© AFP Photo
The swine effluent discovered flowing down the Huangpu river - which supplies a fifth of the commercial hub's drinking water - has added the country's most popular meat to a growing list of food items rocked by scandal.
"As of 3:00 pm today, another 809 floating dead pigs have been fished out," Shanghai authorities said on their Weibo account, a service similar to Twitter.
It gave assurances that authorities had not found any substandard pork products on the market and were closely monitoring water quality.
Shanghai has blamed farmers in neighbouring Zhejiang province for casting pigs thought to have died of disease into the river upstream, although officials from the area have admitted to only a single producer doing so.
Pork accounted for 64 percent of total meat output last year, and China's increasingly wealthy urban residents consumed 21 kilograms (45 pounds) of the meat per person in 2011.
Despite laws against the practice, animals that die from disease in China can end up in the food supply chain or improperly disposed of.
China faced one its biggest food-safety scandals in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill.
Cheap recycled cooking oil is available nationwide, made illegally from leftovers scooped out of restaurant drains. Amid public disgust, authorities arrested more than 30 people over its sale, but the practise continues.
In another recent incident, the American fast-food giant KFC faced controversy after revealing that some Chinese suppliers provided chicken with high levels of antibiotics, in what appeared to be an industry-wide practice.
Source: AFP
The Party passed a new law recently to police such use of tainted animals and this seems to be the result, as the farmers now were stuck with them and needed to dispose of them in the most economical fashion, thus the time honored tradition of dumping one's trash in the river. The problem is that those living downstream don't like this tradition when it affects them, especially in a media driven world. It must be hard to twist this one into effective propaganda, though it can be used in some of the new law's enforcement and perhaps used as a tool for greater control over Party members used to having their way in the past. Putin, in Russia, has this same issue in play as the consolidation continues. The 'herding' continues on all fronts, and one persons 'trash' is another tool or excuse for greater control of even the Party, as the saying goes here in the USA, 'what gets you there, isn't what keeps you there.'