The Goyo Tarag controversy

Eric Thrift

The recent controversy over Goyo Tarag provides a useful point of entry into current expressions of how notions of purity are tied in with questions of ethnic-nationalism, industrial production, and food security. Since 2012 Goyo Tarag has been targeted by the “Dairy Product Consumers’ Centre” NGO (DPCC), which led a media campaign alleging that the product is mislabelled and does not comply with national food safety standards. Headed by consumer activist B. Tseren, the DPCC demanded that the company cease production of Goyo Tarag, as it contains “E number” preservatives that are not permissible according to the “national tarag fermentation technology” standard (ündesnii tarag bürekh tekhnologi): E441 (gelatine, used as an emulsifier) and E330 (citric acid, used as a preservative and flavouring agent). (Several news outlets erroneously claimed in their headlines that Orgil Foods was mixing vinegar with its tarag, based on a misreading of the E300 additives codes.) The DPCC launched a class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer, which promptly counter-sued, demanding 78 million tögrögs in reputational damages.

In 2013, the DPCC published further alleged evidence that the manufacturer of Goyo Tarag had falsified food safety inspection documents. The DPCC later joined forces with the Consumer Rights and Education Federation (Khereglegchiin erkh, bolovsrolyn kholboo) in claiming that bacterial culture counts from laboratory samples of Goyo Tarag had been falsified, as actual live bacteria counts were 100 times lower than the minimum required by law.^[1] The NGOs alleged collusion between food safety inspectors and Orgil Foods, asserting that the tarag is an “ordinary white-coloured beverage”, but not a natural dairy product.^[2] Several news outlets reported in January 2013 that Goyo Tarag is manufactured using milk powder imported from Sweden, and accused the dairy, Orgil Foods, of “illegally” producing tarag with an extended shelf-life of three months.

Following shortly on these reports, an editorial by J. Erdenechimeg was published on several news sites, alleging that Orgil Foods was selling Chinese yogurt drink as Goyo Tarag.^[3] The text of this editorial begins with an evocation of Mongolia’s pastoral heritage, situating tarag consumption within a system of “traditional” practices that link Mongols to a living natural environment (“tarag is a living food”), their resilience (Mongolians “can live for several months on tarag alone during times when meat is unavailable”), and an “uninterrupted” tradition. The author points out that tarag is one of the naiman neriin baraa, or “eight staples” that newly privatized shops were required to sell beginning in the 1990s. Erdenechimeg goes on to argue that the Mongols, who obtain over 80 percent of their consumer goods from China, are “now no longer able to make even our national dairy products with our own hands”. Drawing heavily on the reports issued by the Dairy Consumers’ Centre, the author claims that Goyo Tarag is evidently not tarag because it contains chemicals giving it a shelf life of 90 days, but something else entirely – a “foreign” beverage. The “real” tarag is a living food, linked to a domestic national tradition, which spoils rapidly precisely because it is natural.

Given the terminological confusion mentioned above, it is hardly surprising that Mongolian consumers are uncertain as to what constitutes a “pure” dairy product. Commenters on news reports concerning Goyo Tarag frequently claimed that industrially produced tarag is not in fact “real”, but rather a chemical product with unusual and potentially harmful properties, resulting from an unknown industrial process:

AIMAAR: Really if you let it go sour it turns into something nasty, bitter like medicine and pitch black, I’ve no idea what it’s made of but it’s definitely not milk ^[4]

MONGOL LADY: It’s true, if you leave the bottle out eventually a thick black residue forms, ordinary tarag doesn’t do that. Don’t give it to your kids. ^[5]

ANONYMOUS: I drank a bottle of this once with my son, and we both got terrible food poisoning, after that we’ve stopped buying it ^[6]

ZA ZA: milk your cow, boil the milk, let it sit and remove the clotted cream, then make your tarag, only then will you have real mongolian quality. Obviously any product that is made by industrial process is produced for a profit, bastards who have no qualms about anything can only do things like this, pretty soon they will probably have artificial meat produced on order by our southern neighbours then import it and deceive us ^[7]

MMM: it would be good to know soon whether this [claim that Goyo Tarag is Chinese] is true or false. until then it would be best not to buy this stuff. obviously if there are ingredients such as E421, E312 etc. listed on a food product they’re all chemicals. these [ingredients] are even on the tarag produced by mon suu the children’s milk factory. only a few [products] actually have these written on the label. there are lots more where it isn’t written. we have no idea what we are eating and drinking…..^[8]

But even in the case of domestically-produced milk the lines between “purity” and “unsafety” are blurred. One informant, reflecting on the alternative option of buying fresh milk from the cattle-owners who sit outside apartment buildings in the mornings, expressed strong reservations:

My parents used to have a few cows, even after they moved to the city, but that was already ten years ago. Back then we used to get fresh milk and tarag from my parents all summer. Now there are hardly any families left that keep cows at the edge of the city. They passed a law forbidding cattle inside the city limits, but mainly there is too little left for cattle to eat. No wonder you see cows foraging in the rubbish bins! The suburban districts used to be empty grass fields; now there’s no open space left. Even if local families still sold fresh milk in the shops, I would be too suspicious to buy it. Without grass for the cows to eat, and living in such a polluted environment, how could the milk be safe?

Consumers’ confusion in attempting to distinguish the “national” (Mongol tarag) from the “foreign” (yogurt), and the “real” (jinkhene tarag) from the “industrial”, is compounded by rumours that some “national” products are in fact imported. In 2013 Ünen newspaper published side-by-side photographs comparing Goyo tarag and Chinese yogurt, implying that the products are identical apart from the pasted-on Mongolian label. ^[9] A similar editorial was run several months later by the popular news site Olloo.mn, asking whether the visual similarity between Goyo Tarag and its Chinese counterparts was due to Orgil Foods copying the Chinese packaging, or using the same production technology: “Why must they have the same packaging”, the article asked, asserting that the similarity to Chinese products “gives rise to suspicions that the product might be made in China”. ^[10]

In February 2014, a pair of blurry images taken at the railway station in Ulaanbaatar began to make the rounds of Facebook in Mongolia. These images, taken by a bystander using his mobile phone, purported to show two men next to a train box car, unloading crates of Goyo Tarag – a yogurt drink produced by Orgil Foods, subsidiary of the major Mongolian drinks manufacturer Vitafit.^[11] What seemed out of place was that the train had, apparently, just arrived from the southern border: if this was a Mongolian beverage, why was it being unloaded from a train bringing goods imported from China? Given that Mongolia is a nation of nomadic pastoralists with 45 million livestock, it seemed a national affront, and a major food security concern, that milk products should be imported – and from China, of all places!

Within two days, the photographs had been “liked”, commented upon, shared, and re-shared by hundreds of Mongolians. Very soon they had been republished by several newspapers and online news sites, where they provoked commentary from an increasingly wide audience. Reactions to the photographs ranged from surprise and shock to anger and distress. While some commenters questioned the authenticity of the photographs, many acknowledged a troubling, yet perfectly credible, explanation: the manufacturers of this beverage had been misleading the public, by having their commodity produced inexpensively in China and falsely labelled to indicate local origin.

As interest in the photographs spread, mainstream news outlets began to report on them widely. A brief item was published by the news site Tsag.mn (though subsequently removed from that and other sites), in which these photographs were interpreted as depicting khaltuurchin porteruud –informal, and by implication unregulated, lightweight trucks – loading tarag at the train station on the weekend, noting that the images had raised considerable uncertainty. The news item asserted that “at this time when there is no such thing as food security, milk and dairy products with a long shelf-life continue to be imported from China”, going on to editorialize that readers should resist Chinese products:

We are unable to avoid a sensation of fear in observing that products from our southern neighbour such as Yeli and MonMilk, known as “milk with melamine”, which killed a large number of young children and which were prohibited from import for a time, are now visible on the shelves in food markets and shops. These photographs, distributed among public social networks over the weekend, reinforce this fear.

Mongols, we have the freedom to make healthy and safe choices, so we call on you not to use uncertain products. ^[12]

This brief editorial conflates several categories of “unsafe” products: milk products tainted with melamine, milk with a long shelf life, and Chinese goods. These are collectively “uncertain products” (ergelzeetei büteegdekhüün), referring to the uncertainty over their origin, contents, and production process, reflecting the possibility – though not necessarily the conclusive fact – of non-safety. Significantly, the concept of “safety” implicit in this editorial is not linked to state control or to “safe” industrial processes, but to the fact of economic products being embedded in a known social-ecological environment. The “uncertain” products are effectively represented as “impure” due to the potential presence of unknown elements: melamine, preservatives, or indeed any food sourced from China, whose ecology and social relations are both “polluted”.

The online controversy that erupted in this case was driven by more than a simple rumour of crooked business practices. The suggestion that Goyo Tarag was actually Chinese seemed to indicate that Mongolians were not only victims to Chinese cunning, but were indeed complicit – through the self-interested corruption and bribery of dairy producers and government inspectors – in “poisoning” one another with a Chinese milk product. What is more, the rumour implied that Mongolians were unable to protect one of the few “national” products – tarag (yogurt), identified with the national pastoral heritage and “pure nature” – from foreign industrial products, which are widely seen as “artificial”. The manufacturers of Goyo Tarag eventually organized a press conference and factory tour to dispel the rumours, demonstrating that their product was in fact made in Mongolia. Despite this intervention, however, debate over whether the product was truly “Mongolian” continued, revealing an ongoing uncertainty regarding national survival under globalized market capitalism.

Mongolian fears of Chinese food products is commonplace, and is merely one of the many expressions of Sinophobia ingrained in contemporary Mongolian society ^[13]. Bulag has noted that Mongolians only “grudgingly” accepted Chinese flour and vegetables during food shortages of the 1990s, for example, considering them “poisonous in terms of the long-term health of the Mongols” ^[14]. Nationalist bloggers and online activists have repeatedly posted alarmist warnings about the possibility of “poisonous milk” being imported from China. Recently published articles have pointed to the ongoing risk of melamine-tainted Chinese milk,^[15] as well as to suspicions that a batch of contaminated milk powder from New Zealand had made its way into Mongolia through a Chinese wholesaler, and used by Mongolian industrial milk processors APU, Süü, and Vitafit.^[16] Reader-submitted comments on online news articles discussing the Goyo Tarag rumours have similarly drawn on the premise that Chinese milk products are “dirty” or “poison”. A clear example of this attitude is found in the following comment submitted in response to a news story run in the online version of the newspaper Ünen, suggesting that Goyo Tarag might be repackaged yogurt imported from China:

Yeeew such filty crooks. I heard that this tarag was supposed to be good for you and kept buying it for our kids. We adults couldn’t drink this stuff but gave it to our kids, and now look what happens. So now we’ve poisoned our kids with this dirty khujaa poison, while we kept free of the poison ourselves, from thinking of our children. I even saw lots of pregnant women buying this product. I would like to know how many families’ kids are being poisoned by your dirty money.^[17]

The above comment reveals an unqualified assumption that, if the product comes from China, it must be poisonous to Mongolians – all the more so to children and pregnant women. The commenter describes Goyo Tarag as a “dirty khujaa poison” (“muu hujaagiin hor”), using the racist epithet khujaa to denote its Chinese origin. At the same time, the comment is an indictment of market capitalism, in which private greed undermines nationalism: the Mongolian importers are presumed to be complicit “filthy crooks” who poison children with their “dirty money”. Implicit in this comment, as in much public discussion of food safety and food security, is the understanding that while the Mongolians can only survive by uniting as a nation to protect themselves against the Chinese threat, their ability to do so is undermined by self-interested and unregulated business actions.

In retaliation against the DPCC allegations, the director of Orgil Foods, N. Batzayaa, gave a newspaper interview in June, 2013, during which he asserted that Goyo Tarag is made with cultures from the Netherlands (Chr. Hansen), stabilizers from the USA (Cargill), and dried milk from New Zealand. Batzayaa explained that the company uses liquid milk from “Atar Chandgana Süü”, a sister company located in the town of Ölziit in Kherlen sum, Khentii aimag, a dairy farm with 400 cows built on the site of the former Chandaga State Farm, but admitted that the liquid milk supply is not adequate to meet production needs, requiring imported reconstituted milk to be used in the production line and combined with fresh milk.^[18] In late February 2014, the producers of Goyo Tarag held a second press conference to debunk the Facebook rumours. Showing a freight shipping slip as proof, the company representatives explained that the photographs posted to Facebook depicted people purchasing goods from a train car at the loading area for freight trains headed to the countryside.^[19] At the press conference, Orgil Foods expressed a belief that the rumour that their product was imported from China had been disseminated as a deliberate attempt to injure their reputation, drawing attention to the similarity of recent news reports to the previous, “unfounded” claims made by the “Dairy Consumers’ Centre” consumer advocacy NGO, which they asserted they would take to court. The following day, the company offered a press tour of its facilities as further proof. ^[20]

Images of the factory production line provoked few comments. Although some were suspicious of what was not shown, or questioned the fact that the equipment looked suspiciously new, for the most part commenters expressed a degree of satisfaction that the product had been made “visible”.

Ultimately, the crisis of uncertainty provoked by the rumours surrounding Goyo Tarag resulted from a combination of factors, reflecting concern over survival in every sense – biological, economic, ecological, and cultural. The threat perceived as being posed by “Chinese poison” is aggravated by increasing reliance on Chinese foods, over which Mongolians have little control. Underlying much of the discussion of food safety and food security is an assumption that Mongolians have become too individualistic – in other words, that they have come to put private gain ahead of national solidarity. Criticisms were thus directed against the Goyo Tarag producers, food safety inspectors, and even customs officers, all of whom were suspected by some readers of involvement in corrupt practices:

We’re the ones who should be called stupid animals. we have the opportunity to eat the most original [i.e., natural] food available anywhere yet we’re a stupid people, when we see someone starting to stumble we just sit by and hope they will fall^[21]

ANONYMOUS: What are the professional inspection agency staff doing? So long as they can blackmail people into giving them a bit of money they have no interest in whether the public are being poisoned, or even dying. As a citizen, I am extremely perplexed that such people are above the law.^[22]

ANONYMOUS: Why don’t those professionals who are supposed to be monitoring and checking [such things] speak up? Probably they are either fake-diploma graduates without any knowledge, or else bribe takers. … America, Japan, even China import [food], but the thing is they have stringent standards and laboratory tests, why can’t we implement these.^[23]

Some commenters indeed explicitly argued that the lack of food safety or food security is a result of the capitalist mindset – “looking at everything through the hole in a coin” – in contrast to the socialist period, during which national industry was developed to a point of almost mythical self-sufficiency:

This is a tragedy for us Mongolians. With the transition to market capitalism and democracy, we Mongolians have become hardly able to produce anything at all. Under socialism, which we used to denounce, we were able to make everything ourselves. ^[24]

The notion that Mongolia was largely self-sufficient during the socialist period overlooks the immense role of both trade with the Soviet Union, and of subsidies serving to maintain inefficient processing industries in Mongolia. Yet whereas trade with the former Soviet Union continues to be described in terms of benevolent reciprocity with “Russian brothers” (Oros akh düü nar), trade with China is overtly a form of market exchange, in which each party tries to outdo the other – resorting to dissimulation if necessary – to maximize their own gain.

The perceived failure of Mongolians to protect themselves against Chinese “poison” can be read as a call for greater national solidarity. To some extent the perceived threat is exteriorized through projection onto the Chinese, but there are no clear-cut villains in this scenario; the “corrupt food inspectors”, “greedy milk producers”, even “lazy herders” are all to blame. Yet the threat posed by each of these actors is of a different type. Whereas the Chinese are assumed to be inherently dangerous, the Mongolians by nature have a duty to protect one another, which they have evidently neglected. This mutual protection is directed against the “foreign” in a broad sense, not only the Chinese. The danger posed by industrial milk production requiring unsafe preservatives is not explicitly blamed as “foreign”, but at the same time it is positioned against the local and national. “Mongolian nature”, “Mongolian milk”, and the like are “national” products in the sense not only of being locally produced, and embedded in a cultural tradition, but also in that they are “pure”, and therefore “safe”.

The above discussion has revealed some of the ways in which the symbolism of “pure milk” operates to position Mongolian people and culture as biologically “natural”. As I have pointed out in relation to the consumption of meat and dairy products, the “traditional” diet is widely held by Mongolians to be at least partly determined by biology, as an inherited adaptation by the Mongol human organism to the natural environment of Gobi and steppe. This diet is further embedded in the symbiotic relations between pastoralists and their livestock, which tend to be viewed as the result of co-evolution rather than domestication.^[25] As suggested by the parallel maternal behaviour identified by Mongolians in humans and livestock – shilrekh (“running away”), the post-partum psychological state, and the need for maternal attachment as a prerequisite for lactation – livestock are not perceived in simple economic terms as “meat-producing” or “milk-producing animals”, but as sentient beings who need to be nurtured and coaxed. It is no coincidence that herders often describe milk as the gift or “bounty” of their animals (malyn khishig or buyan): the offering of milk is considered conditional on the lactating mother’s willingness to give milk, which in part is predicated on a psychological bond with her offspring. Milk is thus not merely a commodity to be consumed, but a substance that derives from a reproductive process involving a “pure” state of mind.

The industrial processing and commodification of milk clearly undermine everyday reproductive relations between pastoralists and livestock. Yet, as the advertising messages by industrial milk producers show, the symbolism of milk as “pure” and “natural” retains some resonance, despite its dislocation from the practices in which the symbols originate. The articulation of biological purity through milk implies, above all, opposition to the culturally and technologically-defined civilization of the neighbouring Chinese. Whereas China may constitute a strong civilization with greater political, economic, and technological power than Mongolia, the public discourse I have referenced in this article presents China as inferior to Mongolia in many ways. The Chinese – or “khujaa” – are implied to be selfish, vile, and cunning; their land is polluted; and their food products are unnatural, to the point of being poisonous. These messages suggest that while Mongolia may be smaller and weaker than its neighbour, it is nonetheless superior due to its positioning within a pure and “natural” environment. The mutualism of the Mongols, their livestock, and their grassland territory implies a wiser or more noble form of subsistence than one that gives rise to a poisonous mindset (khoron sanaa) and poisonous products (khortoi büteegdekhüün).