Food Adulteration and Food Fraud

Jonathan Rees

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789142471
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

What do we really know about the food we eat? A firestorm of recent food-fraud cases, from the US honey-laundering scandal to the forty-year-old frozen "zombie" meat smuggled into China, to horse-meat episodes in the United Kingdom, suggests fraudulent and intentional acts of food adulteration are on the rise. While often harmless, some incidents have resulted in serious public health consequences. At the heart of these dubious practices are everyone from large food processors to small-time criminals, while many consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about this malfeasance.In this book, Jonathan Rees examines the complex causes and surprising effects of adulteration and fraud across the global food chain. Covering comestibles of all kinds from around the globe, Rees describes the different types of contamination, the role and effectiveness of government regulation, and our willingness to ignore deception if the groceries we purchase are cheap or convenient. Pithy, punchy, and cogent, Food Adulteration and Food Fraud offers important insight into this vital problem of human consumption.

1

PARTIAL SUBSTITUTIONS

In 1757, an anonymous author (thought to be one Dr Peter Markham) published an article in the London journal the Critical Review entitled ‘Poison Detected, or Frightful Truths’.¹ The author quotes a doctor’s description of the bread sold in London as including ‘lime, chalk, alum, [and] the ashes of bones’. Any baker who uses such ingredients, the author writes, deserves ‘the most severe and exemplary punishment. His crime is a complication of fraud, treachery, and parricide. He is the worst traitor to his country: he not only poisons his fellow-creatures, but entails torments, diseases, misery, and death upon their posterity.’² Because these problems pre-date mass industrialization in Britain by several decades, it should be apparent that this kind of adulteration is more the product of commercial baking than it is of any particular technology.

The easiest way to demonstrate that fact is to note that this practice persists in places at similar levels of economic development to those of England during the 1750s. ‘Alum and chalk are sometimes used to whiten the bread,’ explained one Pakistani expert on food adulteration in that country in 2017, adding that ‘mashed potatoes, sawdust and plaster of Paris were also used to increase the weight of the bread.’³ A similar thing was true of milk in the nineteenth-century United States; ‘a water shortage would put the milkman out of business,’ went one joke from that era.⁴

The principle of these swindles involving bread and milk is exactly the same across the centuries. Substituting ingredients in bread or other foods for cheaper ones reflects the incentive system under capitalism in underdeveloped economies with little regulation, where the potential benefit for would-be swindlers greatly outweighs the risk of detection and punishment. Even honest food manufacturers may feel the need to defraud their customers: if your competitors make substitutions and pass at least some of the cost savings on to their customers, you will be under substantial pressure to do the same or risk going out of business.

If anything, the potential for deceptions of all kinds grows under modern conditions in big cities thanks to the increased physical separation of consumers from producers and the often increasing number of middlemen in the supply chain. Besides substitutions, two related kinds of non-lethal adulteration have become more common as the food-provisioning system has grown increasingly complicated. One involves the addition of small amounts of substances or ingredients designed to mask the inferior quality of the overall food product; this might include something as simple as packing a product in unnecessary ice to increase its overall weight or to water down the product by the time that customers consume it. This sometimes happens to raw fish, for example. The second kind involves food producers removing valuable constituent parts of a product so that other producers can use them – one example would be taking milk solids out of the natural product and selling them separately.⁵

Of course, bread and milk are far from the only kinds of food that can be adulterated in this historic way. Everything from spices to ground beef can be mixed with cheaper alternatives that are difficult to detect, in order to save producers money. Any liquid can be watered down. Anything sold by weight can be short-weighted. Because profit margins in the food business are often so slight, substituting in even a very small amount of cheaper material can provide a great lift to a producer’s bottom line.⁶ While some of these fillers might have adverse health effects, plenty do not. This may make producers more likely to commit this kind of fraud, since it is not only hard to detect but has relatively few consequences upon its victims, making it less likely to lead to strict punishment.

Separating purely economic adulteration from dangerous economic fraud is an artificial distinction. Nonetheless, one set of problems here builds on the other. Violations of trust occur in both cases, but adulterations that threaten human health are usually easier to detect and far more damaging. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the former aspect: how adulterations threaten the food-provisioning system by violating the public trust. Poisoning (or fear of poisoning), the subject of the next chapter, subsumes many of these same issues. However, that chapter will focus upon the extra problems that these more damaging forms of adulteration create.

Substitutions and Cutting

According to an official working for the Italian Ministry of Health, the ‘vast majority’ of food frauds uncovered in the European Union (EU) involve olive oil. It can be synthesized. It can be mislabelled. However, the easiest to understand is the tendency of unscrupulous suppliers to mix inferior-grade olive oils with more expensive ones, and to then market the result as a pure version of the expensive, high-grade kind, thus pocketing a hefty profit. Often, olive oil is mixed with low-grade, comparatively inexpensive vegetable oil. Sometimes other kinds of oil, including inferior grades of olive oil not intended for human consumption, are blended together in labs. The long supply lines for this product mean that it can be very hard to identify such adulterations.⁷

Olive oil travels frequently throughout its supply chain. It is often handled by dishonest wholesalers. Government officials charged with enforcing its purity, especially in Italy, often look the other way at olive oil adulteration.⁸ The taste of olive oil varies by region, and in turn varies by the year that those olives are grown. Olive oil adulteration can destroy the health benefits that consuming it can bring and add highly processed oils, and consumers might also be consuming dangerous chemicals with a substance that they thought might be making them healthier.⁹ Since olive oil is a luxury good and adulterated oils are difficult to detect and expensive to test, this particular fraud is both common and very lucrative.

The adulteration of dried herbs and spices of all kinds follows the same principle. Find something – anything really – that resembles the initial spice and mix it in with some of the legitimate product: if the match is good it can be impossible to tell the difference even if you taste it. Turmeric is cut with ground corn, nutmeg is cut with cheap pepper, while dried oregano can be cut with plants of all kinds, even weeds.¹⁰ In 2018 a French investigation found problems with half the spices they checked.¹¹ Another study that same year found that one-third of the spices sold in Canada had been diluted by this kind of substitution.¹²

The most commonly adulterated spice is the one that costs the most. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world because it is so hard to harvest; the crocuses it comes from are easily damaged and it requires manual labour to remove the stigmata from those flowers, which become saffron threads. This offers a huge incentive to adulterate saffron by dilution or to substitute in its entirety something that looks like saffron threads, even if the substitute requires dyeing.¹³ Other parts of the plant itself can be substituted for the tiny threads that make up real saffron. Ground saffron – dried and powdered, as with most other spices – is invariably fraudulent; the easiest way to identify genuine saffron involves the shape of the threads, so grinding makes it extremely easy to mask the fact that the saffron has been cut with other substances.¹⁴

For all the shock expressed over Britons unknowingly eating an animal that is so beloved to them during the notorious horse meat scandal of 2013, when horse meat was detected in products advertised as being made of beef, this scandal fitted the same traditional pattern: substituting relatively inexpensive components into a more expensive product. Meat from sick horses smuggled into England found its way into highly processed packaged foods because it was much cheaper than actual beef. The fact that the supply chain was long made it easy to obscure the fact that the substitution had been made. Random testing in Ireland and follow-up testing conducted by investigative journalists at The Guardian newspaper made this particular substitution known.¹⁵ However, since horse meat is of course in principle safe to eat, the most significant aspect of that scandal remains that it shook people’s faith in the idea that they know exactly what they are eating.

Perhaps that faith deserves to be shaken. Meat substitution scandals are surprisingly common. In 1995, a study from the Florida Department of Agriculture found that 16.6 per cent of the meats they tested contained more than 1 per cent of a meat that shouldn’t have been present. In 2006, a Turkish study found 22 per cent of meat samples to be adulterated. China, a country with very little regulation, ‘has been riddled with meat substitution scandals. There have been reports of rat, mink and fox being transformed into mutton slices.’ Adding water to scallops is a common practice that can often be perfectly legal, if the shipper doesn’t take it too far. This increases their weight, which in turn increases their price.¹⁶

To understand the conditions under which these kinds of substitutions occur, it helps to look at the qualities that all of them have in common. For this kind of adulteration to pay off, the food being adulterated has to be expensive. It also helps if the good in question comes in non-discrete units, like spices or ground beef; and substitutions and cutting also become easier when the contributions of individual enterprises are all stored together en masse, like olive oil.

Other common incentives for this kind of fraud include stiff competition within the industry. Competition encourages producers to cut corners if their competitors are doing the same, since if they cannot compete on price they could be put out of business. This becomes more likely if their product is perceived as non-unique – if consumers believe that all olive oil is the same, or don’t distinguish between different kinds of ground beef. The bigger the market for a particular food product, the easier it is for unethical actors to slip these kinds of substitutions into at least part of their huge shipments.

Links in the Supply Chain

Historically, the goods that were most likely to be adulterated had the longest supply chains – tea and pepper, for example. Today, however, most foods have long supply chains, and so a much wider range of foods have become susceptible to adulteration, because it is so difficult to oversee their authenticity during their long journeys. When goods are owned by many different parties along the path from producer to consumer, fraud of all kinds becomes more likely. The obscurity of small suppliers in so many global food-provisioning chains makes it harder for both consumers and governments to find who is to blame, assuming their fraud is even recognized.

Honey is a good example of a substance that is apt to be adulterated because it gets handled by so many middlemen. In the European Union, for example, there were 620,000 beekeepers in 2010, and many of these were non-professional.¹⁷ The honey they produce is sold to bulk processors and wholesalers, and sometimes to importers, before reaching retailers and then consumers. Honey labelling requirements vary by country, but somewhere along this long chain much of the honey sold around the world ends up being adulterated. Tests done in 2011 showed that a full 75 per cent of the honey sold in American grocery stores had been adulterated.¹⁸

Honey, a relatively expensive product, is subject to adulteration with different sweeteners of all kinds. These can include corn sugar, cane sugar, beet sugar and even maple syrup.¹⁹ The filtration of honey is an acceptable manufacturing process as it removes any unwanted sediment, but heat-assisted industrial filtration used at too high a temperature or for too long can change its fundamental composition. Adding water is particularly bad for honey because it brings on fermentation, but since it increases its weight, the practice can still be lucrative for middlemen.²⁰ Perhaps the easiest and most lucrative adulteration for honey is to mix cheaper honey with a higher-quality product (or to mislabel it altogether).

Even in instances where legal adulterations take place – often by listing any extra ingredients on the label, so that no misrepresentation is occurring – the practice still has disturbing effects. The flavour of honey reflects the landscape in which it was made. Buy industrialized, adulterated honey and the taste will likely be bland and standardized. Nevertheless, plenty of consumers around the world will purchase such honey, because of the low price or the attraction of acquiring large quantities at a lower price. Sadly, they might well be satisfied with that inferior product because the sugars with which that honey has been adulterated are enough to satisfy their desire for sweetness, even if all the geographically generated nuances in the taste of the honey have disappeared.²¹

Yet before we get too carried away with analysing the costs of our globalized food-provisioning system, it is important to remember that it has a primary benefit beyond lowering the price of the final products. Thanks to globalization and the trade that comes with it, people in temperate climes do not have to devote much of their lives to finding and producing foods. Whole regions of the world would be mostly uninhabitable at their current population levels if they could not rely on importing food from elsewhere. Misrepresentation happens, and so do more dangerous forms of adulteration – however, the fact that some products are adulterated should not be blamed entirely on the food-provisioning system, even if the practice of adulteration becomes more likely due to its existence.

Consider the alternative. In order to know exactly what we are eating at all times, we would have to be there when each foodstuff is made. That is logistically impossible. Instead, we are forced to trust that food distributors and manufacturers will not cheat or poison us. Marketing is the primary way that manufacturers try to make this situation tenable; for example, by evoking a traditional method of producing the food in question or a specific place known for making it. Advertising gets consumers to forget about all the links that exist in the provisioning chain before the product reaches them. Since it is a contradiction in terms to romanticize wholesalers and middlemen, their presence is never even acknowledged.

Labelling

Another way that food manufacturers try to instil trust in their customers is through labelling. Assuming that some particular cheaper ingredient is not unhealthy, is it morally acceptable...