Thai Food Laws - Perserved Meats.

[Cuban]

The question is a simple one, when meat products (sausages/ham etc.) are sold in Thailand is it law that they contain Sodium/Potassium Nitrate to ensure Botulism bacteria is killed off?

If so is there a minimum and or maximum level? (grammes per kilo)

I'm not asking about common practice or best advise - but Food Safety Laws.

[Boater]

didnt think thailand had any food safty laws

[ozsamurai]

A walk through any market or back street will soon answer your question on 'food safety', there is none! Meat drying by the side of the road, covered in flies, small shops pumping out dried pork products for sale at the markets, exposed front shops, with equipment that pre-dates my grandmother, while traffic drives past. TiT... Just because it goes into a nice clean plastic bag...... Take it as it is, you need local bacteria....

Oz

[mark45y]

Of course Thailand has food safety packaging laws. I seem to remember them being displayed at the yearly food show in Bangkok.

The year I went it was an interesting show.

[Cuban]

Nearest I've found http://www.fda.moph.go.th

[mark45y]

Nearest I've found http://www.fda.moph.go.th

Try BRC and HAACP standards and certification.

[craigt3365]

OP asked this to be moved back to the General forum as he was not getting replies in the Thai Food forum.

//Moved back to General forum//

[Hadrian1]

I lived in Thailand for almost 4 years. I ate mostly in you side road locals eateries and street food. I wasn't ill once from eating in one of these places. I was once ill form eating a Take-away in the UK a few years ago. But that wasn't Thai. And the Health and Safety rules and regulations in the UK are 'crippling'.

Edited December 6, 2010 by Hadrian1

[Thongkorn]

I lived in Thailand for almost 4 years. I ate mostly in you side road locals eateries and street food. I wasn't ill once from eating in one of these places. I was once ill form eating a Take-away in the UK a few years ago. But that wasn't Thai. And the Health and Safety rules and regulations in the UK are 'crippling'.

Would beer be taken before you got ill after eating out.

[Hadrian1]

I lived in Thailand for almost 4 years. I ate mostly in you side road locals eateries and street food. I wasn't ill once from eating in one of these places. I was once ill form eating a Take-away in the UK a few years ago. But that wasn't Thai. And the Health and Safety rules and regulations in the UK are 'crippling'.

Would beer be taken before you got ill after eating out.

No. I was on my way home from work which I finished at 10 PM. No beer involved.

[ukrules]

I wonder how many cases of Botulism there are in Thailand each year, it would be good to know this ?

I think that most of the food is fresh so it won't need the nitrates adding.

[Cuban]

The case in point (reason I am asking) is a farang running a business selling home made sausages and hams in a semi-professional kitchen with total refusal to add any nitrates. Where my understanding is that humans discovered that to stop people dying unexpectedly of botulism poisoning you have to use a mixture of table salt and sodium nitrate to make the product safe.

Is is not a question about street food - but preserved foods which I'm sure anyone who has some catering experience will know is a different ball game.

"Good Food - Clean Taste" is fine for wiping the plates clean between customers on the side sois, but preserving meats for cooking at a later date with Thailand's ambient temperature control in a non-refrigerated kitchen.

Foods produced for export or sold through main brands have a reputation to maintain - chancer farang selling from the family kitchen (no background in meat processing) seems (to my eyes) to be playing fast and free with the health of his local customers/friends for the sake of bacon, ham, sausage which is not sold by any Thai shop for about a 45 minute highway drive radius.

Is there a law?

Someone quoted an international law - yes that's fine for stuff from Tesco/Big C, but is there a law that is applied to small companies within Thailand - or it is case that Thais don't eat ham therefore it's open season.

[harrry]

Nitrates may make food safe in some respects but at a cost of potential cancers. Many countries ban it altogether in foodstuffs.

[rockyysdt]

Hi Cuban.

Interestingly I found that the Australian & New Zealand Meat Products Code lists maximum allowable levels of Sodium Nitrite (125mg / kg), but no minimum.

It seems that Sodium Nitrite is only one of a number of ways of achieving preservation in manufactured & cured meats.

Apparently Sodium Nitrite is a known carcinogen if consumed regularly over the minimum level.

New to me, I've also learned that some manufactured meats, such as salami, can be prepared according to traditional methods which only involve fermentation and drying.

They don't necessarily undergo any form of heat treatment or cooking in their preparation.

Instead, preservation is achieved via lactic acid bacteria fermenting sugars to acid in conjunction with dehydration of the meat (reduction in water activity).

There are also other methods including heat treatment and use of ascorbic acid.

Hope this helps.

[Bagwan]

If there are laws concerning processed meat I expect that they are ignored - just as all other laws are.

[canopy]

Nitrates and nitrites are bad for people and that has been known for decades. The theory on why to use them can be summed up as it is better to deteriorate the health of all a little bit to prevent that one person somewhere from dying.

[H2oDunc]

As far as I was aware a sausage isn't a preserved product ? I have a friend who makes them and as far as I know he is not obliged to add anything to them ? Not adding Nitrate or whatever doesn't seem to effect the product as I eat far too many of them. Is it a

" beef " with a certain sausage maker ?

[Heng]

I just avoid meatballs, sausage, anything 'too processed' in general. If it's unclear what it originally was, pass. That way when I finally get liver cancer, I know it was the booze.

Seriously though, there's no point scratching your head when your kids get cancer one day if you fill them with processed junk from a young age.

[jsflynn603]

I lived in Thailand for almost 4 years. I ate mostly in you side road locals eateries and street food. I wasn't ill once from eating in one of these places. I was once ill form eating a Take-away in the UK a few years ago. But that wasn't Thai. And the Health and Safety rules and regulations in the UK are 'crippling'.

They were not crippling enough to prevent the infection of the cluster of five people who died in the village of Queniboroughof variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD) (Mad Cow disease that affects humans) in 1998. Interestingly statistical predictions from the year 2000 (which varied widely) predicted ultimately fatal infections as high as 136,000 people in GB--though it seems very odd that today it is hard to find any current statistics for vCJD. Either food safety regulations have markedly reduced vCJD transmission or perhaps nobody wants to talk about it anymore--who knows?

I'm curious, could you elaborate on how current regulations are crippling?

As for Thailand, though I enjoy the candied dried fruit, It's pretty self-evident that there is plenty of food coloring in them. I'd prefer my dried sweetened cherries to be dark purple rather than the unnatural fluorescent red (or other unnatural fluorescent colors) that one always sees here in the candied dried fruit. In America and Europe many food colors have been banned as being carcinogenic (the exception in America is the carcinogenic red used to color maraschino cherries--exempted from the ban on the thought that "nobody would ever eat enough of them--though I admit having eaten a bottle at a time when I was a kid--including drinking all the juice) I suspect that the "red" is same coloring that is banned in the US (but allowed in Marashino cherries).

At least nobody in Thailand has ever been implicated in putting melamine in milk products, or doing what one entrepreneur did in China which was to take tons of "fats" skimmed from sewage treatment plants--filter, bleach and dilute it with other fats and sell it to some of China's best restaurants. (true story).

I imagine that pesticide use in agriculture and antibiotics in aquaculture is largely unrelated, but any damage done to humans would likely not be immediately evident.

[h90]

The case in point (reason I am asking) is a farang running a business selling home made sausages and hams in a semi-professional kitchen with total refusal to add any nitrates. Where my understanding is that humans discovered that to stop people dying unexpectedly of botulism poisoning you have to use a mixture of table salt and sodium nitrate to make the product safe.

Is is not a question about street food - but preserved foods which I'm sure anyone who has some catering experience will know is a different ball game.

"Good Food - Clean Taste" is fine for wiping the plates clean between customers on the side sois, but preserving meats for cooking at a later date with Thailand's ambient temperature control in a non-refrigerated kitchen.

Foods produced for export or sold through main brands have a reputation to maintain - chancer farang selling from the family kitchen (no background in meat processing) seems (to my eyes) to be playing fast and free with the health of his local customers/friends for the sake of bacon, ham, sausage which is not sold by any Thai shop for about a 45 minute highway drive radius.

Is there a law?

Someone quoted an international law - yes that's fine for stuff from Tesco/Big C, but is there a law that is applied to small companies within Thailand - or it is case that Thais don't eat ham therefore it's open season.

also the nitrate/nitrit, specially together with Ascorbinacid (spelling??) helps to maintain the red color. Else it may get gray/brown after some time.

[Chunky1]

are you telling me that ลูกชิ้น (luk-chin) is not healthy.