Poor Mojo's Newswire

SHANGHAI — Regulators are investigating whether restaurants throughout China are creating food hazards by cooking with recycled oil, some tainted with food waste, and prominence given to the issue in the state-controlled media suggests that the problem could be widespread. The State Food and Drug Administration issued a nationwide emergency notice telling health bureaus to investigate the sources of cooking oil in mid-March. The notice came shortly after a professor and a group of students at Wuhan Polytechnic University announced that they had found widespread use of recycled oil in their region in an undercover investigation. The professor, He Dongping, asserted that recycled oil was being used to prepare 1 in 10 meals in China. Regulators are now searching for illegal oil recycling mills, and some health bureaus have begun releasing the names of restaurants and food establishments that were found to be using questionable oil. Last November, regulators in southern China raided several workshops for turning discarded waste — possibly even sewage — into cooking oil. . . .

When Florian Kaps, one of the founders of The Impossible Project, tries to explain just how they've managed to reinvent instant analog film -- the type that works in Polaroid instant cameras -- he says that he limits himself to using the word "magic" only five times per presentation. By his count, he's managed to keep it down to four. Had he put a limit for himself on another word, it would have been "crazy." Kaps, (pictured) the project's head of marketing and distribution, uses that one far more than four times, to describe himself, to describe his whole team, to describe the former Polaroid employees in Enschede, Netherlands, who almost without reservation said "yes" when asked to join this passionate group on a -- yes, crazy -- project that had a high likelihood of failure: re-engineering almost from scratch the film packs that work in the 300 million still-functional Polaroid cameras which can be found in cabinets, shelves, attics and eBay listings worldwide. Magic craziness doesn't work very often in business, but perhaps that's because so few companies allow the crazy magicians to do their work unhindered. At The Impossible Project, mild forms of insanity mix with enchantment in a way that has thrived despite everything. Some of the upshot of that thriving are displayed on the high, white walls of the spare offices of Impossible New York: the most charmed results of Polaroid artists' shots taken with a test version of the new PX 100 film.