The Wicker Basket Bakery Restaurants teach all their staff Food Safe on a regular basis. I know the owners. They treat their vegetables and fruit in an ozone bath. Apparently the best way to kill harmful bacteria.
Founders of the Wicker Basket are Canadians who work hard to promote a safe eating environment.

Thanks everyone for your feedback! It's helpful reading to prepare myself psychologically. At the same time, it's nice to know that there are some options.

[quote]This is why most restaurant food tastes so bad. It is just not fresh like getting food in HK, Xiamen, Shenzhen, or Shanghai where it is properly shipped in and consumed at port of entry. Kunming is way down the shipping line and thus will always have sub standard food quality by virtue of the logistics to get it here.[/quote]

If you're referring exclusively to western food, that comment might make sense, but then you're talking about 'most restaurant food' in Kunming...I don't get it. Why would local restaurants import foodstuffs from abroad, when there'd be plenty of supply in Yunnan itself?

And then the statement itself that most restaurant food in Kunming tastes bad; with one year's experience of sampling Kunming's shabbiest restaurants for my blog, I strongly disagree; the majority of restaurants we've reviewed (all selected more or less by random) has unanimously gotten an okay to good rating (i.e, 3-5), and no restaurant we've ever went to this far has gotten a 0 or a 1 for its food, except for a bonus feature review that was outside Kunming. I've had better food in Kunming than basically anywhere else in China, and whenever I go to cantonese areas where all the food is horrible, I long for the Yunnan-Sichuan-axis where they actually know what spices are.

NingSi: Much of it is overblown western propaganda, yes. China is a developing, largely rural country, so of course food standards are not up to western standards, and yes, food scandals in China are a dime a dozen, but people here eat the local food their whole life and apparently most of them are fine (if China has higher cancer rates than other countries, I't be because of smoking I assume, and not heavy metals in the sewer oil (that they do consume, by the way, that part is true...). And in some ways the food here is apparently healthier than in the west; The past year I've lost almost -20- kg without even trying, and the only explanation is that I haven't eaten much western food since I came here.

By and large, food in China is good and fine. You'll get stomach cramps every now and then, and maybe when you're like 95 cancer from the sewer oil, but in the west you'd (I would, at least) die from food-induced heart problems much earlier than that.

Too summarize: China is a developing and corrupt country, and food safety is not as good as in the west. This is, however, only a problem for people who worry too much, as western food safety is generally overly cautious to begin with (like, back home in Sweden I regularly eat meat that the stores have had to sell at discount because the best before-date has passed, even though the meat is still fine; others I know even went dumpster diving to find perfectly fine food that the supermarkets had thrown away because of best before-dates).

My wife is Chinese, her family are Chinese, and they all avoid eating out if they can. As someone else said, 'food fraud' is becoming more common as food prices increase, this is a global issue.

Can cancer rates for bowel cancer and stomach cancer be attributed to smoking? Just because you don't see obviosuly sick and dying people walking the streets, it is not safe to assume they don't exist, or the numbers of them is smaller the back home. And we don't see the dead walking the streets.

Just because someone is not fat it does not mean they are getting a healthy diet, ditto fat people and being well nourished. Just because you are eating less processed foods, does not mean you are not eating some stuff that is bad for you. People with Crones disease also loose weight.

If the Chinese government, who are often accused of turning a blind eye for a buck, are concerned with food safety...

Food safety in china is real, not a western prop, just as pollution in Beijing is real. In the cities neighboring Hong Kong, the affluent middle class are traveling to Hong Kong to shop for their groceries, not just baby milk powder. The demand for goods from Hong Kong in those cities have created a sizable grey market traders who travel back and forth the border multiple times daily. The trade has pushed up prices across the board along the East Rail Line in Hong Kong so much so that The locals are protesting, especially in Sheung Shui, of Hong Kong government 'inaction.' While in Shenzhen,shops selling exclusively goods imported from Hong Kong have sprung up like rabbits. So ......

why would mainlanders shop for groceries in Hong Kong when the groceries in Hong Kong are imported from the Mainland? It's not like Hong Kong imports its cabbage, cucumber and garlic from overseas.

Then, I know personal experiences doesn't really count, but I didn't see anyone carrying groceries across the border when I left Hong Kong; lots of people carried diapers and soda cans, though.

If the groceries are for the Hong Kong market, there is much stricter regulations and safety before it gets exported from the Mainland.

There's more negligence towards things that are made in the Mainland for the Mainland market.

Food safety is apparently the #1 concern of the Chinese people. Hopefully this will translate into a radical change in food safe practises. Change, in my opinion, happens fastest in the marketplace, when it becomes profitable to change. Consumers have incredible power, if they can demand changes as a large and unified group.

okay, sure, that does make sense. And I was at Carrefour today and saw the sad state of the vegetables; the groceries always look better and fresher when I buy them from the street market just outside my house.