Fuyang's meicai kourou: the best-selling dish was pork neck at a quarter of the price

Meicai kourou — pork belly steamed with preserved mustard greens — is the best seller of China's pre-made dish aisle. In Fuyang, Anhui, nearly sixty factories made it, and on March 15, 2024, CCTV's 3·15 gala showed what some of them put in the bowl: caotourou, the neck cut between head and carcass, dense with lymph nodes, fat tumours and thyroid, which the national standard requires trimmed out because the thyroid's hormones poison the eater.

The economics were the decision: untrimmed neck went for 3 yuan a jin against 12 for belly. At Anhui Donghui the person in charge said neck was about 60% of the meat and admitted 'I don't eat meat with thyroid'; at Fuyang Chuntian a worker said trimming the glands clean left the meat too thin. At Anhui Chu Xiansheng, sealed the next morning, inspectors counted 1,670 bags of neck and over 20,000 boxes of finished dish; the owner Wang Guangzhi was summoned on camera.

The exposure ended the three named firms — Chuntian, Donghui and Chu Xiansheng lost their licences within a year — and sent regulators through Fuyang's whole pre-made cluster. A dish that sold on the promise of home cooking had been priced by the parts of the pig the standard forbids.