Weird Food of the Week: 46-Year-Old Chicken Feet

This story is supposed to be about weird food, but in the case of the chicken feet sold in China this year, it’s a loose definition of the word “food.”

The chicken feet, which were sold to food markets by a group of smugglers, had an expiration date in 1967.

Instead of putting them in a museum where they belonged, the Vietnamese smuggling group brought the frozen feet across the border of Vietnam to their processing facility in China’s Guangxi Province.  They treated them with hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals to make them look fresher and plumper and to kill germs, Chinese official Li Jianmin told state mouthpiece Xinhua, the Telegraph reported.

The group also prepared and sold other old meat, such as tripe.  After their treatment, the meat weighed more, so they were able to make a hefty profit.

Each kilogram of old meat turned into 1.5 kg of “fresh” meat, according to the South China Morning Post.  The smugglers raked in as much as 16,000 yuan ($2,609) of profit for every ton of meat they sold.

Chinese police raided the facility and confiscated 20 tons of the foul meat in May.

“The entire processing facility had a fishy and foul smell,” Li said according to Xinhua, the Post reported. “You just couldn’t stand it after one or two minutes.”

Sources: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1277785/police-seize-chicken-feet-storage-1967-smuggled-vietnam

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10165968/Chinese-police-discover-chicken-feet-for-sale-46-years-past-sell-by-date.html