Officials from a major food exporter in China apologized to American consumers today for shipping over 70 million poisonous turkeys to the U.S. early last week, but indicated that it was "too late" for a recall of their toxic food product.
A spokesman for the Wuhan Food Exportation Company said that while the company "deeply regretted" the shipment, the error was not discovered until Friday morning, making a recall of the birds "virtually impossible."
"It would be problematic to recall such a massive shipment," the spokesman said. "Those turkeys were sent to virtually every store in the U.S."
At a press conference on Saturday to discuss what went wrong with the shipment of turkeys, Wuhan officials revealed that the birds had been fed an experimental combination of birdseed, lead pellets, and date-rape drugs.
"Going forward, we're going to skip the lead pellets," said Qiu Liangyong, the company's public relations director.
In an attempt to regain the confidence of the American consumer, Qiu said that in the future all turkeys shipped to the U.S. would include a warning label, but under tough questioning from reporters he conceded that the label would be printed in Chinese.
At the conclusion of the press conference, Qiu indicated that he was "confident" that the company could regain U.S. consumers' trust in time for the Christmas season: "We have 80 million delicious Christmas hams just waiting to be shipped." More here.