Isabel Hilton writes:

You have to marvel at the ingenuity and enterprise of food adulteration in China: can it really be more economic to get rat meat to mimic mutton than just to raise a sheep? But bearing in mind that I come from a country that only recently discovered that some of its major brands' "value" beef burgers were at least partly horse, an animal that the Brits, perhaps irrationally, don't want to encounter on a plate, I think we have to recognize that China is not entirely alone in this.

In Britain, the industrial revolution, with its separation of food production from consumption, also brought a host of appalling food adulteration that took some time to regulate effectively. In the early 1980s in Spain, a still unexplained episode involving fake olive oil left scores of people with permanent neurological damage. In the West we have a whole separate set of problems around food: maximum returns come not from selling fresh, perishable produce but from processing: hence additives, sugar, salt, colorings and the obesity epidemic.

All that said, the sophistication of Chinese adulteration is impressive. Much of it demands a fairly high degree of technical knowledge, which suggests a certain professionalism  though not a high level of ethics. To pick only a few examples, it is unlikely that it was the dairy farmers who had the idea of putting melamine in milk to mimic high protein levels, the episode that left hundreds of babies with damaged kidneys.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/05/why-cant-china-make-its-food-safe/275852/