The Rise Of Food Fraud

May 25, 2016 in Daily Bulletin

You may not always be eating what you think you’re eating. Natalie Whittle wrote about food fraud and how things came to be this way:

  • The story of a fish “freshly caught off the coast of Scotland” illustrates why food fraud is so difficult to catch. The fish is captured by a Russian ship, sent to China to be fileted, then sent to Korea to be stored, and sold on to other intermediaries from there.
  • Organized crime has been getting into this business because it’s so easy to infiltrate and because it requires things that they normally have – like haulage, storage, and money laundering capabilities.
  • It’s innocuous items that are targets for fraud. The apple juice you’re drinking may not be what you think it is. Margins may be low but a lot more apple juice is drunk than champagne.
  • Similarly testing indicates that 25% of dried oregano is cut with things like olives, and hazelnut leaves.
  • The industry is hitting back. A lab in Belfast uses a £500,000 machine that has been repurposed to detect chemical traces of foreign food instead of cancer.

Read more here.

Source: Financial Times

Via: Marginal Revolution