A video of a piece of beef twitching as if it were alive has been doing the rounds online for the last two weeks creeping out viewers and even turning some of them into vegetarians.

Chinese meat has been getting a lot of news coverage lately. Just last week we reported about the now-famous “zombie meat” – cheap meat as old as 40 years smuggled into the country and sold to small restaurants – and these days everyone’s talking about “Frankenstein meat”. Luckily, this one is actually safe for human consumption, although it looks arguably creepier than zombie meat.

So what’s this all about, then? Around two weeks ago, Cheng Tan, a woman from Shandong Province, China, bought a piece of fresh meat, and just as she was getting ready to slice it on her kitchen table, she noticed it was moving. She quickly reached for her smartphone, recorded a video of the creepy twitching meat and posted it online. The minute-long clip was viewed tens of millions of times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter and eventually found its way onto Western websites, where it went viral again.

“It looks like it is still alive, or that there are worms or something inside. However when I cut it open I didn’t find any worms, just twitching,” Ms. Chen wrote in the video description. “I’ve never seen anything like this, so I was afraid to eat it and decided to record the video.”

Indeed you can see the beef is sliced open in several places, and yet it’s still twitching. A plausible explanation came from Lv Suwen, an expert at the local animal health department, who said that the spasms were caused by nerve endings that had not died yet. “The central nervous system is dead but the nerve endings in the muscles are still firing resulting in the jumping, because the nerves are not yet dead. This will stop after a short time,” Suwen said, reassuring everyone that the beef is perfectly safe for consumption.

Although most viewers were put-off by the creepy twitching of the Frankenstein meat, with some announcing it had made them go vegetarian, some of them pointed out that it’s actually a sign of freshness.

However, it’s worth noting that fresh, twitching meat has been known to freak out people in the past. Just take a look at this video posted on YouTube two years ago:

via People’s Daily (Chinese)