On March 15, 2024, the CCTV "3·15" Gala revealed its fourth industry and brand: preserved mustard greens with pork belly pre-made meals.
It was reported that Fuyang City in Anhui Province is one of the main production areas for these pre-made meals. Some local companies have been using gutter meat, which has not been properly processed, to produce these dishes.
Gutter meat refers to the meat located where the pig's head connects to its torso. This meat, often termed lymph meat due to the abundance of lymph nodes found within, contains a large number of lymph nodes, lipomas, and thyroid glands. It is considered a part of the pork that requires stringent "trimming" due to its recognized poor quality and low price.
The wholesale price of normal pork belly is around 12 CNY per 500 grams, while the inferior quality gutter meat, without proper processing, wholesales for only about 3 CNY per 500 grams.
One of the local gutter meat pre-made meal factories, Spring Food Factory, had highly secretive production workshops; curtains covered the windows on the first floor, and the second floor windows were stickered over with opaque film.
Subsequently, reporters saw in several pre-made meal production enterprises that the workshops were filled with cooked meat products made from gutter meat, where lymph nodes and thyroid glands were visible and had not been completely removed.
In the yard of Anhui Chef Food Co., Ltd., there are numerous open-air freezer containers filled with large amounts of pork belly, some even without packaging, completely exposed to the outdoor environment.
Indoors, workers are slicing processed low-quality pork belly, while others are packaging pork belly with preserved mustard greens.
During the investigation, the person in charge of these preserved mustard greens with pork belly prefab meal companies stated that with the continued popularity of prefab meals, their business has become very lucrative, with booming production and sales keeping them busy from morning till night, year-round.
