Wednesday, September 17 2008

Rice and Fall

Rice wine? Technically it's beer, but it's weird drinking carbonated sake

First it was pet food laced with melamine, then lead-toys and contaminated baby formula and now pesticide contaminated rice used to make saké. What's next, cyanide toothpaste? Razor-studded contact lenses?

According to Decanter Magazine

In the past week, more than 1m bottles of saké and the distilled, rice-based spirit, 'shochu' have been recalled following news of tainted rice shipments – destined for use in glue factories – finding their way to Japanese-based breweries and distillers.

On Friday the Kyoto city government announced the toxic pesticide methamidophos had been detected at twice the permitted level in sticky rice produced by Osaka-based miller, Mikasa Foods. This had already been sold to a local nursery and nursing centre in Kyoto, among others.

He's just resting.

The rice was imported from China, which supplies a lot of Japanese industrial rice (they're fussy about the rice they use at the table, and grow a lot of their own, for a very small country with limited arable land).

It's a sad blow for the saké industry in Japan: domestic consumption is way down as folks drink other beverages they see as more 'sophisticated', like wine and whisky, while exports, driven by the popularity of Japanese cuisine around the world, continue to rise.

I sleep a little better at night knowing we have our pesticide bioassay facility at our side, testing our grapes and juices for residue (our tolerance limit is zero PPB--absolutely nothing). It's a funny old world when people sell unsafe products for profit, and it makes me glad I make my own.

posted by Tim at 04:16PM

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