Would you like some cardboard with that?

[adegiulio]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, so moderators please feel free to move it.

A news story reports that, instead of using minced pork as a filling for their buns, some chinese bun makers are using "cardboard and fatty meat". Yikes. Check out the story here...

[Kouign Aman]

Well, pork does fall into the fatty meat category anyway.....

The Chinese just executed the head of their FDA. I guess they arent too happy about this stuff either.

[mrsteak]

I read that this morning. Not just cardboard but cardboard picked up from the ground.

[adegiulio]

Well, it turns out that the whole thing was staged. The guy who did the "reporting" has been detained by Chinese police...

[jumanggy]

Wow. For everyone's sake, I hope it really is a hoax. (I wouldn't put it past any government to cover up stuff... oh, the complexity) But, yeah, it does sound hoax-y. I mean, wouldn't cardboard soaked in caustic soda taste bitter? And wouldn't it be less of an effort to just get cheap meat? I'm recalling those obviously fake stories of earthworms in hamburgers.

http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/...alth.fake.reut/

This guy is in for a WORLD of hurtin'.

[mrsteak]

Yep, fake story and the reporter has been arrested. Was trying to bolster his reporting career by jumping on the heels of the real food problems in China.

[gfron1]

But wait!...I now serve coffee at my store out of corn cups. If I put a bit of salt and butter on them, they'd be yummy. So why not cardboard buns...try it, you might like it.

[Kouign Aman]

There used to be a crack about the cardboard box being more nutritious than the sugared cereal it contained...

[adegiulio]

Ok, maybe it wasnt a hoax...

Click me

This is like watching a tennis match...

[Sam Salmon]

In an authoritarian state like China when the sh*t hits the fan it really sprays I'm not at all surprised to hear that media people are 'under suspicion of such and such an offense'-IOW just for making the state look foolish.

This reminds me of the old Russian joke about 3 convicts in a cell in Lubyanka-a notorious Moscow prison.

First prisoner asks the second prisoner-"What are you here for"?

He answers-"I spoke for Orlov-and you"?

First prisoner-"I spoke against Orlov"!

They look @ the third prisoner and he says "I'm Orlov"!

Edited July 23, 2007 by Sam Salmon (log)

[Makan King]

Ok, maybe it wasnt a hoax...

Click me

This is like watching a tennis match...

←

This is quite true. My Chinese tutor and many people I speak with in Beijing do not believe that the original report is fake.

There is also a plausible basis for the original report, since the price of pork has been rising steadily in China, and vendors have been known to resort to all sorts of ways to cut costs. The staff cafeteria in the building where I work has just raised the price of a meat bun from RMB 1.5 to RMB 1.8; the actual amount of the increase appears small, but that's a 20% price hike!

[Reignking]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews

Zhang was not the only one to feel the crackdown bite. A Chinese court handed down a one-year jail sentence Sunday to a Chinese reporter convicted of faking a story about steamed dumplings whose stuffing included cardboard along with ground pork. Zi Bejia, 28, pleaded guilty to damaging the dumpling industry's reputation, the official New China News Agency said.

[srhcb]

My Aunt Roberta used to claim my Uncle Carl would eat cardboard if she put whipped cream on it.

[SundaySous]

I think even before WWII sawdust was a filler used for bread in the former USSR. I wonder what fillers are permissible in the US that come close to or are cardboard.

[GTO]

Plus, wouldn't even the worst of pallettes recognise that cardboard filling would taste like crap?