Scandalicious: ‘Quan-booba’ ducks and tarnished trotters

Don't know about you, but there's something juicy about a good food scandal. In a country this stomach obsessed, it never ceases to amaze the ingenious depths folks will sink to in order to make a buck. Some schemes are merciful flashes in the pan like the cardboard baozi plot; others ongoing and endemic, like the ever present menace of reclaimed sewer oil.

Recently there's been some closure on an ongoing case of straight-up, bare-faced counterfeiting. No, not North Face jackets or DVDs ... Peking duck. A group of fakers (let's call them a scandal cell) were charged last week for selling counterfeit quackers at Qianmen, Xidan and some railway stations. This begs the question – how the hell do you fake a duck?

Well, our intrepid band of entrepreneurs used a meat factory in Hebei to ‘assemble’ a bird from duck bones and unwanted offal, wrapping it all up and conning people into thinking they were buying a whole roast duck. Kong, a man from Dongcheng District involved in the scam, said it only cost RMB 3 to make a fake duck and they could be sold from RMB 15-58. Smart, huh? According to the Global Times, the authorities confiscated 11,800 bags of knockoff ducks from two residences, which presumably equates to at least double the number of fake ducks. Did they really think they'd get away with it?

I have a theory on this. If you’ve ever tasted the sort of gift box ducks commonly available at railway station kiosks (I have, unfortunately), most people would be hard pushed to tell the difference between the real thing and a bag of bones and offal.

Across town in Tongzhou District, another scandal is afoot. Pig feet, to be precise. The ever vigilant Global Times noted that traders were artificially ‘beautifying’ pig’s trotters in giant, toxic baths of caustic soda, hydrogen peroxide, and sodium nitrite, to make them whiter and heavier. I think you’d need to do a lot more than that to make a severed pig’s foot look pretty, but there you go. Anyway, 500kg of the tainted trotters were sold into smaller markets, so shop safely. Or better yet, become vegan. And grow your own.