Forget mutton: in China, it's rat, fox and mink dressed as lamb
Staff Reporter 2013-05-05 09:18
A rat scurries through the snow in Jilin province. (Photo/Xinhua)
Nine hundred suspects in Jiangsu province have been arrested for passing off rat and fox meat as lamb, reports the Associated Press.
Police say they have spent three months investigating more than 380 cases and arrested 904 suspects in China's latest food safety scandal. Sixty-three of the people arrested are suspected of running scams in Shanghai and the Jiangsu city of Wuxi. Their "lamb" was mixed with rat, fox and mink with additives including gelatin. The meat was sold to farmers' markets in the two cities.
Ensuring food safety has been a continual problem in China. The country's top court on Friday issued guidelines calling for harsher punishment for those who produce and sell unsafe food products. The court said the guidelines will criminalize acts including selling food containing excessive chemicals or produced from animals that dies from disease.
The Ministry of Public Security has begun a campaign against violators and recently released results from 2,010 cases, where 1,721 factories and markets and 325 websites were inspected and 3,567 arrests made.
