Police seize chicken feet in storage since 1967, smuggled from Vietnam

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A vendor stands behind slaughtered chickens at a poultry market in Hefei, Anhui province. Photo: Reuters

Published: 9:54am, 8 Jul 2013Updated: 3:28pm, 8 Jul 2013

When police raided an illegal food storage site in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi autonomous region, they found decades-old chicken feet waiting to be processed. Some even dated to 1967, during the tumultuous days of the Cultural Revolution.

The storage site, raided by police in May, was run by a gang that reportedly smuggled chicken feet, beef tripe and cartilage from Vietnam across the porous border to Guangxi.

Some 20 tonnes of meat were seized in the raid, according to Xinhua. The bygone chicken feet, in particular, were brought into China frozen; they would then be processed with bleach and other chemicals to add weight and improve its colouring.

Through this process, the group managed to turn 1kg of old chicken feet into 1.5kg of seemingly fresh chicken feet, making up to 16,000 yuan (HK$20,230) profit on each tonne.

Local police quoted by the paper said that most inferior-quality meat had been smuggled from Vietnam. Over the last 12 months, police at the border hub Fangchenggang pursued seven similar cases of smuggled chicken feet, seizing 20 million yuan worth of tampered product.

"The entire processing facilty had a fishy and foul smell," Li Jianmin, from the local Public Security Bureau told the news agency. "You just couldn't stand it after one or two minutes."

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