Another Shocker: See How Chinese Restaurants across the country uses Rat as Beef Meat

When they’re not tampering with rice, dishonest Chinese food sellers are adding chemicals to meat from rats, minks, and foxes and selling them as mutton. The scheme was so popular and successful that the police arrested more than 900 people and seized about 20,000 tons of this meat, all within three months. One of the sellers, a man named Wei, even raked in more than £1 million from sales alone. He mixed fox, rat, and mink meat with nitrate, gelatin, and carmine before selling it in markets to unsuspecting buyers.

Chinese police posted a tutorial on Sina Weibo, China’s biggest microblogging site, to teach people how to differentiate between real and fake mutton. While the difference between them is hard to tell at first glance, the white and red parts of real mutton don’t separate after getting thawed, torn by hand, or boiled, while the fake meat does.

In another development, market traders and restaurants in Northeast China have seen sales slump after a meatpacking factory was found using cheap duck meat and additives to replicate mutton and beef slices.

Police seized more than 50 metric tons of products at Shengtai Meat Processing Plant in Liaoning province's Liaoyang county, the Ministry of Public Security said on Sunday.

The products were made from duck meat steeped in mutton fat and other additives, in order to lower production costs, according to a statement posted on the ministry's website.

Samples of the tainted meat products were found to contain excessive levels of nitrite, the statement said.

The amount of sodium nitrite, which is a major ingredient in nitrite, in the tainted products was 8.69 grams per kilogram, far exceeding the national standard for fresh and frozen meat, Beijing Times reported on Monday.

For adults, ingesting 3 grams of sodium nitrite can kill, the report said.

The factory had sold some of its fake meat products to small restaurants in the area. So far, police have recovered most of the products, the ministry said.

Thirty-four people have been detained, the ministry said.

The factory has been closed and the county authorities will cancel its business license, according to Yu Shaoming, head of Liaoyang's information office.

"The factory has a legitimate license, but they do underground production. They are very cunning," he said.

"We have gone to the factory many times during the past two months but didn't find any violations."

"It is unlikely that these tainted meat products have found their way to Beijing since the city's major suppliers of mutton and beef are in Shanxi, Shandong, and Inner Mongolia," said Liu Tong, director of statistics at Xinfadi, a major wholesale centre for agricultural produce in Beijing.

Hou Shuisheng, an animal nutrition professor with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said it is not easy for consumers to recognise fake meat products when duck meat is processed in such a way.

"There is no obvious difference between duck, mutton and beef in their appearance. With the use of mutton fat, they taste almost the same," he said.

At present, nitrite can be used as a food additive in meat processing as a preservative. "But since the chemical may cause cancer, there should be stricter government supervision of its use," he said.