五家收购点，毁了一条产业链——"泡药杨梅"之后

something happened in China

that seemed quite small.

Someone used additives that should not be used,

on a small fruit.

It was exposed by the media,

and the authorities handled it quickly too.

Five people were criminally detained,

the case was clear-cut,

and the handling was clean.

On the surface,

this was

a fully wrapped-up food-safety case.

But this matter's

real impact

is not so simple.

Today,

starting from this single bayberry,

we'll talk about something bigger:

trust,

the market,

and why those who play by the rules

also end up

going down with the rest.

Let's first lay out the facts.

The subject of the story

is a fruit called yangmei (bayberry).

Yangmei is a fruit

very characteristic of southern China.

Deep red in color,

sweet-sour in taste.

Each year, only from May to June —

just a few short weeks —

is its best season.

But yangmei has

one deadly trait:

its shelf life

is only two to three days.

After being picked from the tree,

in less than three days

it begins to spoil.

This point,

we'll come back to later.

Around May 15,

CCTV and multiple media outlets

disclosed a story.

It took place in

Longhai District, Zhangzhou City, Fujian Province.

Specifically two towns were involved:

Fugong Town

and Baishui Town.

Several yangmei procurement points there

were found

doing something illegal.

They took the freshly picked yangmei

and soaked it in two things.

The first

was called dehydroacetic acid sodium,

a food preservative.

The second

was a bottle of high-strength sweetener.

The packaging read

"8000x sweetness,"

but it had no production date,

no ingredients list,

and no quality certificate —

a textbook "three-no product."

According to the state's

National Food Safety Standard,

both classes of additives

are clearly forbidden

on fresh fruit.

So what these procurement points did,

legally speaking,

was fully illegal.

On May 20 to 21,

Zhangzhou City issued a notice.

The official investigation found

the procurement points involved

were five in total.

Seized on site

were 225 kg of problem yangmei

and 20.1 kg of illegal additives.

And from the market,

another 540 kg of problem yangmei was recovered.

In the end:

twelve administrative cases were filed,

two criminal cases were filed,

five people were criminally detained.

On the surface,

the matter was handled

quickly

and thoroughly.

But

the real damage

was just beginning.

As soon as the news broke,

the whole yangmei market

crashed rapidly.

In the livestream rooms,

the hosts selling yangmei

were notified —

"illegal selling" —

and had to refund consumers.

Wholesale markets across the country

were being inspected three times a day.

Ordinary consumers,

seeing yangmei, were afraid,

and simply did not buy.

But what hurt the most

was another thing.

Zhejiang

is actually China's most famous yangmei region.

Xianju yangmei,

Yuyao yangmei,

Cixi yangmei —

all are decades-old brands.

This event

had no connection

to Zhejiang at all.

But consumers

could not tell.

You hold up a yangmei to them,

and there's no way they know

whether this one

is from Zhangzhou

or from Xianju.

The result:

Zhejiang fruit farmers

also could not sell.

On May 23,

a Zhangzhou fruit farmer

cried in a livestream room.

He said

his family had grown yangmei for decades

and had never used any 药水.

But this news came out,

and his goods,

none of them could be sold.

This video

spread widely online.

Speaking of this,

we must go back to

the question we started with:

why does this kind of thing happen?

Why do procurement points

take on the risk of prison

to use banned additives?

The answer,

in fact, hides in

yangmei itself —

that two-to-three-day shelf life.

For fruit farmers,

procurement points,

transporters,

and the final sellers,

those two to three days

are

a brutally narrow time window.

Once picked,

it must be sold as fast as possible.

If it doesn't sell,

it can only be thrown away.

And illegal preservatives

can let the yangmei

hold on for a few more days.

Meaning:

goods that would have been thrown out

can now be sold;

goods that couldn't be shipped far

can now travel farther.

For an industry

where money is hard

and pressure is high,

this kind of temptation

is structural.

It's not that

these procurement points are necessarily evil people —

they were, under

a structural pressure,

making a

clearly illegal choice.

This is not defending them.

Illegal is illegal,

and especially treating consumers

as the people who bear the risk —

that is, under any conditions,

unacceptable.

But to solve this problem,

you cannot only rely on "crack down on a few people."

The real cure

is to make the short-shelf-life fruit's

cold chain,

storage,

and processing

truly solid —

so that the law-abiding path

is actually viable.

Speaking of this,

I want to say something

more universal.

The core of this matter

is, in fact, "trust."

A market,

on the surface, exchanges goods.

But one layer deeper,

what it exchanges is trust.

You believe

that what I sell you

is clean.

I believe

that you are willing,

for my labor,

to pay a reasonable price.

This kind of trust

is not written in a contract.

It is, through countless transactions,

slowly accumulated.

Building trust

takes many years;

destroying trust,

sometimes,

takes only one news story.

And when trust

is destroyed by a few people,

the cost is not only

paid by those few.

The cost is the whole industry —

those who play by the rules,

those who did nothing wrong,

also have to bear it together.

This is why

we say

trust is a public good.

It belongs to every

person who works honestly.

And every person who cuts corners

is stealing a little of it away.

Finally,

let me leave you with two questions.

The first:

when an industry

has "a few rotten apples,"

what should we do

to protect those

who really work honestly?

The second,

perhaps harder —

as consumers,

when we see a piece of negative news,

can we

not, with one stroke,

beat the whole industry

to death?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they

are worth thinking about slowly.

Okay.

That's all for today.

See you in the next story.