Wuhan railway authorities agreed to compensate 11 passengers 10 times the price each paid for a 35 yuan ($5.74)-boxed meal that turned out to be moldy, on Saturday, after the group arrived in the Hubei Province city by high-speed train from Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

One of the group's passengers, a man surnamed Hu, opened the meal of rice and beef on the train that had just left a station in Changsha, Hunan Province around 6 pm. He saw something wrong with the food, shouting out that it was "moldy."

Other passengers dropped their chopsticks to look at his meal, which contained two pieces of meat that were noticeably moldy.

The meals were packaged on October 20 and were supposed to be fine for 90 days under the right storage conditions, which Liu Qihong, a manager for Wuhan's railway bureau, assured was the case, when the passengers arrived in the city.

But Liu said that the boxes was damaged, allowing for the food to go moldy sooner, which he said had happened before. Liu settled on paying 350 yuan to each passenger who bought the moldy food.

Wuhan Evening News