For the topic on food safety, it is necessary to know our gatekeeper, the government agencies that supervise food safety. We wanted to know more about the agencies and their responsibilities, so through our research, we found that the Laboratory of the Department of Health, Taipei City Government, is responsible for the inspection of food in the Taipei area. Thus, we paid a visit to the agency.

First, we listened to the briefing by Mr. Hsu, the director here, and we learnt about the work contents and items in the laboratory. We also learned that food inspection is a highly professional and complicated field, because one food item needs to undergo multiple levels of inspections. It is a tremendous task to inspect various foods and the laboratory inspects over 10,000 foods every year. It is a heavy responsibility indeed.

After the briefing, we visited the laboratory. From the brief, we learnt that the advanced and expensive inspection equipment might cost millions of NTD, so we were all excited to see the equipment in operation up close. For different inspection items, there are different laboratories, and each laboratory has a lot of machines to do the job. Mr. Hsu said that each machine is valuable and precise, and can inspect different food additives. Although all the personnel are professionals, they were more  interested in who we are, but they were not distracted by our visit.

Finally, we had a chance to interview Mr. Hsu. In the interview, he said that “it is very easy for the manufacturers to add additives into the food, but it is hard to inspect them one by one, because it is difficult to know which items to inspect, so each item must be examined; it is demanding work”. We were told, in recent years, some strange additives have been detected in the foods. We hope that the illegal manufacturers would not gain profits by harming people. This is a wrong deed that damages their business reputation, and harms the future generation.

The most important thing for food safety is concurrent enforcement of education and punishment. We should educate the manufactures not to do illegal things, educate the public on how to select the safe food, and strictly punish the manufactures who violates the laws and regulations. Only by this way could we reduce the endless problematic foods with huge fund and manpower.