‘Ill-gotten gains’ — Phrase of the Week
China's latest food safety scandal is about companies profiting from unhealthy ready-made meals in schools. And there's a phrase for that.
Our Phrase of the Week is: Ill-gotten gains (捞油水 lāo yóushuǐ).
The context
Students at schools across China have been seen gathering outside their campuses in Jiangxi, Wuxi, and other places around lunchtime, waiting to receive homemade meals delivered by parents or other relatives.
It’s in response to a controversial move to serve “ready meals” (预制菜 yùzhì cài) at schools across the country instead of freshly cooked dishes.
Ready meals are not new in China. But they have recently come under greater scrutiny from disgruntled Chinese parents, who have taken to the internet to share their questions and gripes about the new changes to school meals.
Some companies have moved to cash in on the pre-cooked lunches. Vague regulations, and no clear definition of what a ready meal is, have pushed companies to seek out quick profits at the expense of consumer safety, as one news article notes:
With the news that the government will include ready meals as a focus for development, while the relevant industry standards have not yet been established, it is not hard to imagine that there will be plenty of opportunities to take advantage of loopholes and make a quick profit.
随着国家将把预制菜纳入重要的发展方向的消息传出，相关的行业标准却还没建立起来时，钻空子捞油水的契机也就随之涌入。
Suízhe guójiā jiāng bǎ yùzhì cài nàrù zhòngyào de fǎzhǎn fāngxiàng de xiāoxi chuánchū, xiāngguān de hángyè biāozhǔn què háiméi jiànlì qǐlái shí, zuānkòngzi lāo yóushuǐ de qìjī yě jiù suízhī yǒngrù.
And with that, we have our Phrase of the Week!
What it means
Make a quick profit translates directly as “collecting” (捞 lāo) “oil-water” (油水 yóushuǐ), or “collecting oil that is floating on the surface of water.”
“Oil-water” is a reference to illicit income. It’s a figure of speech that dates back to ancient times in China, when the country was so poor that cooking oil was a luxury — a product reserved for the wealthy and privileged. The more oil a family had, the wealthier they were assumed to be.
At the time, soup served with a film of oil floating on top was a delicacy that a poor person might be tempted to scoop the oil from, which became a metaphor for illegal income.
There’s also a reference to the phrase in one of China’s four great classics, The Water Margin (水浒传 Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn):
Brother Zhang, here you are again! What kind of goods are on this boat? Any profitable goods? Or any oil-water?
张家兄弟，你在这里又弄这一手！船里什么行货？有些油水么？
Zhāng jiā xiōngdì, nǐ zài zhèlǐ yòu nòng zhè yīshǒu! Chuán lǐ shénme hánghuò? Yǒuxiē yóushui me?
In other words: Has he made any dodgy extra cash?
Now, with companies producing ready meals for schools this week, parents are concerned that these companies are capitalizing on the change to make a quick profit at the expense of their children’s health — all with the apparent support of the government while they enjoy freshly cooked food in their canteens.
The companies’ profits are described as illegal income, which we translate as “ill-gotten gains.”
Two previous Phrases of the Week have also come up in online comments, similar neologisms that were invented in the aftermath of other recent food safety scandals in China:
- Hex technology (科技与狠活 kējì yǔ hěnhuó) refers to foods with high levels of preservatives, following accusations that Haitian Soy Sauce had double standards for its domestic and overseas products.
- Pointing at a rat and calling it a duck (指鼠为鸭 zhǐshǔ wéiyā), which we translated in A Rashomon affair, refers to an incident in a food safety scandal where the accused refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem. This refers to a scandal in June this year when a student at Jiangxi Industry Polytechnic College found what looked like a rat head in his lunch while eating in the college canteen.
So, will ready meals in Chinese schools become the next “rat’s head being called a duck”?
