Why can "mutton" that is actually duck meat brazenly parade around at food festivals?

Just as melamine milk, Sudan red salted eggs, formalin jellyfish, clenbuterol, black-hearted cotton and the like had only just begun to subside, other food frauds came one after another - fake mutton has now taken up the baton of food fraud and is running rampant in the market.

According to tips from industry insiders, a recent investigation by a Yangcheng Evening News reporter found that in some frozen food wholesale markets and at "food festivals," some of the meat sold under a "mutton" sign actually has nothing to do with sheep - a considerable portion of it is duck meat.

In the past, people often used the phrase "selling dog meat under a mutton sign" to describe goods that do not match their description, appearances that belie reality, and cunning deception. But that saying is now outdated, because dog meat is more expensive than mutton these days; if a seller still hung up a mutton sign and sold dog meat, he would certainly lose money.

But unscrupulous merchants will not be bound by old sayings. What meat is sold under a mutton sign is determined by market prices. Nowadays duck meat is cheaper than mutton, so they have started "selling duck meat under a mutton sign."

A tipster familiar with mutton market conditions said that duck meat costs only 4 yuan per jin, equivalent to one-seventh the price of mutton. The huge profit from the price difference has lured some meat sellers into the business of substituting duck for mutton. Many "mutton skewers" and "grilled lamb chops" are mostly substitutes sold under the name of mutton.

These fake mutton products are not only sold at roadside stalls and street-side shops, but are also openly hawked at various "food festivals," driving out genuine, higher-priced mutton with their fake goods at low prices, turning "food festivals" into "counterfeit-selling festivals."

According to the report, Guangdong holds more than 2,000 food festivals of various sizes every year. A stall must pay several thousand yuan in entry fees to get in, and for better-known ones the entry fee can reach as high as ten thousand yuan, with 20%-30% of business revenue going to the food festival organizers. Running one food festival often brings in around a million yuan. Able to collect money so effortlessly, the organizers only care about taking in cash - who has the mind to distinguish genuine from fake? Since many "food festivals" are government-hosted or government-supervised, regulatory agencies find it even less convenient to investigate counterfeits.

But even if someone does investigate, some bosses suspected of fraud can still act as if nothing is wrong. One boss running a "grilled lamb chop" business shamelessly argued that "grilled lamb chops" do not necessarily contain lamb - it is just a product name, just as a "hot dog" contains no dog, a "pipa leg" contains no pipa, and a "wife cake" contains no "wife."

By this logic, any name can fail to match reality: pork chop rice can have no pork chops, a wool sweater can have no wool, a gold necklace can have no real gold... When restaurants and merchants sell these things to this "grilled lamb chop," they can all drop the attribute in front.

Of course, in the eyes of unscrupulous merchants, no logic is needed besides making money. But now counterfeiters are not afraid of counterfeit-fighters, and this goes beyond our normal logic - they should be fleeing like mice before a cat, desperate to get away, yet they are not afraid at all. Why on earth is that?

It is said that these days some mice really are not afraid of cats, because some cats have been fattened up by their owners, or have already established friendly relations with the mice, or because there are too many mice and the cats have long grown numb to them... The cats no longer have any motivation to catch mice.

Today's counterfeit "mice" have precisely seized on the opportunity that food festivals can bring "win-win for cat and mouse," and on the timing when there are so many big and vicious counterfeits that regulators cannot keep up and have no time to bother with the "little mice." That is why they dare to sell fake mutton this way, and even swagger into government-run food festivals.

High profits and low risks have always been gospel to unscrupulous merchants. Encouraged by this "gospel," in Guangzhou, a city named after the "City of Rams," it is estimated that genuine mutton will rarely be seen at food festivals.

Although duck meat, unlike chemical additives such as melamine and Sudan red, contains no toxins, fraud is a toxin of credit; chemical toxins poison only some people, while the toxin of credit poisons the entire credit system of society.

When the credit system collapses completely, today's unscrupulous merchants use live ducks to replace real mutton; tomorrow they may use the meat of diseased chickens and dead ducks to replace mutton. - By that time, every one of us may become the "scapegoat" of weak regulation.