I Want to Trust My Food is Real

This post is all about fraud. Like the recent news about the lawsuit regarding the mini bottles of Fireball Whiskey, which turns out to not be actually whiskey, but a malt drink with whiskey flavoring (WaPo). Food, it turns out, can be full of fraudulent practices.

—**—

Global Food Fraud Defined

The European Union (EU) wrote that food fraud is any deliberate action of businesses or individuals to deceive others in regards to the integrity of food to gain undue advantage. They consider types of food fraud to include, but not limited to: adulteration, substitution, dilution, tampering, simulation, counterfeiting, and misrepresentation. This includes intentionally causing a mismatch between food product claims and food product characteristics.

This is not new, way back when, Romans were complaining about fraudulent wine (1). Since the 13th century, England has had food fraud laws against diluting wine with water, adding ash to pepper, and packing flour with chalk (2). The USA, had food laws in 1784, and in the 19th century began protecting consumers from “snake oil salesmen” who preyed on a susceptible public with their spiked tonics and elixirs.

There is even a yearly listing of the top adulterated foods. In 2013 the USA top ten fake foods were: olive oil, milk, honey, saffron, orange juice, coffee, apple juice, grape wine, and a tie with vanilla extract, and maple syrup. Then just eight years later, in 2022, the list changed, just a bit, and here are the new top five: Olive oil, fish, honey, fruit juice, and spices.

How Food is Fraudulent

Many of the agencies fighting fraud list the same series of words to describe how fraudulent food can occur. Here is a mix of what I found online.

Dilution: This is mixing an ingredient of high value, with an ingredient of lower value, and charging the high value price.
- Example: Orange Juice diluted with water, masked with added sugars and citric acid (3).
Substitution: Replacing an ingredient, or part of the product, of high value with another ingredient, or part of the product of lower value.
- Example: Tea Leaves where actual unused tea leaves are replaced with dried, used leaves or dyed sawdust, or other non-tea leaves (4). Or, FAO reported on a collaboration between Chinese and Italian scientists carried out DNA tests on 153 samples from 30 different brands of roasted Xue Yu (a kind of cod) fillet and found that 58 percent of the samples were substituted with other fish species (Xiong et al., 2017).
Misrepresenting: Purposefully hiding the truth about a product or how it is grown.
- Example is coffee being fraudulently labeled fair trade or organic.
Mislabeling: Would be placing a false claim on the food packaging for economic gain.
- Example: Labeling diluted honey or maple syrup as 100% honey or maple syrup. Or the 2013 horse meat scandal, which had beef lasagne adulterated with horse meet and deliberately mislabelled. But even not declaring that a specific food item contains allergens is mislabeling.
Concealment: Using fraudulent means to hide or conceal the truth about a product.
- Example: Using colouring agents to enhance the appearance of inferior or aged fruit and vegetables, or salmon.
Counterfeiting – copying the brand name, packaging concept, recipe, processing method, etc. of food products for economic gain.
Diversion: This is when food intended to one thing is diverted and sold on the market.
- Example: Food given by countries to aid a starving population, is diverted and sold to others who do not require the aid.

Fraud Examples + How To Fight Back

Olive Oil

The most typical olive oil fraud is when manufacturers add a cheaper vegetable oil to an expensive bottle of olive oil, but sell the product as 100% olive oil. Not only are they cheating customers, but if they cut it with soy bean oil say, they could endanger the life of someone who has soy allergies.

In 2018, officials caught the largest olive oil cooperative in Spain exporting a low-quality blend of Tunisian, Moroccan, and Spanish olive oil disguised as extra virgin olive oil to the United States.
In a 2006 fraud case, nicknamed “Operacìon Colesterol”, officials discovered 76,000 liters of sunflower oil were treated with preservatives and dyes to look like olive oil. The fake product was labeled by 14 different brands in Spain as pure olive oil when, in fact, the olive oil content was only about 20%.

So what to do? Here I can suggest some brands that are widely available across the USA that actually are what they say they are.

I know the Costco Kirkland brand (5) and California Olive Oil Ranch brand (5a) are good quality and 100% olive oils.
Do not fall for the Italian brand names, that is no guarantee. But Chile and Australia brands come with high praise.
Stay away from “light” oils.
Only buy olive oil that comes in darker, often greenish, colored bottles, not clear.
Do not trust “cold pressed” as extra-virgin olive oil is, these days, typically spun with centrifuges rather than pressed.
I have written posts on Olive Trees + Oil which has some fraud advice, and a post on Cooking With Oil.
Make sure the label indicates PDO (protected designation of origin) or PGI (protected geographical indication), which should distinguish good quality olive oil.
Or buy your olive oil from local farmers who grow olives all over Northern California.
By the way, any oil labled “truffle oil” does not have truffles in the oil, just a chemical to provide the truffle smell and taste (6). Generally it is an overly pungent smelling oil, that can ruin a dish, and I should know, having fallen for this before, a long time ago.

Just like olive oil, avocado oil is subject to the same fraudulent events. Cut with primarily soy bean oil, for example. The Costco Kirkland avocado oil is recognized as real avocado oil.

_{Species which are commonly mislabeled include Atlantic cod, grouper, swordfish, red snapper, and wild salmon. When processed, these species become extremely difficult to identify. From SharkRsearch.}

Fish + Seafood

Seafood fraud often happens when someone substitutes a less expensive species of fish, for a more expensive species, such as selling less expensive snappers (Lutjanus spp.) or rockfish (Sebastes spp.) for more expensive red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) in a restaurant.

In 2018, researchers from the ocean conservation organization Oceana tested popular fish across the USA and found that 21% (1 in every 5) were mislabeled. Additionally, 1 in every 3 establishments they inspected sold at least one fake fish item. Concluding that restaurants and small markets were particularly risky, as 26% and 24% of seafood samples were fraudulent, respectively.
A global version of this study was done again in 2021, the Guardian-Seascape analysis of 44 recent studies of more than 9,000 seafood samples from restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets in more than 30 countries found that 36% were mislabelled, exposing seafood fraud on a vast, global scale.

So here are recommendations on how to check you are getting what you paid for.

Order whole fish rather than fillets, as it is harder to fake.
Make sure you know what the fish is supposed to look like.
- Haddock and cod are often mislabled (7)
- Hoki is often sold as Hake
Some salmon is dyed red to make it look more appealing (8).
- Farmed salmon is lighter and more pink, while wild has a deeper reddish-orange hue.
- Farmed fish will also have a lot more fatty marbling (the wavy white lines) in its flesh since they aren’t fighting against upstream currents like wild ones
Buy your seafood from a reputable seafood monger.
There are “imitation crab” which are made of starch and finely pulverized white fish that has been shaped and cured to resemble the leg meat of snow crab or Japanese spider crab. These are not fraudulent as they are properly labeled and are often appreciated for what they are.

_{Canada’s fight against fraudulent honey coming into or being sold in Canada.}

Honey + Maple Syrup

Here is a quick list of four ways honey has been modified. First, even though their labels may represent their honey as a pure product, some unscrupulous companies have mixed honey (or maple syrup) with cheaper sweeteners such as corn syrup, rice syrup, sugar beet syrups, or cane sugar. Second, unripe honey can be harvested before it has completely finished being processed by bees and its sugars fully converted to honey. Third, bees can be fed sugar syrups during harvest season, and therefore the honey harvested is not sourced from plant nectar and pollen but rather processed sugars. And fourth, in my opinion, fraudulent honey can be filtered to remove pollen and disguise the exact origin of the honey.

The FDA (2022) found that 10% of all imported honey were adulterated with undeclared added sweeteners (9). So how do you get real honey?

Honey sold at farmer’s markets and directly from apiaries are almost always legit.
Read the ingredient label, and look for ‘raw’, ‘natural’, ‘forest honey’ or ‘organic’.
Pure honey is flammable. Take a dry matchstick and dip it in honey. Strike the matchstick against the matchbox. If it lights, your honey is pure. If it doesn’t light, it may be adulterated (10). I am quoting others here, I have never tried this.
Place a small amount of honey on your thumb and check if it spills or spreads, pure honey is thick while impure honey will be runny (11).
If you open a new jar of honey, and hear a little pop sound, that could be a sign that the honey is adulterated, as that pop usually happens when fermentation takes place inside the bottle.
AdeeHoneyFarms write: In a glass, combine a spoonful of honey, a few drops of vinegar and a small amount of water. If the mixture starts to foam, the honey is adulterated. I have never tried this either but multiple sources vouch this works.

Maple syrup has the same problems as honey.

There should be maple sap or maple syrup as the only ingredient on the label.
Maple syrup is quite runny and not viscous.
Maple syrup is more expensive than regular syrups.

Spices + Herbs

Fraud happens in this area of food when the price for the item is high, and when the supply chain process is complicated. Certainly both are true for spices and herbs that are globally grown and imported. One type of spice fraud (FDA) occurs when an expensive spice or herb is bulked up with other non-spice plant material (such as saffron with other plant stems, or rosemary leaves with branches). This can happen anywhere along the supply chain and often does.

Another type of fraud is using dyes to give spices a certain color, especially when the color strongly impacts the perception of quality. Lead-based dyes and other industrial dyes that can cause adverse health problems have been found in spices such as chili powder, turmeric, and cumin.

2021 Scientists for Consumer Reports selected 15 of the most popular spices and herbs and purchased a total of 126 products (from McCormick, Trader Joes, Whole Foods, etc.) as samples for testing. Of those tested, 40 items had high enough levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium combined, on average, to pose a health concern for children when regularly consumed in typical serving sizes. For thyme and oregano, all the products we tested had levels that CR experts say are concerning. In 31 items, levels of lead were so high that they exceeded the maximum amount anyone should have in a day, according to CR’s experts.
In 2021 a study, carried out in 21 EU states (+ Switzerland and Norway), noted 1 in 5 herbs and spices were adulterated, or modified in some way. Oregano was found to be the most commonly adulterated herb, with ~48% of samples containing other ingredients (such as olive leaves). Other herbs and spices, found most likely to be adulterated, included: pepper (17% of samples), cumin (14%), turmeric (11%), saffron (11%), and paprika (6%). Some herbs and spices were found to contain additives unapproved for use in foods (15).
A study in 2019, published by the magazine Frontiers in Pharmacology, analyzed the authenticity of almost 6,000 herbal products sold across 37 countries using DNA testing. 27% of them, due to the presence of contaminants, substitutes and filler species, did not contain what was claimed on the label (12).
In 2017, the Chinese police busted underground producers that were distributing counterfeit versions of products like soy sauce and spice mix, these ~50 families had been doing this for a decade (13, 14).

How to get the best spice.

Start with opening the lid and smelling the herb or spice, it should smell fragrant and strong.
If you can, give it a taste.
Know your spice, real saffron should be noticeably frayed at one end, and taste sweet and bitter at the same time.
Buy whole and not pre-chopped herbs or pre-ground spice.
Grow and dehydrate your own is the safest way to be assured of the spice and herbs.
Do not bring home spices and herbs from your travels abroad.
Do not rely on brand to assume healthy herbs or spices, in the CR study Simply Organic did okay in most areas, but not oregano. Costco’s Kirkland brand failed in turmeric, while Trader Joes failed in ground cumin.

Meat

In the late 1970s, a well–known case of ‘meat–species substitution fraud’ involved representation of kangaroo meat and horsemeat as frozen beef trimmings. Purchased from an Australian meat broker, it was used by grinders to produce ‘ground beef’ patties for a fast–food franchise operation.

Chapman University in California tested ground meat and exotic–game meats for presence of beef, chicken, lamb, turkey, pork and horsemeat and reported that: (a) 38 of 48 ground meat samples were labeled correctly, (b) 1 sample was mislabeled in its entirety and 9 samples contained additional species. (c) meat from online distributors, local butchers and supermarkets, respectively, was mislabeled 35%, 18% and 6% of the time, and (d) exotic–game meat from online distributors was mislabeled 18.5% of the time.

Other Foods

(2008 to 2012) Some people reported that pine nuts contained a bitter metallic taste, that sometimes lasted for weeks after they ate them. Following an international investigation, it was found that some manufacturers substituted a non-food species of pine nuts in place of more expensive edible pine nut species.

Milk fraud occurs mostly in developing countries, and commonly the fraud is to dilute milk with water, or with sugar, urea, milk powder or even hazardous substances like melamine or detergents. Remember the China (2008) melamine in baby food, or the Russian (2015) palm oil in milk scandals.

In developing countries we have illegal use of organic labels, or eggs from caged hens be marketed as free-range, or ground meat containing other meats from what it is labled.

Summation

What this should say to us is that food safety and inspections are critically important, and (of course) are underfunded or just not done in many cases, to our detriment. This is one of the largely unspoken conversations we should be having regarding the importing/exporting of food and the vast opportunities for fraudulent behaviors, or just the plain greed of so many businessmen.

The other thing this should clarify for home cooks, is that it really is best to plant and grow the herbs and spices (if you can) of your most regularly used items. Surprisingly, to me, oregano thyme, and sage are often diluted with twigs and other leaves when bought from oversea sources.

—Patty