Nice catch: A man skims used cooking oil from the sewer.Photos: Andrew Stein

For months I had been hearing about a black-market sewer-oil industry, but the thought was just too difficult to digest. Living in a state of incredulity seemed like a good alternative to a compulsively upset stomach. That is, until I caught the aforementioned sewer-oil fisherman red-handed (literally, with a red flashlight in hand to distinguish swill-oil from plain sewage in the dark of the night).

I tried to talk with him but he eluded me, moving quickly down the street from sewer cover to sewer cover, skimming used oil from the sewer and plopping it in a large bucket. When I asked what he would do with it, he simply replied, “It will be reused.”

Now, I’m all for recycling. But there must be less gross — and unsanitary — ways to handle it.

Feeling swill

Earlier this past year, headlines buzzed with news about hazardously unsanitary Chinese cooking oil. He Dongping, professor of food science engineering at Wuhan Polytechnic University, sparked the flames. His investigative study found that 10 percent of meals cooked across China use oil that has been reprocessed from discarded kitchen waste. This oil, called swill-oil, often contains high levels of aflatoxin — a toxic fungus and notoriously potent carcinogen.

Swill-oil makes its way back to people’s plates from two chief sources: the market and the drain.

Most food in China is stir fried in a wok with oil; personal ovens are rarer than restaurants that don’t use MSG. With more than 1.3 billion people producing thousands of tons of waste-oil every day, a dirty black market has formed around this slippery commodity.

Restaurants could dispose of their excess oil in a sanitary way using government-provided services. But … they don’t.

Why? The government-run services cost money. And what business playing by modern capitalist rules wants to pay for a government service when they could instead get paid to use a private service that provides them the same benefits?

“Restaurants have to pay a certain fee if they hire the city’s sanitation workers, whereas selling kitchen waste to private parties can make up to 10,000 yuan ($1,500) every year,” the director of the Wuhan Airui Biodiesel Company told China’s Xinhua News Agency. According to this report, “a large restaurant is capable of making 2 million yuan ($294,117) per year just by selling its kitchen waste.”

These private companies take waste oil and refine it using machines or simple methods. The result is a substance that by appearance and smell alone is difficult to distinguish from store-bought cooking oil, but in actuality is very toxic.

So not only are restaurants incentivized to sell their used oil to private contractors, but they’re also incentivized to buy the processed-oil back. The price of swill-oil is “half that of ordinary cooking oil,” noted the government mouthpiece China Daily. According to He Dongping, the swill-oil industry turns a profit of 1.5-2 billion yuan annually. “The profit margin is almost 200 percent. It’s easy to understand why the business is so hot.”

In an industry with huge profit margins, every bit of slop oil counts. Large quantities of oil get washed off kitchen utensils and flow down the drain. And by drains, I mean sewers.

Ew. Just … ewwww.Slick operators

This past summer when I was in Yunnan Province, I had a conversation with a concerned government official about controlling sewer oil. 

“Why doesn’t the government do something about it?”

“It’s difficult,” he replied. “We don’t have much power over the situation. There’s no specific law that forbids this type of activity, and we don’t have adequate resources to properly enforce this kind of law.”Although China’s FDA equivalent issued a nationwide notice about the swill-oil situation in March, it seems that there isn’t much this local government is able to do about the situation.

Since then, there have been several crackdowns in China. The New York Times reported that in the city of Chengdu, food safety officials named 13 restaurants that had been found to be using illegal cooking oil. While this news shows ostensible progress, there are far more than 13 restaurants across China using swill-oil, and in a country with a quickly evolving legal system, the tangibility of a law prohibiting this activity is uncertain.

Nonetheless, the Chinese government seems to be concerned with this development. Since detecting and identifying the use of illegal cooking oil is tough, “there is an urgent need to improve kitchen waste recycling procedures to prevent the continued use of such oil in food production,” said China Daily.

One way that the government might improve such procedures is to get people using the systems that currently exist. You’ll remember that the public sector does provide sanitation services, but that no one uses them because of their cost. The private sector — the swill-oil producers — is succeeding due to its market savvy-behavior. If the public sector coughed up some cash for using its services, too, it might gain more control over the situation.

The majority of swill-oil in the market comes directly from restaurants, so the swill-oil industry would shrink considerably if restaurants could be persuaded to sell the bulk of their used oil to public sanitation services. As for the sewers, I’m sure that a few audacious men and women would still go fishing for oil — but if sewers were the only place swill-oil was coming from, it would be much easier for authorities to focus their attention.

Grease these palms

To depose the swill-oil mafia of their current stranglehold of the used oil market, the government will have to absorb the approximately 1.5 billion yuan industry. Here’s how it could do so:

• Biodiesel: Recycled waste-oil can be used sustainably for fuel in the form of biodiesel. Local Chinese sanitation departments could team up with public transportation departments and make massive bus fleets bio-friendly.
• Roof Bio Coating: A new polymer for roofs that helps regulate building temperature can be made from used cooking oil. China is building at an unparalleled rate. Using recycled materials will help offset the environmental impact of the country’s nationwide construction craze.
• Soap: Can swill-oil actually produce soap to clean our
  bodies? Beijing Forestry University researchers say yes.

China’s state-owned enterprises are quite adept at turning profits, so the government could create lucrative, sustainable, and sanitary industries from the country’s swill-oil problem. That kind of recycling would be a lot more appetizing.

Is that a giant cucumber or are you just happy to see me? My local produce market features donggua, or winter melons.Photos: Andrew Stein

I’m in Hangzhou, the capital of China’s fertile Zhejiang province.I’ve lived happily for months under the impression that I eat locally. Within one block of my apartment, in downtown Hangzhou, the capital of China’s rich and fertile Zhejiang Province, I can take care of almost all my food needs by supporting the little, local guy. No need for supermarkets when you’ve got great local food available!

Then, one day, cutting veggies for an omelet in my kitchen, I was awoken by a mid-summer’s ripe tomato. Emblazoned across its shiny red face was a sticker that read “Yunnan.”

Hey! That’s not local, I thought. Heck! Yunnan is as far from Hangzhou as Dallas is from New York City.

I wondered: Just how local are these foods I’ve been eating?

With reusable water bottle in hand and organic cotton socks pulled up tight, I set off to see where my food really comes from.

Seedy business: China is the biggest producer of watermelons in the world.Veggie whiz

Along the way, I encountered a truck piled high with watermelons. Herds of these trucks ascend from the southern Zhejiang town of Wenling, located 400 kilometers away. Why stampede so far to sell watermelons? The answer is obvious — the Wenling watermelon market is saturated, and Hangzhou fetches the highest prices around.

Selling watermelons in Hangzhou, however, could cost the Wenling watermelon farmers more than just gas fees and fresh air. If caught by a regulatory official called a chengguan, the vendor’s truck and melons will be confiscated because they aren’t legally registered to sell within the city limits. When I asked them about the police, a separate entity in China, the vendors replied, “The police don’t care. Only the evil chengguan cares. So, we sell watermelons before the chengguan begins work at 6 a.m., when he has a lunch break, and after he quits for the day at 6 p.m.”

Happy that the chengguan doesn’t control my livelihood, I marched off to the local vegetable stand run by ruddy-faced Mr. Wang.

Hangzhou is surrounded by fertile farmland and has a long growing season. Most of Mr. Wang’s veggies must come from the Hangzhou area … where else could they be from? Maybe Mr. Wang even grows some of his own vegetables.

Mr. Wang’s rosy glow, unfortunately, doesn’t come from cultivating heirloom tomatoes. He doesn’t have time to grow anything, since he begins every day at 2 a.m. — gathering produce, delivering it to restaurants, and returning in time for his early morning customers.

Mr. Wang’s wares come from two major wholesale markets: Gouzhuang and Xiasha. Gouzhuang is the largest wholesale food market in Hangzhou, located eight kilometers away. The smaller Xiasha Market is located a further 20 kilometers away.  The chief difference, distance aside, between Gouzhuang and Xiasha is that Gouzhuang’s foodstuffs come primarily from other provinces, while Xiasha’s come from the greater Hangzhou area.

Based on the murky information that Mr. Wang provided, it’s possible that two-thirds of his veggies come from the Hangzhou area.

Why don’t all of them come from local vendors? “Two reasons,” says Mr. Wang. “The supply of Hangzhou veggies doesn’t meet the demand, and the Gouzhuang market is close and convenient, offering the city’s largest selection of produce.”  

I’m inclined to believe that the second reason hits closer to the truth. Every morning he drives to Gouzhuang because it’s closer, faster, and more convenient than going to Xiasha, and those priorities tend to rule even in modern Chinese culture.

Happy or not too happy? Chickens at the market.Bird hunting

Next to Mr. Wang’s is the tuji, or “free range chicken” stand where I get my fresh chickens. In this setting, I can see that the chickens are alive and in decent health — they hop around, they’re alert, and, ultimately, they aren’t the nightmarish products of American industrial agriculture portrayed in Food Inc. When you buy a chicken, it’s weighed, slaughtered, and butchered right in front of you. It feels good to get a closer glimpse of my food source and see it treated with a higher level of respect than death by lifeless-metal-killing-machine.

But how much of the source do I really see? It’s certainly ironic that all of these “free-range chickens” are in cages.

And now I wonder, am I really supporting local foods?

In part, yes: I’m supporting a local vendor who makes a commission on chicken sales. It’s also likely that the chicken was raised within Zhejiang Province, since this chicken stand is part of the large provincial livestock corporation Zhenning, based out of Ninghai County 250 kilometers away. But as I watched a truck full of crated chickens pull up, I began to think that this wholesome, liberated chicken might not be as wholesome as I thought.

“Where exactly are these chickens raised?” I asked.

“The mountains,” replied the owner, pointing to a poster with ten ambiguous mountain names.

“Where are these mountains located?”

“I don’t know. That’s the corporation’s deal, not mine.”

My careful questions about the use of steroids, antibiotics, and chicken feed were all met by Mr. Chicken with a variation on “That’s the corporation’s deal.”

In search of answers I went to Zhenning’s website, which says that their chickens get a balanced diet from local products and boasts that its mill produces over three tons of feed annually. However, it doesn’t tell its customers exactly where the chickens are raised and what exactly they’re fed.

Feeling a bit queasy about my poultry source, I crossed the street to The Good Neighbor Fruit Stand.

The first words out of the owner’s mouth were, “I don’t know where this fruit comes from! I just get it from Gouzhuang market. I only know the price.”

Expatriotic: Chinese merchants often fake foreign labels as they are associated with higher quality than domestic produce.< /span>Since many fruits were labeled, I decided to have a look. Although Zhejiang produces a wide range of fruits, this store only had one product for sale that was grown within the province. Even more disturbing than the distance the fruit traveled was its mislabeling.

“You have a lot of fruit from Mexico,” I commented.

“No,” said the owner. “That’s just the label on the bags. All of that fruit is from somewhere in China.”

When I reached the Taiwan mangos, a worker whispered, “Though the label says Taiwan, those are actually from Hainan Province.” I realized that this is probably because many Chinese believe imported foods to be safer and more precious than mainland domestic products — and thus worthy of a price markup.

Before leaving, the owner’s wife stopped me. “Let me tell you something,” she said. “We don’t know anything about this fruit. If you want to know more about it, go to Gouzhuang.”

Back on the street, I bumped into a police officer. I looked up and found myself between another Zhenning “free-range chicken” stand and a Wenling watermelon truck.

Curious, I asked the officer, “Do you mind the Wenling farmers selling watermelons?”

“Not at all,” he replied.

“Is it not illegal?”

“Well, I’m not going to stop them. That’s the chengguan’s responsibility. These people are from the poor countryside. How else will they make ends meet?”

Although it was apparently illegal, the watermelon that I bought from the Wenling farmers had the most direct link to its source, had the only vendor that could tell me how the product was cultivated, and was likely the most local food I bought all day.

Reusable water bottle still in hand, I strolled home with one thing in mind — hunting the beast that is Gouzhuang.