In times of economic hardship, plenty of stories emerge on how much local councils spend on biscuits, for example, each year usually some horrifying figure. But how would you feel if your local civil servants took it upon themselves to build a giant chopping board and six-metre wide oven, using tax-payers’ money, solely for the purpose of creating the world’s largest naan bread?

In China’s Oiemo County in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, that’s exactly what happened. The naan, baked in the specially built oven, was 2.75m in diameter and contained meat dumplings. Ingredients included 30kg mutton, 125kg flour, 16kg of onions and 90kg of water and, with 17 people working on the job, the naan took 10 hours to complete.

While local residents may have taken real pride in their local government’s efforts and been somewhat mollified by the fact that the naan was eventually divided up and handed out to them, Stop the Week can only imagine the uproar in the UK on the money spent on such an effort.