By Lindsay Beck BEIJING, May 30 (Reuters) - First bird flu made eating poultry worrisome. Next it was tainted pork. Pesticides in vegetables. Toxic additives in processed foods. Chinese consumers could be forgiven for not knowing what to eat any more, and many wealthier urbanites are saying the country's string of food safety breaches is making them think twice about what they put into their shopping carts. "Look at the colour of these things!" said 32-year-old Ning Qiyun, poking at a package of sliced reddish sausage in the supermarket counter. "We eat a lot less of these kinds of things now. In fact, I buy very little of this sort of thing," said Ning, shopping for dinner for her husband and 10-year-old daughter. The quality and safety of China's food products has come under scrutiny around the world since tainted pet food caused deaths of cats and dogs in the United States and toxins in toothpaste exported from China led to recalls in Latin America. At home, China's citizens are treated to a near-daily diet of stories of mass food poisonings or tainted products, and the government is starting to take action. In the most dramatic of a series of measures, from announcing a system of food recalls to blacklisting producers who break the rules, a court sentenced to death the former head of the national food and drug agency for taking bribes in exchange for drug approvals. Zheng Xiaoyu may have been made a scapegoat in China's efforts to show the rest of the world it is serious about cleaning up its food and drug industry, but if the judgment was unusually harsh, residents were feeling little pity. "We should not have any mercy for Zheng Xiaoyu. Even death would be too good for him," read one posting in an online forum. "The amount he took in bribes is a small thing, but his corruption in medicine has brought calamity for 1.3 billion Chinese people." SORROW One shopper in a Beijing market said Chinese people were accustomed to fake products, but that there was no room for lax regulation when it came to food and drugs. "If you approve these things, the consequences for ordinary people can be extremely serious. So I think this was done according to law," said the woman, surnamed Ye. She said she had become wary of additives in packaged foods and tried to buy what she referred to as "green" produce. "For example, these cabbages might not look as nice, but maybe that's because they used less pesticides," she said, contemplating a stall piled high with vegetables at the market, which also sells everything from pigs' trotters to live crabs. "I feel more at ease eating them." One press commentary suggested China was making an example of Zheng both to reassure citizens like Ye and to warn officials, without taking action to clean up the entire regulatory system. "Zheng Xiaoyu's receiving the death penalty in reality is a sorrow for the system of preventing corruption, it's a sorrow for the inability of powerful departments to clean up their acts themselves," said the editorial in Southern Metropolis Daily. Public anger over not just food safety but the broader issue of corruption -- so endemic the ruling Communist Party has warned it could threaten its legitimacy -- is running high. "Is this the way high-ranking cadres of the Communist Party should behave? He has taken money out of the hands of common people!" shouted one fruit vendor, jabbing his finger at a picture of Zheng on the front page of the newspaper. As the government prods its food industry into a slow process of reform, China's savvier urban consumers are choosing what they eat more carefully. "Sometimes you see these things and you have no way of knowing really what's in them," said Ning, the supermarket shopper, dangling a vacuum-packed chicken marinated in a bright orange sauce. "That doesn't look natural."
