Diner Scammed With Fake Rice Made From Rolled-Up Paper

There are a lot of fake foods being passed off on the diners of the world. But while making a knockoff version of a high-end product like Champagne or halibut or even beef might make a certain amount of sense, it is unclear why anyone would bother making fake rice out of itty-bitty pieces of rolled up paper, but that allegedly happened this week in China.

According to Shanghaiist, a woman was allegedly halfway through eating lunch she had made herself when she bit into a piece of rice that she said was unusually hard. When she took it out of her mouth, she was amazed to find that it was a tiny piece of paper that had been rolled up to approximately the size of a grain of rice.

The woman said she had purchased the rice as a premium product from a vendor who said it was grown in the countryside without any pesticides or unnatural ingredients.

It is not exactly clear why a person would go to that much effort to roll up hundreds of tiny pieces of paper to sell them as rice, though, because rice is a comparatively inexpensive product. Bleached, white paper is not much cheaper by comparison, especially when one counts the time it would take to roll up all the little pieces into "grains."