You won’t believe this: In China, rats and foxes are being sold as chicken wings and mutton

Last Updated on 2016-05-18 , 5:01 pm

China is no stranger to the assortment of “fake food” on the market. We’ve heard of people using plastic to make rice, cardboard to make the chicken in chicken pau and now we have… fake chicken wings.

Nearly 300,000 pieces of fox and rate meat were found to be sold as “boneless chicken wings” and “mutton” in China. Using such counterfeit meat with a variety of chemicals, spices and other ingredients, they may only taste slightly different from your normal chicken wing or mutton cut.

However, tainted meat undoubtedly poses a disturbing health risk. These other forms of meat from mammals are often treated with toxic additives and unsafe chemicals. For example, in another case, duck meat was treated with a slew of chemicals and mutton fat, in a bid to sell the duck meat as mutton (which draws a much higher price). The meat was found to contain more than 2,000 times the legal limit of sodium nitrite. Sodium nitrite is also found in bacon, hot dogs and luncheon meat. A diet high in sodium nitrite can lead to respiratory problems (as red blood cells lose their ability to transport oxygen throughout the body) and brain and gastrointestinal cancer.

In the province of Zhejiang, police have already posted guidelines on how to differentiate real and counterfeit mutton meat. For example, in fake mutton meat, the red and white parts of the meat start to separate when boiled, while in real mutton meat, the meat tightens. In 2013, 63 people were arrested for selling fake and tainted meat to farmers’ markets in Shanghai. This led a wider food safety investigation, resulting in around 900 suspects and 20 tons of tainted meat seized.

However, a large amount of tainted meat still remains undiscovered in dubious factories, markets and restaurants. The lure of money that can be made from passing off cheap, tainted meat as more expensive ones (eg. mutton) remains irresistible to many unscrupulous businessmen.