Starting from today you’ll be able to buy a nice crispy youtiao at KFCs throughout Beijing and around the country as the fast food giant has decided to add the traditional Chinese morning snack to their breakfast menu. The colonel is making a big deal of the fact that his KFC youtiao are safe, clean and free of the 明矾 (ming fan) or alum that a lot of the street vendors add to give their deep fried dough sticks that extra bit of puff.

Olympic fever continues this week with news from the Financial Times about a controversy over pigs reportedly reared to help athletes pass doping tests. After FT reported in August that the supplier was planning to “rear organically fed pigs at secret locations in order to provide Olympic athletes with meat guaranteed not to cause them to fail doping tests,” angry netizens lashed out online against the perceived preferential treatment for foreign athletes, particularly in the wake of all the food scandals from this past year.

The company, for its part, denied the rumors, but reportedly failed to elaborate on exactly what it’s doing to its prized porkers. Read more about it here.

Another mid-Autumn festival has come and gone, and that means boxes and boxes of unopened mooncakes – the "Chinese equivalent of the Christmas fruitcake" – in homes and offices across the city. But before you throw those salted-duck-egg-yolk stuffed-delights in the trash, consider this:

That funny tasting water coming out of your office cooler may not be a figment of your imagination after all: In the wake of local media reports from this past summer that up to 50 percent of bottled water could be fake (a.k.a. straight outta the tap), the city government is looking into measures to more effectively track the sources of water barrels.

Last weekend the Beijing Bureau of Quality and Supervision announced that by March of next year, all barrels of drinking water for sale in the city will come with a serial number, which consumers can refer to after calling a hotline at 95001111 (www.95001111.com) to check the authenticity of their H2O.

In last week’s newsletter, we mistakenly reported the statistic that China goes through 45 million disposable chopsticks per year - it's actually 45 BILLION. If saving the trees (25 million of them per year) isn't enough reason for you to start bringing around your own pair, maybe this is: Beijing News reports that police recently shut down a factory selling unsanitized used chopsticks as new.

The factory allegedly sold 100,000 pairs of recycled kuaizi on a good day. That number sounds a bit inflated, but we still advocate stashing a pair in your jeans. At best, it'll help the environment and stave off la duzi - in the very least, it'll make for some quality junior high school-level jokes.

Like something from a James Bond film or the recently released Bourne Ultimatum, the Chinese government has announced that they intend to use cutting-edge satellite tracking systems to keep Olympic food supplies contaminant free. According to Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic Committee, “The whole process will be monitored from the start of production through transportation to the end users,”

The public bathroom, that is. No, the government isn’t installing a video surveillance system in public restrooms (at least, not that we’re aware of). But they are cracking down on the sale of food and other commercialization of the city’s 5,000 public toilets.

A few interesting items to note tangentially related to this piece of news:

1. Beijing will soon be issuing a “Guide to Public Toilets.” FINALLY.
2. The Beijing Environmental Sanitation Engineering Research Institute, which we assume probably knows something about bathrooms, has “attributed the bad odor in some toilets to insufficient ventilation facilities, and the lack or inappropriate use of deodorization products.” Come on, BESERI. Insufficient ventilation certainly makes the situation worse, but it fails to explain why sinks citywide burp sewage. The real reason for smelly bathrooms in Beijing is poor plumbing.

With Beijing up in arms about food safety issues, reports are now coming in that a health food company in the U.S. will label their products “China-Free” to ease customer concerns regarding tainted food products from China. Food for Health International based in Utah, makes whole food nutritional supplements for people and pets. Their plan is to label products with a “China-free” sticker and use “China-free” in their marketing.

The past few weeks have seen Beijing weather a bout of bad news; it seemed as if reports in the international and domestic press were as depressing as the humid and polluted weather that we’ve been subject to for the past few weeks. First there were reports of the yang rou chuan’r, made from chemically-laced pork, then there was the international scandal surrounding sub-standard toothpaste from China and a US ban on Chinese seafood products. But the one that hit home and caused the biggest waves was the report (complete with hard-to-refute video footage) that some of the baozi being sold on the streets of Chaoyang contained “chopped cardboard, softened in an industrial chemical and made tasty with pork flavoring.”

This past Monday, an expose in the Beijing Times quoted an unnamed manager from an unnamed “major water company” as estimating that 50% of all bottled water is fake. What this Beijing Deep Throat meant is that your local shuizhan may be pouring either tap water or lesser-quality bottled water into brand-name water machine containers that you implicitly trust. The motive is understandable: legitimately-bottled containers from reputable brands cost the supplier upwards of RMB 6, whereas a bottle of “fake” or sub-standard water only costs RMB 3, allowing for a far greater profit margin.

The government has responded that they are launching an inquiry into the situation, and reassured the press that a survey last May had indicated that 96% of Beijing water supplies were safe. In the meanwhile, we suggest that you abstain from all bottled or tap water and exclusively drink Pocari Sweat.