HONG KONG — Government officials in southern China sought on Wednesday to calm public ire about toxic substances menacing the region’s main food staple, rice, after the city of Guangzhou said that nearly half the rice tested at restaurants this year held excessive cadmium, a heavy metal that can cause cancer and other illnesses.

Chinese citizens have become increasingly irate about food and beverages tainted with pesticides, illegal preservatives and additives, as well as industrial waste and heavy metals from polluted land and air. The news that this mainstay of the kitchen may also be toxic drew a vehement outcry.

“Now before every meal must we all first wonder: Does this rice have too much cadmium? Are the vegetables laced with pesticide?” one Chinese Internet user wrote on the popular Tencent microblog service. Another wondered whether he was expected to quit rice the same way he quit smoking.

The alarm was set off by the Food and Drug Administration of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province. The agency revealed last week that 8 out of 18 samples of rice tested from canteens and restaurants in the first three months of this year had cadmium levels surpassing national limits.

The administration tried to explain on its Web site two days later that the finding used a small, skewed sample and was not representative. By then, however, news reports and apparently many residents had concluded that half the rice in the city could be tainted with too much cadmium.

On the Internet, many citizens accused the government of concealing the risks from unsafe food to avoid political damage. The Southern Metropolitan Daily, a popular and sometimes outspoken newspaper based in Guangzhou, said on Tuesday that the uproar was a lesson in candor for officials. “There is not enough transparency in information concerning the public’s own interests,” it said in an editorial.

Officials said the tainted rice came from the adjacent Hunan Province, an area where expanding factories, smelters and mines jostle with paddy fields. Cadmium is often found in zinc ores, and it is used in coatings and batteries for cellphones, cameras and computers — products that China makes in abundance. If too much accumulates in the body, cadmium harms the liver, the kidneys and the respiratory tract, and can dangerously weaken bones. It has also been linked to a variety of cancers.

Cadmium is the latest culprit in a succession of food safety scandals in China.

In 2008, public anger erupted after the government reported that tens of thousands of children were at risk of kidney stones and other organ damage from milk powder mixed with melamine, a chemical used to deceive protein tests. At least six infants died from illnesses linked to the tainted powder, which sickened more than 300,000 children.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/wo...ina.html?_r=3&

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