Officials in China reported they nearly threw up when they swung open the truck door and found rotting meat from the 1970’s inside, being transported by smugglers on its way into Chinese grocery stores. Over 100,000 tons of illegal meat has been confiscated from smugglers by officials in China, but the 40-year-old meat is a bit of a rarity. I’m sitting here wondering how in the hell anyone found meat in a freezer that’s 40-years-old, and that meat was in bulk, and they thought it would then be a good idea to sell it to grocery stores…Aged steaks these are not. But we’ll get to that after we read up on the details of this stinky meat bust.
“It was smelly. There was a whole truck of it. I nearly threw up when I opened the door,” Zhang Tao, an official that helped with the operation in Hunan province told the paper. Some of the meat had begun to thaw and rot, and some of it was stamped with packaging dates as far back as the 1970s, officials said.
Meat smuggled in from foreign countries via Hong Kong and Vietnam is increasingly making its way into Chinese grocery stores, where consumers can’t tell the product’s age easily when it is frozen. The meat, transported in non-refrigerated trucks and cars, is often repeatedly thawed and refrozen. In Hong Kong, imported meat is subject to surveillance but not usually tested if it is for re-export, government officials said.
In the latest food scandal to hit China, authorities have seized almost half a billion dollars worth of smuggled frozen meat, some of more than 40 years old. According to the state-run China Daily, customs officials have confiscated over 100,000 tonnes (110, 231 tons) of chicken wings, beef, and pork, and arrested gangs across 14 Chinese provinces attempting to sell the contraband.
Just reading that I can almost imagine the putrefaction taking place inside of that steamy hot semi-truck. China, for the most part, is a VERY HOT country. That mean was probably cooking up a storm, rotting, with maggots crawling all over the place. And when that official swung open the truck door he probably wanted to die when the smell of rotting flesh and death him him like a ton of bricks.
Stories like this are just one of the reasons I’ll probably never travel to China in my lifetime…
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