Except for purposes of faithfully serving my company, it's been hard to free up some time at the keyboard. As such, there is some catching up I'd like to do.
This summer, it was discovered that street vendors in Beijing were substituting softened cardboard for minced meat filling for meat buns. For the uninitiated, Chinese meat buns are the East's answer to Italian calzones or English Cornish Pasties except that they are generally steamed rather than baked.
Beijing meat buns.
However, I guess it was all a scam. So says the Chinese government. Apparently, it was also newsworthy enough for the AP to enlighten us with as we sipped our morning cups of coffee and reviewed what was going on in the world. And, so enamored were we with the honesty and integrity of the Chinese government, especially in regards to food and consumer product safety, that I suppose no respectable journalist has second-guessed it. Luckily, I'm neither a journalist nor respectable.
What a boatload of feces. Why would a journalist fabricate a story like this? In order to make the Chinese people look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world? Because of the fact that street vendors lie, cheat, and steal in order to make a profit, even at the risk of the health of fellow Chinese, of women and children? Did he make this up to embarrass the government (at all levels) by highlighting the fact that food safety and health inspections are either fabricated or non-existent in China? Or was he just trying to prove the already overly-demonstrated point that China is developing/trying to develop (translation: people are getting rich/trying to get rich) at a rate faster than the Chinese culture, society, government, and environment can handle?
Gee, we've plenty of valid and proven examples and incidents that do all the above already; no need to make anything up! So, back to the question of "why would some John Doe journalist fabricate a story like this"?
Answer: He wouldn't.
The report claims that this journalist thought up the idea himself of using caustic acid to soften up cardboard, chop it up, add it to fatty minced meat, fill some buns, and get it all on hidden camera. Right. If I had to decide who would be most likely to think up a way to dilute minced meat with readily available garbage, I would most definitely choose some insurgent freelance reporter with a bone to pick and no clear motivation rather than a meat bun hawking street vendor looking to save a few thousand RMB in overhead so he can stock up on coal to heat his shanty and pay his rent.
I would be willing to bet one month's worth of my measly salary that there is some kind of cover-up involved and that journalist is probably already in a gulag or dea... oh, hold on a minute. Be right back. Doorbell just rang... must be the Beijing Public Security Bureau and/or Secret Police.
In other old news....
Some background.
The meat of the story... no pun intended: China Officials deny flood rats on the menu.
Seems fairly simple to draw this out:
Vast amounts of flooding = vast amounts of homeless rats (2 billion, according to Chinese media! And these are just the ones they... um... "caught"... and... um... "counted.") = vast amounts of rat meat made readily available to a culture famous for eating any living creature whose back faces the sun.
Approached from a completely new and arbitrary direction:
People desperate to get rid of rats/surplus of rat meat + street vendors looking for things other than pork to fill their buns.
Chinese authorities denied that evidence of rat meat for sale in markets in southern China. Maybe they should have checked a bit further north.
No comments:
Post a Comment