Three people in Fujian province were arrested for processing pigs that had died of infectious diseases and selling the inedible pork, with two of the suspects initially hired by a county government to safely dispose of the pig carcasses, Chinese newspapers reported 
 
 PETER PARKS / AFP/Getty Images A dead pig in China's eastern Zhejiang province 
 
 Just how unsafe is food in China? Over the past three months, Chinese police have arrested more than 900 people for selling fake or tainted meat, including a criminal ring that processed meat from rat and fox and sold it as mutton. Public outrage had hardly died down when another food scandal broke out on Sunday. Three people in the southeastern province of Fujian were arrested for processing pigs that had died of infectious diseases and selling about 40 metric tons of the inedible pork to various restaurants in central and southern China, according to the state-run China Daily. It quotes the Strait Metropolis Daily, a Fujian newspaper, which reports that two of the suspects are farmers initially hired by a county government to safely dispose of the pig carcasses. 
 
 (MORE: Bad Eggs: Another Fake-Food Scandal Rocks China) 
 
 According to the state-run Global Times, in August 44-year-old Lin started selling the meat processed from dead pigs that she picked up from roadsides or got from local farmers for less than a dollar a kilogram. Her colleague, a 33-year-old man surnamed Wu, joined the business after he saw how much money Lin was making. Before the pair were detained in March, they had established a business worth almost half a million dollars. Police arrested the two, along with a driver they hired to transport the meat, at a warehouse they built to store the “mountains” of pig carcasses, noted the Strait Metropolis Daily. 
 
 Police are still compiling a complete list of the suspects’ clients, reported the China Daily, which alleges that Lin and Wu sold the problematic pork to meat processors in Guangdong, Jiangxi and Hunan provinces. Bloggers on China’s Twitter-like social-media service Sina Weibo lamented that it was not safe to eat any meat in the mainland. Some said the culprits should be punished by the death penalty. 
 
 (MORE: China Cracks Down on ‘Gutter Oil,’ a Substance Even Worse Than Its Name) 
 
 In response to the high-profile food scandals, China’s top court on Friday called for harsher punishments for making and selling tainted food products. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Supreme People’s Court specified for the first time acts that are considered crimes in violation of the country’s food-safety law, which forbids unsafe food products but is often accused of being ambiguous. 
 
 Li Fangping, a Beijing lawyer representing the victims of the 2008 tainted-milk scandal, told the Christian Science Monitor that the guidelines are just a political statement to satisfy the public. Caixin, a Beijing-based financial-news publication, observes that there is no lack of regulations in China, which has 40 sets of laws, as well as 300 department rules, to ensure food safety. However, food-safety commissions often fail to hold officials accountable because they don’t have much legal support and lack a “regulatory bite,” the publication writes in an editorial. 
 
 (MORE: China on Food Safety: Seriously, This Time We Mean It) 
 
 Zhou Dongfei, a columnist at the Hunan newspaper Xiaoxiang Morning News, writes that the lack of supervision is exactly what is happening in Fujian. He calls for prosecution of the local government that hired Lin and Wu in the first place. “These people had been doing the illegal business in the name of the government for more than three months,” he writes. “Local officials act as if they know nothing about it. Why was it so easy for them to sell the meat? This is a question the government must answer.” 
 
 MORE: No End in Sight for China’s Food-Safety Scandals 

 Three suspects in a high-profile food safety case have been arrested in Fujian province, and police are still looking for nearly 40 metric tons of inedible pork, Chinese media reported on Sunday. 
 
 Two of the suspects, a 44-year-old woman surnamed Lin and a 33-year-old man surnamed Wu, were detained on March 15 when they were transporting dead pigs by truck, Strait News, a newspaper in Fujian, quoted police sources in Zhangzhou, Fujian, as saying. 
 
 Police officers found seven tons of dead pigs in the truck, it added. 
 
 The driver, a man surnamed Hong, was also detained. 
 
 According to police, Lin and Wu confessed they have sold nearly 40 tons of pork, which was cut from ill and dead pigs, to meat processors in Guangdong, Jiangxi and Hunan provinces since January. 
 
 Fujian police are investigating how Lin and Wu transported the pork and who they sold it to, the report said. They hope to find the meat before it is eaten. 
 
 Lin and Wu were farmers in Zhangzhou's Nanjing county and hired by a local township government to collect ill and dead pigs and dispose of them using bio-safety techniques. 
 
 Lin began to produce pork products in August using the pigs she collected and made huge profits. In January, Wu joined her business. They built a freezer compartment that could store up to six tons of pork, according to police. 
 
 They also hired three workers from Henan province to cut the dead pigs and package the carcasses. 
 
 The two collected dead pigs that local residents discarded and purchased them from farmers. 
 
 They were caught after Zhangzhou police received a report in March that someone was storing sick pigs in a freezer at Xiexin Frozen Foods. 
 
 Officers searched the company's freezer and found more than 25 tons of pork that later tested positive for two swine diseases. 
 
 The manager of the company's freezer has been arrested, police said, adding they have also discovered that Lin was involved in another ring suspected of collecting and trading dead pigs carrying diseases. Authorities are investigating the case and searching for the pork.
– If you're in China and craving pork, probably best to hold off for a bit. Two farmers, along with a third suspect, were arrested for allegedly selling tainted pork in the country, and authorities are still looking for 44 tons of the stuff. The suspects got their hands on the meat in a fairly twisted manner, according to police: The government had hired the farmers to collect and dispose of sick and dead pigs using bio-safety methods, China Daily reports. Instead, police say they confessed to having sold pork cut from those pigs to meat processors since August. Police are still trying to figure out who bought the tainted pork; here's one disturbing sentence from China Daily: "They hope to find the meat before it is eaten." Police were tipped off in March that the suspects were storing diseased pigs in a freezer; officers eventually found more than 25 tons of disease-infected pork there, and the farmers and their driver were detained after being found transporting more than seven tons of dead pigs in a truck. Time notes that more than 900 people have been busted for selling tainted or fake meat in the past three months alone (including rat meat sold as lamb).