Kindle Notes & Highlights
Fake eggs started appearing in China in the mid-1990s and continue to crop up from time to time. The fakes are so good that people are cooking them up and eating them. There’s loads of information online to show people how to tell the fakes from the real thing
The melamine milk incident in 2008 forced China’s dairy giant, Sanlu Group Co. Ltd, into bankruptcy by December of that year. More than 30 milk brands were affected globally by the adulterated milk, forcing more than 60 countries to ban or recall Chinese dairy products at an estimated cost of £11.5 billion (US$18 billion).
There are reports of phoney tofu cakes made from gypsum, paint and starch being sold in Shanghai, mystery meats in London curries and milk adulterated with urea in India.
Indeed, detecting added water in food remains one of the major challenges of the food fraud field, and it’s a theme we will return to in later chapters.
Just in the time we’ve been writing this book, there have been at least five scandals in UK headlines: nut protein in spices, rat sold as mutton in China, unidentified meat in curries, goat’s cheese made from sheep milk and cheap oriental perch sold as sea bass.
Not unexpectedly, the desire to earn a little extra cash is most rampant during tough economic times. Yet these are also the times when people may be most tolerant of food fraud. Low-income households are looking for cheap calories and may turn a blind eye to even the most questionable of deals.
Today people with limited incomes are still the most vulnerable to fraud.
These argue that it is environmentally less costly to produce food in some areas of the world as the fewer additions required for growing (fertilisers or day-length) outweigh the additional travel costs. Importing peppers from Spain, for example, may have a smaller ecological footprint than growing them in polytunnels or greenhouses in Britain. However, an additional benefit of sourcing food more locally is that it removes some of the anonymity from the supply chain.
truth is that the easier it is, the more likely it is.
we have seen rice scams in the past, including fake rice made from plastic resin and potato starch.
In 1900 the average family in the US spent 43 per cent of their income on food, while in 2013 this had decreased to 13 per cent.
In China, food safety is the responsibility of no fewer than 10 different government departments.
The first prosecution in the UK related to horse meat sales (not Horsegate itself) did happen late in 2013. A random test on pork sausages bought in Dartford, England exposed its equine side; it contained nearly 50 per cent undeclared horse meat.
The head of Sanlu was sentenced to life in prison and fined more than US$3.1 million (£2 million). Farmer Zhang Yujun, who produced and sold hundreds of tonnes of melamine-laced protein powder, was executed in November 2009 along with middleman Geng Jinping, who sold more than 900 tonnes of tainted milk.
They must find the appropriate balance of ensuring that food fraud is kept in the consciousness of the public without overwhelming them with so many stories of gloom and doom that people are paralysed into a state of apathy.
A child that has been exposed to artificial strawberry flavour in ice cream, sweets, gum, milk, cereal and goodness knows what else all of her life can still perceive the taste of a real strawberry. Yet she will probably have a preference for the fake strawberry flavour she has been raised with.
although the truth is that the actual scale of the problem is completely unknown. This is because no matter how sophisticated the tests become, it is impossible to screen every food item for its authenticity.
Even if you take the time to understand what all the ingredients actually are, how can you be sure that even these are what they say they are and they’re present in the right amounts?
Understanding the ingredients list on some food items requires an advanced chemistry degree in order to truly know what we’re eating.
Globalisation and commoditisation of our food has got us into a situation where we can’t always trust what we eat.
Annual global honey production amounts to an astonishing 1.2 million tonnes.
Indeed, honey is recognised by the European Parliament as among the top 10 foods most likely to be adulterated.
Compared to many of the foods we eat, honey is a relatively simple substance biochemically. It is a supersaturated sugar solution.
The processing of the nectar by worker bees involves repeated regurgitation and enzymatic conversion to honey.
Honey sugars can be determined by gas chromatography (GC) but it is more easily done using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).
A very troublesome adulterant in honey is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
So even if the results of the HPLC are consistent with a pure honey, this does not necessarily mean the forensic analysis is over, particularly if there is evidence, such as questionable paperwork, which caused suspicion of the honey to begin with.
As a result of the premium price, the adulteration of mānuka honey has reached astonishing proportions. It is reported that the majority of mānuka-labelled honey on supermarket and health food shop shelves worldwide is adulterated.
just over 1,500 tonnes of pure mānuka honey are made annually in New Zealand. It is truly remarkable, therefore, that an estimated 9,070 tonnes of honey labelled as mānuka is being sold around the world annually; more than five times the amount of mānuka honey produced is sold.
the EU funded a major initiative known as the food traceability project (TRACE).
In 2001, the US Department of Commerce implemented anti-dumping duties (a 300 per cent tariff) on honey imported from China to discourage suppliers from flooding the US market with cheap adulterated honey and putting their own domestic beekeepers out of business. To get around this duty, some US importers simply purchased honey from intermediary countries – ‘honey laundering’, so to speak.
In 2014, the annual per capita consumption of vegetable oils in Italy reached a high of 28kg (just shy of 62lb); that’s the best part of 100ml (3.5fl oz) per person per day.
We have no idea just how prevalent vegetable oil fraud actually is, but it is rampant enough among commonly tested oils to suggest that there is an underlying chronic fraud.
The bottom line was that it appeared Italy was exporting more olive oil than it was producing, and the mislabelling exposed by the UC Davis investigation, and others, was rife.
The most common type of fraud is the misrepresentation of the type of olive oil, either its grade or the country of origin.
They checked 4,114 operators and considered 452 of these to be ‘irregular’.
olive oil as one of the products (together with fish and organic foods) most prone to food fraud,
you could tell the same story of almost any artisan’s product we put in our mouths, from bacon to cheddar cheese or smoked salmon. Industrial production techniques and the supermarket’s tendency to strip out quality in order to give ‘value’ will debase any foodstuff once it becomes popular to the point where the producer has to abuse his animals, sin against tradition or commit fraud in order to stay afloat.
One of the most critical pieces of guidance when contemplating a purchase of extra virgin olive oil is that if it’s cheap it’s probably not the real thing.
There have been around 220 cases of vCJD worldwide to date, but it is estimated that there are approximately 15,000 citizens in the UK who are potentially incubating the disease, so this story is not yet over.
Global fish consumption has been growing at a rate of 3.6 per cent per year since 1961
The Codex Alimentarius states that if a food has been processed in a way that changes the nature of the product, the origin of that food becomes the country in which it was processed.
Russian sockeye salmon that are processed in BC, Canada, become a product of Canada and are labelled as BC salmon.
104 million kilograms (230 million pounds) of squid caught in California each year is sent to China for processing before ending up back in the US for sale – ...
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while the UK simply states that any fish from the two genera Epinephelus and Mycteroperca can be labelled as grouper – a combined total of over 100 species.
There are hundreds of breeds of pig, but all of them come from just one species – the Eurasian wild boar, Sus scrofa.
At the time of writing this book, more than 10,700 species of fish have been barcoded.
The New York Times tested salmon from eight stores around the city in 2005 and six of the stores were selling farmed salmon as wild-caught.
In 2012, a freedom of information request to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) revealed that the use of pesticides in the Scottish fish farming industry increased by 110 per cent over 2008 values, while salmon production had only increased by 22 per cent. It is suspected that more drugs are being used because the parasites and bacteria are becoming resistant to them.
Malachite green – a fungicide – is another drug that is randomly tested for. It was once commonly used in the fish-farming industry to rid the salmon pens of parasites, but it is also a carcinogen in humans.
