A family in the northeastern Chinese city of Jinan has been left shocked after they found a dead bat hidden in a jar of oyster sauce that they had been using for cooking for nearly three months.
The mother spotted the bat’s carcass when she was scooping the sauce out with a spoon while making dinner, her son told reporters in China.
Footage shows the dead bat covered in the sticky brown sauce as it was being lifted out of the 6kg oyster sauce container. It comes as the source of the coronavirus pandemic has been suggested to have come from wild animals, including bats.
The son known as Guo said that his family couldn’t eat anything for days after discovering the dead animal lying at the bottom of the sauce jar.
“My mum was cooking and she couldn’t scoop out the oyster sauce with a spoon, we found the carcas after digging deeper. It stank as well.’
Guo believed that the bat had gotten into the jar before the manufacturer filled it with the cooking sauce during the production.
“I always put the lid on after using it, if it went in there later, the bat couldn’t have swum to the bottom. The oyster is so sticky.” Guo said.
A spokesman for the Foshan Haitian Flavouring & Food – the food company that produces the oyster sauce, denies the customer’s claim, saying that their products go through “layers of filtering and checks” before being sold.
The company said it is willing to claim full responsibility only if Guo can provide “concrete evidence” to prove the bat had been in the sauce jar before the purchase.
The family is planning to get an analysis of the sauce jar from a third party.
