Mouse head discovered in canteen meal, again

The market regulation bureau of Xiushan county in Chongqing municipality released a statement on Tuesday acknowledging that a mouse head had been found in a lunch box in the cafeteria of the county's traditional Chinese medicine hospital.

How the mouse head ended up in the lunch box remained unknown, the bureau said, adding that it will conduct an investigation and promptly disclose the results to the public.

A video posted online by a netizen showed the alleged mouse head in a dish of moyuya, or duck stewed with konjac, a local specialty. The incident sparked outrage and calls for those responsible to be held accountable.

The hospital stated that its cafeteria catering is outsourced to a third-party provider through government bidding and had never encountered such an issue before, according to a report from Cover News.

This is the second case of a mouse head being found in a canteen in China recently.

A provincial investigative task force in Jiangxi on June 16 overturned an earlier investigation by local authorities, confirming that the object found by a college student in a canteen meal was in fact the head of a mouse, rather than the duck neck reported by the initial local-level probe.

On June 1, a student from Jiangxi Industry Polytechnic College in Nanchang uploaded a video to social media, showing a strange object in his meal at the college's canteen, which he suspected to be a mouse head.

The college said in a statement on June 3 that the object in the video was not a mouse's head, but rather a duck neck.

However, this conclusion did not quell the anger online, as many believed that the local market supervision bureau and the school were lying because the object in the video looked very different from a duck neck.

A joint investigation team was put together to investigate the incident, which said the object was confirmed to be the head of a rodent, after identification by animal experts of the photos and videos taken by the student.