However, a series of food safety incidents has damaged the country’s reputation for fine cuisine. Experts say that an insufficiency of institutional food safety supervision is harming the public’s faith in food.

“Now dining out is haunted by questions. Is this meat safe? Does this meal contain additives? Do they use illegal cooking oil?” said Cheng, a food quality inspector in Wuhan. “In my job, I have been shocked to see where some food has come from.”

Figures from the Ministry of Agriculture shows China consumes over 2 million tons of food every day from over 400,000 food manufacturers, and 3.23 million related businesses.

To tackle complicated problems concerning food safety, the State Council Food Safety Commission chaired by Vice-Premier Li Keqiang was set up in 2010.

However, under the current framework of food safety supervision, more than a dozen departments are involved with six bureaus and ministries directly responsible for stages from farm to table.

Luo Yunbo, dean of the food sciences college at China Agricultural University (CAU), says the more agencies involved, the less likely the problem will be solved efficiently.

“There is no clear cut division of responsibility for food safety,” said Luo. “That makes effective supervision a problem. It is very common for officials to pass the buck. Meanwhile, the problems don’t go away.”

Zhu Yi, associate professor at CAU, suggests a single government agency should tackle the problem: “It is a trend in food safety supervision to have a sole administration, such as in the UK and Canada, so that problems can be fixed swiftly.”

Li Shan, of the Politics and Public Administration College of Tianjin Normal University, also advocates the need to have a single department covering the whole food production chain.

“Maybe a new ‘ministry of food safety’ that brings various agencies into one administration can help boost the capacity for supervision,” said Li.

All three experts believe it will take some time before there is a Chinese version of the US’ Food and Drug Administration.

Study Times highlights the mismatch of information between agencies and consumers.

“The lack of an information sharing mechanism among stakeholders in food safety is causing both monitoring overlaps and blind spots,” according to Study Times.

CAU’s Zhu Yi sees another obstacle – the execution of policies and regulations.

“Monitoring equipment is available in markets but much of it is hardly used,” said Zhu.

According to Zhu, in Germany, every food inspector is required to carry out over 800 checks on food manufacturers. “But our inspectors often don’t have such a workload,” said Zhu.

Inspector Cheng does not agree: “We work really hard to trace any food safety issues reported, but there are just too many to tackle them all.”