Imagine how disgusted and violated and betrayed you would feel if you had just come home from shopping at your local Walmart and were about to put together a delicious meal for the dinner party you're hosting for friends only to discover that your main course, a delicious slab of premium grade Chinese donkey, was nothing more than run-of-the-mill fox meat? Yes, the oldest trick in the donkey meat book has happened again.
I could fill a small novella with the questions I have about how it comes to pass that someone first wanted donkey meat and ended up with fox meat. How is donkey more desirable than fox? How does fox get into donkey meat? Does that mean someone is farming fox and it's an inferior meat? Is fox meat a thing you can buy on its own in China if you want it? Are fox and donkey really so similar that you could pass one off as the other without people noticing, or was this just a really terribly perpetrated fraud? I want to know, and yet at the same time I don't.
Whatever the logistics of the fox/donkey substitution, at the end of the day, Chinese shoppers looking for donkey only want donkey, and fox is unacceptable. The result was a recall of the five-spice donkey meat from Walmart locations in China while officials look into how it came to pass that one of those five spices is a small, wild dog.
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