Sweet corn man goes past our workshop daily and people buy from him regularly - which implies they were not poisoned last time around.
Think about it. Corn is steamed - when cooked Chinese style - so what would/how could alleged battery acid added to the water poison the product? Hot sulphuric acid has a very distinct smell as does nitric acid. Same with the Muriatic acid aka hydrochloric acid, which I use to clean concrete, also has a different smell.
If there was any truth in the original rumour it is more likely someone switch cooking dishes. Vietnamese don't deliberately set out to kill/injure people - it's not a viable business model.
Then there's Ha Noi ...
Yes, thinking about it.....Â
The information came from the Cong An in D1, for whom a relative in the family works at extremely high level.
If the H2SO4 were to be added to the blanching water (to aid faster softening of the sweetcorn, apparently), prior to the roasting of the sweetcorn, the effects of the subsequent heating of the sweetcorn by roasting would be to concentrate the H2SO4 on the skin of the sweetcorn, by evaporating the diluting cooking water - H2SO4 is not flammable, so is unlikely to "burn off".
I am not of the opinion that eating foods contaminated with such a substance would be a good thing, but others have free choice in the matter.
As for "not being poisoned", personally I wouldn't take the risk, but the fact is that some people have been poisoned. Hence the police interest. and consuming food with less than desirable additives may not necessarily lead to immediate effects.
In an interesting turn of events, it seems that an analysis of the cooking water in which large quantities of sweet corn are blanched or cooked before being sold to street distributors for roasting or including in other foods, by some bulk suppliers, has shown that the water in a couple of cases contained potassium hydroxide, a component of torch batteries, rather than sulfuric acid, a component of car and truck batteries.
As well as being found in torch batteries, potassium hydroxide is found in:
Cuticle removal products
Drain cleaners
Leather tanning chemicals
Caustic potash or potash lye
I am not suggesting that all Vietnamese people are busy trying to poison each other. However the odd rogue trader (usually the bulk supplier) may add less than desirable substances to the food they process, not for the purpose of deliberately poisoning people, but for the purpose, e.g. Of softening the food being processed and thus saving cooking fuel costs. Old batteries cost nothing.
Of course, such things never happen - cant happen here, but only happen in other countries. Like the addition of melamine to babies milk powder by the Chinese manufacturers (22 factories involved), which caused the death of at least 3 kids and severe sickness in another 600 in China alone. Chinese milk powder was subsequently banned in Vietnam
And then there was the scandal some years ago, of antifreeze (diethylene glycol) added as a (toxic) sweetener to wines made in Austria and exported to Germany.
And a little bit closer to home:
Vietnam food purity legislation is in many areas still at the drafting stage right now and will take some time to get to the inspection and enforcement stage, although some authorities in Vietnam are taking the lead in investigating cases where ill health has resulted from the consumption of contaminated food.
Jaitch himself posted some concerns about the marketing of fruit and vegetables contaminated with pesticides and chemicals in Vietnam not so long ago, although he didn't say whether people were falling down dead around his location as a result (of the contamination, not of him mentioning the matter).
And of course Vietnamese people don't deliberately set out to kill and injure people by selling contaminated fruit and veg and that's a fact. But some traders do import contaminated fruit and veg from China illegally and sell them here - as Jaitch reported.
My post on this subject should simply regarded as a "word to the wise".
