Chinese food activists turn to new media

“I never knew you could make fake beef!” said Wu, who described being shocked and disgusted by the revelation. “I suddenly felt I needed to do something, to create a platform so consumers could know about this kind of thing.”

The result of Wu's epiphany a year ago is the cheeky and informative food scandal database “Throw It Out the Window,” a homegrown resource that tries to alert the Chinese public to the many dangers lurking at the supermarket and on the restaurant table.

The site and other tech tools like it, including a new iPhone app that gives daily news feeds about the latest food scandals, underscore the deep anger in China over the country's persistent food safety problems and a new willingness among ordinary people to take the matter into their own hands.

Driven partly by the government's foot dragging on food safety, such grassroots activism is unusual in a country where citizen action is discouraged and often dangerous.

After reading about the fake beef problem a year ago, Wu, 26, dashed off an online appeal seeking help for the new project, his exuberance clear from the 17 exclamation points in his May 11, 2011, blog title that ended with a rallying cry: “Come on, we can change something.”

A few dozen volunteers now help Wu maintain the site, which is updated daily with Chinese language news reports about food dangers. It's become so popular it crashed from all the traffic on May 3. Wu says 5 million people visited his site over the last month and a half.

Thursday, the site had reports about maggots in hot dogs and a workshop that was churning out fake honey made from water, white sugar, thickener and coloring.