School Meal May Not Be Safe

The government will stiffen regulations on unsafe food. In the case of food safety problems at schools, the Ministry of Education will post relevant information, including the names of school meal service providers and food ingredient vendors, on the web pages of the city or provincial education offices if they turn out to be responsible for the problems.

If the names of the vendors and providers are publicized, the company will effectively be eliminated from this business, as it will be impossible to win another contract.

An official at the Ministry of Education said, “We will thoroughly investigate the irresponsible school meal businesses that think lightly of the students’ health and sanitation, and strictly punish them.”

The ministry has recently announced the implementation of the revised law on the school meal system under which school meal providers and food ingredient vendors could be deprived of the right to run a business if they violate relevant regulations on sanitation, safety, and other issues.

The revised law stipulates that the Ministry of Education will set the standard of the quality and safety of ingredients of school meal, and nutrition and hygiene. The law also stipulates that a city or provincial education office shall form a school meal committee responsible for monitoring and directing school meal programs.

To strengthen food safety at school, the Ministry of Education is considering applying the HACCP (the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point System) to school meal programs.

The HACCP is a preventive system of supervising each stage of processing, distributing, and consuming food in order to protect food from being mixed with hazardous materials or being polluted.

“We plan to spend 700 billion won to modernize the school meal system by 2007,” an official at the Ministry of Education said. “The HACCP will be gradually introduced in the system in-line with the budget allocation.”

Parents’ organizations are demanding food safety at school. “There is a good chance that bad dumplings were provided to schools,” a renowned national parents’ organization said Monday. “The Ministry of Education should publicize the list of the vendors that provided bad dumplings and the list of schools which were provided with the dumplings.”

The organization urged, “An institutional tool to check the origins of foods, producers, and results of safety at school easily and stronger measures to promote food safety at school are required.”

A Ministry of Education official said, “A comprehensive investigation is under way regarding whether vendors provided schools with bad food including bad dumplings.”

School meal programs are implemented to seven million students at 10,242 schools, which account for 97.7 percent of the total number of elementary, middle and high schools.

Seong-Chul Hong sungchul@donga.com