Ok I was thinking some kind of cured dried jerky or sausage, but the picture appears to be fresh or until recently frozen pork steaks.
Even canned meat makes no sense, where has it been stored for 40 years?
WHY would someone pay money to keep meat frozen for 40 years?
The problem isn’t that the meat has been continually frozen for forty years, it’s that it hasn’t. The articles I’ve read stated that much of the meat had been allowed to partially or completely thaw multiple times before it had reached the border, and that a lot of it was meat reportedly disposed of by producers elsewhere for exactly that reason- it had reached an unnacceptably high risk of spoiling, was written off, and then ‘fell off a truck’ so to speak and was carried on the black market to its final destination.
I don’t think the majority of it was anywhere near forty years old, but all of it had been condemned and then sold off the books. Like cars that have been flooded washed out and sold as like new. The oldest stuff was probably things which had been in a massive bureacracy, like a prison or a military, and had been forgotten about in the back of a massive freezer which was used regularly, and then thrown out when someone actually checked the sell by date.
If government subsidises shield farmers from market forces they will continue to produce even when the market declines. This means that the surplus has to be stored - welcome to the lala land of the EU Common Agricultural Policy.
When the cold stores are full, they try to sell it, or even give it away to other countries but this is “dumping” and causes their farmers problems. So the meat, butter, whatever sits in storage for decades.
In the US it is more efficient: the farmers are paid by the federal government not to grow/produce the product in the first place.
They do both here in La la land
You get paid for not growing stuff and then paid again for planting trees.
Inside a Slaver Stasis Box?
Salisbury Steak? Only 200 years old, and no longer frozen, but probably ultra-pasteurized by background radiation.
[Quote=Three Dog]
Let me ask you something, children. You hungry for some 200-year old Salisbury steak, or you hungry for some news? I’m guessing news. Here ya go.
[/quote]
I read somewhere that someone tried 20,000 year old frozen mammoth. It had not kept well.
Many decades ago, a butcher shop (Pittsburg, IIRC) had a “Celebration of 25 Years in Business”, in which they sold meat at the same prices they had when they opened.
Massive lines, good story for a slow news day.
A few months later there was a small note about authorities searching for a truckload of beef which had broken down and the refrigeration had failed, rendering the meat “unfit fot human consumption”.
I don’t remember if thee truck story tied to the discounted meat story, or if it was just coincidence that the two event happened at the same time and in the same locale.
When dealing with 100’s of tons of anything, it becomes a commodity.
The bad meat was mixed with presumably ‘good’ meat. Why? Because it’s China? It’s not like stuff like this doesn’t happen every day there, after all, or like there is some sort of free market system OR a government willing to regulate such things for the good of the people. This video (YouTube) doesn’t talk about this specific scandal, but it goes into the latest (as of 2014…there has been others before and since) involving McDonald’s in China and their Chinese suppliers. Or, you could watch this video about pigs and ducks tossed into rivers (that, you know, people drink out of) in Shanghai and Jujo. Pretty gross…but, what can you do if you live in China? Hell, the meat is probably the last thing you need to worry about when the air is as bad as it is (let alone the repression :p).
Isn’t this story coming from the land where 100-year-old eggs are considered a delicacy?
Anyone else do the arithmetic? 2015 - 40 = 1975 = year US abandoned Vietnam.
I can see tons of meat (much more common in American diets than in Asian) being grabbed and swapped around for years.
A lasting gift from the US to our Asian cousins…
My meat is 20 years older than that and it’s still in pretty good shape.
Bow chica bow bow.