…Pork for Olympic
athletes comes from 10 secret pig farms set up far away from cities, state
media report. The pigs get two hours of exercise a day, eat organic feed and
are monitored around the clock…
…Chinese officials
naturally bristled when they heard that athletes from some countries — the United States and Australia in particular — were
brown-bagging some of their own groceries to the Olympics…
… The USOC is shipping
27,440 pounds of food to Beijing … Much of the food comes from sponsors — such as
Tyson, Oroweat, Hershey's, Maverick Ranch and
Kellogg's …
Articles in this document:
·
China tries to ease Olympic worries about
tainted food
·
Olympic
Vegetables Under Guard
China tries to ease Olympic worries about
tainted food
By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers
July 14, 2008
CHANGPING, China — Guards carefully monitor the perimeter of
Lin Yuan's farm, where carrots, peppers, tomatoes and other vegetables will
ripen just in time for the hungry athletes arriving for the Beijing Summer
Olympics.
"What is special now is the security," Lin said as
he strolled out of a greenhouse and pointed to sentries at the farm's entry
gate.
Food safety is a sensitive subject as China hosts the
Olympics. It weathered global concerns last year about the safety of its
exports, amid scandal over tainted pet food and toothpaste, and now China is
striving to ensure that the food served to 16,000 athletes in the Olympic
Village is healthy and free of contaminants.
It's going to great lengths to explain the care that it's
putting into Olympic cuisine.
If security is high at Lin's vegetable farm, a premium provider
for the Olympic Village, it's even higher at the ranches and livestock pens
that provide meat for the village. Pork for Olympic athletes comes from 10
secret pig farms set up far away from cities, state media report. The pigs get
two hours of exercise a day, eat organic feed and are monitored around the
clock.
Given the extent of such efforts, Chinese officials
naturally bristled when they heard that athletes from some countries — the United States and Australia in particular — were
brown-bagging some of their own groceries to the Olympics.
In some ways the matter shows the delicate balance as China tries to
overcome long-held foreign suspicions about the safety of its food without
stirring up citizens, who may wonder why even the pigs get such special
treatment when it comes to what's served to foreigners.
"It's a perfect symbol of what the Olympics is and has
become for China.
It's an issue of trust," said James Mann, author in residence at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, whose recent book is titled
"The China Fantasy." "You've got international athletes and
their trainers, who want to control things such as what the athletes eat."
The stakes aren't trivial. Nations can see their prestige
rise and fall by how many medals they win at the Summer Olympics, and watching
a top athlete fail because of tainted food could derail those dreams.
Despite China's
vast efforts on food safety, questions about contaminants still arise. In late
June, China
banned top swimmer Ouyang Kunpeng
for life after he failed a doping test. The backstroker
later said he'd eaten barbecue on vacation, and the meat may have contained the
banned substance, clenbuterol.
Often used as a bodybuilding aid, clenbuterol
is prohibited for use by China's
farmers, but it still finds its way into meat. In 2006, 330 people fell ill in Shanghai after eating
pork tainted with clenbuterol.
"It increases the yield of the animal
significantly," said Dennis L. Erpelding of Elanco Animal Health, an Indianapolis company, adding that meat
containing the substance could leave residues in the human body. He said China "has
taken action not to see it used."
After a New York Times story Feb. 9 said that U.S. Olympians
would take some of their own food to the Beijing
games because of fears of steroids in meat, startled Chinese officials bemoaned
the lack of confidence in their country.
Since then, the U.S. Olympic Committee has said repeatedly
that it trusts the quality of food that will be served to athletes at the
Olympic Village, where most of the 594 U.S. Olympic athletes will stay and
dine.
The USOC is shipping 27,440 pounds of food to Beijing to be served primarily at the high-performance
training facility set up on the campus of Beijing Normal
University, where coaches,
training partners and medical and support staff will be lodged, said Nicole Saunches, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Springs-based
USOC.
Much of the food comes from sponsors — such as Tyson, Oroweat, Hershey's, Maverick Ranch and Kellogg's — and includes
foods that either aren't easily sourced in China or are especially low in
saturated fats, she said.
"We as an Olympic committee shipped more dry goods to Athens and more products overall to Athens
(in 2004) than we are shipping to China," Saunches
said.
"The USOC doesn't have any more concerns for food
safety than we would have here in the U.S.,"
she said, noting a recent salmonella outbreak in U.S. produce. "Food safety
isn't solely a Chinese issue."
Tyson Foods, the world's largest meat conglomerate, said it
had provided a shipment of 4,400 pounds of chicken, beef and pork to the U.S.
Olympians and delegates for use at the Aug. 8-24 Beijing games.
The U.S.
athletic team "wants specific American cuts of meat," said James
Rice, country manager for Tyson's China operations, adding that the
matter is "not a food-safety issue."
Australia,
too, is sending some food with its Olympic athletes.
"We're taking some snack bars, some packaged cereals
and things like that," said Mike Tancred, a spokesman for the Australian
Olympic Committee.
All Australian athletes have been instructed to stick to the
dining halls in the Olympic Village and drink only bottled beverages.
"A lot of our athletes who competed in the (test)
events up there have had stomach bugs," Tancred said.
The head of the British Olympic Association, Simon Clegg,
said British Olympians wouldn't take food with them to Beijing.
"We are confident that the arrangements put in place
for Beijing
will amply cater for the needs of our athletes," Clegg said in a statement
provided to McClatchy.
The private Philadelphia company that's providing food to
the Olympic Village, Aramark, has catered 13 previous
Summer and Winter Olympics, and is set to cook 3.5 million meals during the
course of the Olympics and Paralympics.
Lin, the vegetable farm manager, tenderly displayed tomatoes
ripening on a vine to a visitor to one of his greenhouses and described how
he's providing nine products to the Olympic Village: potatoes, tomatoes,
cucumbers, carrots, bell peppers, mushrooms, parsley, turnips and arugula.
The farm uses mainly manure and few chemical fertilizers, he
said, relying heavily on natural pest-management techniques. It employs a
sophisticated electronic-tagging system to track outgoing vegetable shipments.
Noting the security methods, Lin said that any problems with
vegetable safety "won't be because of problems on the farm."
(McClatchy special correspondent Hua
Li contributed to this article.)
mcclatchydc.com
Olympic Vegetables Under Guard
Countdown to the Olympics
By Staff Reporter of the Sun | July 14, 2008
New York
Sun
Chinese officials eager to assuage fears about food safety
are keeping carrots, peppers, and tomatoes to be fed to Olympic athletes under
guard, while the sites of pig farms providing pork to the Games are being kept
secret, McClatchy News Service reported yesterday. Chinese Olympic officials
reacted angrily to announcements from Olympic teams in America, Australia,
and elsewhere that they planned to bring at least some food supplies to Beijing because of
concerns about hormones and drugs in Chinese-grown food. American officials
said some food samples taken in China
had so much steroid content that athletes would have failed drug tests. Olympic
organizers in China
played down the reports, but last month a Chinese swimmer banned for life for
failing a drug test blamed impure meat he consumed at a barbecue.
CHINA
USES COMMANDOS, REWARDS TO STEM DISORDER
China has
put a force of 100,000 commandos on high alert and is offering large rewards to
head off violence during the Olympic Games set for Beijing next month, the state-run news
agency, Xinhua, reported. Rewards ranging up to 500,000 Yuan, or about $73,000,
are being offered to those who report details of "major threats"
between July 10 and October 31, the agency said. China's vice president, Xi Jinping, told reporters on Saturday that security is the
top priority and run-throughs are under way to make sure there are no
disruptions. "It's necessary to carry out an exercise on the whole process
of services for the arrival, departure, room and board of our Olympic guests,
discover the loopholes and problems in each area and make relevant
adjustments," Mr. Xi said, according to Xinhua.
BEIJING
ADJUSTS WORKING HOURS, OPENS BUS LANES
Authorities in Beijing
are ordering some workplaces to delay their workdays by an hour and to consider
flex-time and telecommuting to ease traffic problems on the city's crowded
roads in advance of the upcoming Games. Between July 20 and September 20, most
private businesses are being urged to start their day at 9:30 a.m., while
government-owned enterprises will start business at 9 a.m., Xinhua reported
yesterday. Large shopping centers will open at 10 a.m. and be encouraged to
remain open late into the night.
The changes appear to be aimed at heading off morning
traffic jams that could prevent athletes and spectators from reaching event
venues. Beijing
has also unveiled special traffic lanes, painted with the Olympic rings, which
are to be use to whisk Olympic participants to their destinations.
OLYMPICS HOTEL BOOKINGS WEAK
With less than a month to go before the opening of the
Olympics, the Games are looking like less of a bonanza for Beijing's hotels than many had expected.
"At least for now, supply exceeds demand," a staffer for a company marketing apartment rentals, Song Zhi, told Agence France-Presse. Government officials have encouraged local
residents to take vacation during the Games, a strategy that has led many
homeowners to make their houses and apartments available to rent. "We were
told there would be a lack of beds so property owners got ride of tenants and
upped the rent for the games period," Mr. Song said. Beijing may also have glutted the hotel
market by bringing 336,000 rooms on line for the Games. As of last month, about
three quarters of five-star hotels were booked beginning August 8, while
lower-quality lodgings were less than half reserved, according to figures from
the Beijing Tourism Bureau.
RONALDINHO DEFIES TEAM ORDERS TO PLAY OLYMPICS
A global soccer star, Ronaldinho,
is planning to travel to Beijing with the
Olympic team of his native Brazil
despite orders from his employers at a Barcelona
soccer club to return to join training for a European league championship.
"I feel positive and I am not thinking about anything that is not
good," the player, whose real name is Ronald Moreira,
told reporters last week, according to a soccer Web site, Goal.com. "I am
not thinking about if someone is going to stop me or try and block me from Beijing."
Ronaldinho, 28, is expected to
skip a required training session in Spain
today, buy himself out of his contract, and transfer to a Milan club, news outlets reported yesterday.
nysun.com