In the most serious case of faking, one can produce milk without a cow.

TODAY in Hong Kong, a Hong Kong child has fallen ill due to tainted milk. In school, I am teaching my students to listen for implication in a given talk.  Everyday the newspaper's front page has articles on the situation. What are some implications that we can find in these articles?

Right now, the taint du jour is melamine in milk. According to experts, melamine has been an additive since 2005! Evidently New Zealand helped bring the issue at this time to the fore because a big milk company in NZ has a minority share in one of the Chinese giants. They don't have a large enough share to force the company to disclose t heir practices, but they were finally able to get the Chinese government to do something. Implication: There has been this practice since 2005, Chinese people have brought it to the attention of authorities, but it wasn't until it became known INTERNATIONALLY that anything is being done or that any one hears about it.

Yesterday in the paper milk middlemen were saying that they had been told only this past week that the large production factories would no longer be buying discounted milk that failed quality test. Implication: They WERE taking bad milk. The paper had a quote from a milk dealer who said that when his milk did not meet standards, he was told to put his milk in a different place and unload the milk into a factory container. Both companies USED to buy sub-standard milk for about half the price of good quality milk. Producers for both companies have admitted that they have added melamine for the past few years.

However, with this new policy of not accepting low quality milk, even at half the price, dealers bemoan the fact that "while before wey lost about 1 yuan for each kilogram of bad milk, with the new policy we lose everything!" Oh, sorry.
They were told that the low quality stuff would be mixed with the good, or used for milk powder. That's okay then.
And sometimes it was just off or bad smelling milk- and mixing it with good at a ratio of 1:5- no one would able to tell, right?

Now you may ask, as I did, WHY would someone put melamine into milk. Well, evidently it raises the protein levels. Therefore, when someone waters down milk to get more milk to sell, the nutritional values also get watered down, and it can't pass the test for protein levels. SO, they add melamine. BUT, that's not all! They add melamine or protein powders to boost protein levels, they add oil to increase fat percentages, and whey powder to fake the lactose level. And do you think they add expensive Canola oil? Of course they use industrial oil!

Since the price of grain has gone up so much, many cows were killed as farmers could not afford to feed them. Implication: there is less milk available. This is probably why now there is so much of this going on. Maybe they changed to ration from 1:5 to 1:1 bad to good and it actually has had an effect (like children dying). And now it has spread to Hong Kong.

information from the South China Morning Post