An apple a day keeps the .......

As I sat down to breakfast this morning with my yogurt and apples I opened the Shanghai Daily News to read the following headline "Apples ripen in toxic bags". After choking and thinking twice about the next swallow, I read that the Shandong Provincial Agricultural Bureau is probing allegations that paper bags coated with pesticide are widely used to cover apples growing on trees in two major apple growing areas in east China - a region that supplies billions of kilograms of apples to cities all across China  and also accounts for over half of all the apples sold in Shanghai. That made me feel better - I have a 50/50 chance I'm eating an apple that was not coated with pesticides.

According to a bureau official surnamed Su it seems that young apples are covered in pesticide coated bags until they grow to full size. Local farmers  buy the pesticide-coated bags from unlicensed workshops to keep their apples from getting worms and to maintain a fresh shiny look.

These unlicensed manufacturers have so far refused to disclose the ingredients used in coating the interior of their bags however it is believed they contain highly toxic pesticides including asomate and tuzet and a mixture of thiram, ziram and urbacid - none of which I recognize but they all sound nasty. One manufacturer is quoted as saying a sack of pesticide costing 30 Yuan ($4.70 US) can coat 20,000 bags selling for 1,000 Yuan or $160.00 US.

An orchard owner says almost all orchards are using these bags because grocery stores and restaurants are demanding that all apples they sell have a perfect appearance.

So it looks like apples now join a long list of other goods that come off our shopping list or we start buying imported ones. So does An Apple A Day Keeps The Doctor Away? Im not so sure anymore.