Kindle Notes & Highlights
In summary, if you experience numbness or tingly lips after eating so-called monkfish (or any other fish for that matter), seek medical advice immediately. Seafood substitution also
IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated) fishing.
IUU is estimated to be worth €10 to 20 billion (£7.1–14.2 billion, US$11.4–22.8 billion) per year and is equal to at least 15 per cent of the reported global catch.
The Oceana study found that 74 per cent of sushi bars, 38 per cent of restaurants and 18 per cent of grocery stores they took samples from were selling mislabelled fish.
And if you care about the environment, your body and your wallet, this is the best advice: get to know your seafood.
Maggot Pete, perhaps one of the most notorious meat fraudsters in recent UK history.
A layer of fresh fat would be added to rotting meat to make it appear fresh.
it was the grotesque conditions in which meat was being processed that truly revolted the nation. Sinclair’s evocative descriptions of mouldy white sausages, piles of meat covered in rat droppings, and even the rats themselves being swept into the hoppers where sausages were being churned out for home consumption were disturbing.
Most of the meat rejected in the UK is discarded for aesthetic reasons.
China has been riddled with meat substitution scandals. There have been reports of rat, mink and fox meat being transformed into mutton slices.
Doner meat is similar – it’s mince and spices mixed together – which is probably why 70 per cent of lamb kebabs from British takeaways tested in 2013 contained cheaper, undeclared meats.
In September 2013, police confiscated 20,000kg (44,000lb) of pork masquerading as beef from a factory in north-west China. Not mince, not sausages, not even thinly sliced ‘mutton’, but whole cuts of pork that had been made to look like beef. One wouldn’t think it was possible. The pork is mixed with beef extract and a glazing agent and left to sit for ninety minutes. When cooked, the meat takes on a dark beef-like appearance rather than the characteristic white pork colour.
Blood is very high in protein (about 18 per cent). In fact by weight, blood is a better protein source than eggs and most meat.
Hindus don’t eat beef, and so the knowledge that hydrolysed beef protein may be found in chicken breasts (labelled or not) is no doubt very distressing.
Cheap blood protein is being explored for its emulsifying and coagulating properties outside of the meat industry. Blood proteins have been used to replace the very costly eggs used in many baked goods.
While we can all consume milk in early life, the ability of adult humans to digest milk is a relatively recent evolutionary development. The normal state for all mammals, including humans, is to lose the capacity to digest milk after infancy.
Today, about 35 per cent of the human population can digest lactose into adulthood, and most of these have European ancestry, though there are other lactase hotspots in West Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Without the enzyme lactase, people are said to be lactose intolerant or lactase non-persistent.
There are 1,000 different types of cheese produced in the world, with France alone accounting for 400 of these.
cheese made from donkey milk in Serbia, known as pule, is one of the most expensive dairy products in the world, sometimes selling for as much as £176/kg
Next to olive oil, milk is the next biggest target of food fraud, constituting just over 24 per cent of reported food fraud incidents in the last 30 years.
And so was the rise and fall of margarine. It was developed in response to animal fat supply shortages in the nineteenth century and didn’t truly become popular until nearly a century later, when people began avoiding animal fats for perceived health reasons. It then fell out of favour 60 years later as federal governments – the very same ones that supported its original development – cracked down on trans fatty acids. It is yet another example of the complicated road we pave when we process foods.
The scandal broke on 16 July 2008, after 16 infants in Gansu province, fed infant formula milk, were diagnosed with kidney stones. Analyses of the kidney stones using HPLC and infrared spectroscopy showed they contained crystals of melamine and a melamine-related compound, cyanuric acid. There is no reason why these substances should have been present in the bodies of these infants.
tests on animals have shown that when melamine and cyanuric acid are consumed together, as they were in the infant formula, they are highly toxic, and can be fatal. The
As we saw from Chapter 2, analysts need to have some idea of what they’re looking for and pose the questions accordingly.
As we have mentioned before, foods are chemically highly complex and we simply can’t analyse for everything, especially for substances that have yet to be recognised as threats.
Yet, as with practical jokers, the acts expose more about the criminal’s own character deficiencies than those of their supposedly gullible victims.
Italy maintained a monopoly on the black pepper trade during the Middle Ages, from the fifth to the fifteenth century.
The FDA states that pepper can contain no more than 1 per cent of insect-infested and/or mouldy pieces by weight. Nor can it contain more than an average of one milligram (0.03oz) of mammalian excreta per half kilo
There is an extensive list of items that have been dyed to mimic the vibrant crimson stigmas of the real thing, including parts of other flowers, such as marigolds, carnations, poppies and safflower. Somewhat more daringly, people have disguised beet fibre, capsicum, corn silk, grass, onion and silk fibres as saffron; they have even fashioned threads from gelatin and the fibres of dried animal meats.
Most vanillin is synthesised as demand for it within the food and beverage industry as a flavouring far outweighs what could be produced by the beans alone.
a higher sugar content than what might be harvested from the wild. The higher sugar content in fruit has been noticed by zookeepers who have fed their animals, mostly primates, human-grade fruit on a daily basis. The animals were experiencing anxious and unsettled behaviour – pacing, inability to concentrate, aggression.
The most adulterated and counterfeited spirit products appear to be those that are relatively tasteless and clear – vodka and gin, for example.
The symptoms are so acute that the people experiencing them believe that they’ve had a drug slipped into their drink, when in fact it’s the counterfeit alcohol at work.
Between 2009 and 2014, plans to export approximately 4.5 million litres (just under one million gallons) of fake whisky into Europe were thwarted by the authorities.
There are 6,000 food additives, including flavourings, glazing agents and improvers, which are used in the behind-the-scenes processing of our food.
In the EU, one of the requirements of organic farming is that no synthetic pesticides or synthetic mineral fertilisers can be
The nitrogen in synthetic fertilisers comes from atmospheric nitrogen and as little fractionation happens in the manufacturing of these fertilisers, the stable isotope ratio of the fertilisers is very close to that of atmospheric nitrogen. Fertilisers used in organic production, however, have usually been through the food chain. As the ratio of 15N to 14N tends to increase with each trophic level, this means that the nitrogen isotope ratio of organic fertilisers is much higher than that of atmospheric nitrogen.
For now, it would appear that the authenticity of organic food still very much relies on the enforcement of strict production standards through rigorous certification processes and site inspections. In other words, a lot of paperwork.
cats, for example, have been obligatory carnivores for so long in their evolutionary history that they have lost the ability to detect sweet flavours.
Don’t fall prey to unrealistic prices.
Find the story in your food.
We must be prepared, however, for food fraud to become more prevalent before it gets better. Climate change combined with rising demand creates an ideal environment for fraud.
