A rather ridiculous post in which a Beijing official associates the capital’s air pollution with cooking has not surprisingly attracted a lot of attention online.

On October 8, Zhao Huimin, Chairman of External Affairs for the Municipal Government of Beijing, replied to a question made by a reporter regarding air quality in Beijing with the statement, “After a city has a large enough population, the cooking of Chinese people will make a substantial contribution to PM2.5 levels since they do it so often. We hope that citizens will cooperate with initiatives towards clean air efforts.”

In response to this, some netizens have answered by saying, “Does this mean that in order to cooperate, we all need to eat tossed cucumber salad?” Some netizens have ridiculed the idea by saying, “I propose that the purchase of stoves be operated on a lottery system, and then the operation of these stoves may be restricted by the last digits of the user’s personal identification in which certain days are assigned for single digit users, and others for even digit users.”

There are even netizens who think that since Beijing has seen another invasion of polluted smog occurring after the long National Week holiday that recently passed, it was the right time and place to properly “cast off suspicion” against cars in this “laboratory test” as the lack of a regular work week meant fewer motorists on the roads. It is in light of this perspective that pollution from cooking has been made into a “sacrificial lamb”.

Source: iFeng

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Keywords: air pollution cooking Beijing air quality