates from the banks of Lake Geneva. Nasty bacteria that filters through the finest mineral-rich sand formations and clays and then to the spring in which the nasty bacteria is bottled into the overpriced Evian that finds its way to fine Shanghainese eateries. Or in this case, into some Chinese customs hangar.
•Financial Times: China Seizes Shipment of Evian Water