…What…?
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Wait. Do we heat the spoon with the rice? So just plastic rice, spoon, and throw them in a pot and apply heat? How much heat do we need to apply? Probably won’t take much to melt plastic rice and a spoon (especially if the spoon is plastic–I don’t believe there was any sort of distinction as to the type of spoon necessary in the original ‘recipe’) if there’s no water in the pot.
Or are we applying direct heat to the plastic rice and spoon? Get a little bottle of map gas, build a pile of plastic rice and spoon, and point it directly in! But I think that would probably give odd results. Something like a blackened pile of stink and an empty bottle of map gas (they’re not cheap).
Your newly rigged test needs work.
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Link to original source, with more detail-
http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/editorial/the-plastic-rice-scare/177829.html
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Aluminum spoon over any reasonable heat source.
True, but it would be the first logical step before tests that would be more expensive and take longer to get results back from.
Huh?
Whoever made this fake rice did an exceptionally good job - on first impression it would have fooled me. When I ran the grains through my fingers nothing felt out of the ordinary.
But when I smelt a handful of the “rice” there was a faint chemical odour. Customs officials say when they cooked up the rice it was too sticky - and it was then abundantly clear this was no ordinary batch.
They’ve sent a sample to the laboratories to determine exactly what the “rice” is made of.
On Korean TV I sometimes see horror stories about fake chinese food including, to my amazement, fake eggs, shell and all.
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I knew you’d come around. Welcome.
If this is real, then I hope there is a special level of hell reserved for the monsters who would make and sell this.
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And also the deregulationists who would encourage this to happen in the US.
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Never thought about how cheap it really is – wholesale spot price for rice is ~$360 per metric ton.
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I know there are a few smart people on BB here… are we talking about cooking rice, like in water? I mean the article talks about turning gooey and catching fire…are you stir frying uncooked rice? Most common plastics today will deform slightly at the boiling point of water, but aren’t going to turn gooey. HDPE would barely be chewy at that temperature. Catching fire you’d need over 400F/200C. I know I’ve cooked some rices before that can turn to mush if you do it wrong, like a giant gooey mess, but hey maybe I just bought some weird plastic rice and didn’t know it.
-Besides I’m pretty sure you could eat HDPE rice sized pellets and it wouldn’t seriously hurt you. I mean you might end up in the bathroom all night, but I don’t think you’d die just from the ingestion of the common plastics.
Well you may not die from the plastic hurting you directly, but if you’re desperate enough to eat it, it isn’t helping your starvation and malnutrition issues.
Though this could be real rice with some chemical process to it that gave it the smell and weird properties. It could have been contaminated from something else. The article wasn’t conclusive that it was actually plastic.
I don’t think anyone but the most fanatical of libertarian/anti-gov types are suggesting this.
Sadly, we live in a time when they’re set to take power.
Say what?
That’s the man-bites-dog part of the story.
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I think this is probably wrapped up in Nigerian rice politics. Apparently, the government has restricted rice imports in order to bolster the domestic rice industry, And so, every source-- from customs, to food inspection, has an inbuilt political bias, which we, as non Nigerians, can’t calculate. The local papers too may range from professional to sensationalistic.
Who can you trust?
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I’d tend to go with callous disregard about the likely deadly consequence. The idea of making, what, $50 for something that would almost certainly injure, and quite possibly kill a few says something about the ethics of those who committed this crime (if, indeed, a deliberate crime has been committed).
It would also say something about the desperation of whoever committed the crime. Sure, the chance of punishment is small, but I’m sure the Chinese government would be happy to shoot those responsible for something that hurts the country’s reputation, so you’re looking at someone who is values their life at what, $5K? (Assuming a 1% of this incident resulting in their deaths.)
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Well played, sir. I wonder how the market for plush toys is doing these days.
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Yeah, that’s the problem with private, fee-for-service regulators. If you’re strict, you get no business. If you’re willing to look the other way, companies will flock to you. Independent government regulators are better, IMHO. In Europe, drugs and devices are evaluated by private companies. In the US, it’s the FDA, which is relatively independent (except for the politically appointed bosses, who generally are pretty friendly with industry). Fortunately the bureaucrats within (mostly scientists and engineers) try to follow the rules, but sometimes it’s difficult to buck the bosses, like when a rejection is overruled despite the opinions of the scientific staff.
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I have a question. In all this uproar over “plastic” rice, has anyone stopped to address the actual issue at hand here? Are we discussing fake food or are we seeing the beginnings of actual factory-made “food”?
As in stuff that resembles true biologically grown and/or produced versus created in a lab food products?
Think about it for a moment.
We’ve already seen Tofu, which I do not consider to be food by any stretch.
How long do we have before ADM starts making say, corn syrup from natural gas derivatives. Or sugar from petrochemicals. Or cow’s milk made from wood chips?
Fake meat made from proteins assembled by engineered bacteria,
What I’m saying is that if there is a better cost effective method for producing a foodstuff, someone will try to make it.
Remember Tang? How about Space food sticks?
And then we have the whole Soylent Green issue…
which of course we now know is actually, you know, people.
