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On 19 May 2015, a Facebook user published a photoset of crabs to his timeline along with the following message: The message caused significant concern among social media users about whether imported crabs may truly be contaminated with formalin (or formulin), a dangerous formaldehyde solution. Immediately, the message bore one red flag of an urban legend: a source of I heard this at a market. And the original poster did not claim to have snapped the photographs himself; he only said that he jad learned of the purported practice during a 19 May 2015 visit to a market in Thailand. (The precise origin of the photographs wasn’t explained.) As it turns out, the images in question had been circulated before and were not originally labeled as crabs injected with formalin. English-language blog posts from December 2014 and May 2015 (as well as Chinese-language versions of indeterminate date) all labeled the same set of images as showing adulterated crabs, but in those versions the crabs in question were injected not with preservatives to stretch their shelf lives, but rather with seawater to increase their per-pound weights: Note that even in the text quoted above, the claims of weight tampering still came to the poster via unspecified reliable reports and not via any documented evidence or first-hand knowledge of such a practice. While that posited claim was likelier than the one involving formalin, it also lacked any corroborating information to support it. The latter claim elaborated upon some of the drawbacks of adulterated crab: It's true the United States imports some crab from Asia, and scattered reports in 2011, 2012 and 2014 have claimed the sighting of of meats and other foods intentionally contaminated with formalin in Bangladesh and Indonesia. We could find no evidence that crab in China is routinely adulterated in this fashion, however.
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