
The fight against food fraud - Turukawa
https://next.ft.com/content/42985f40-f148-11e5-aff5-19b4e253664a
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askyourmother
Food and drink fraud is a real problem in London, especially fake alcohol,
which leads to organ damage, blindness and death. Lots of local smaller shops
get caught selling faked wine and vodka, a market trader recently caught with
fake spices (basically was flavoured dust and dirt with shoe polish colourings
and fake flavours), and plenty of fake branded food goods.

~~~
13of40
I've been to Moscow a few times, and despite it being only three or four days
drive from France, Spain, and Italy, it's nearly impossible to get a decent
bottle of wine there. Bottom shelf stuff is obviously counterfeit, and even
the top shelf imports are like putting one bullet in your revolver and pulling
the trigger.

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EliRivers
I'm with the Chinese on this one; the penalty for fucking with the food supply
is... well, death does seem a little extreme, so maybe I'm not completely with
the Chinese on it, but I can certainly see where they're coming from.

If you can't trust what you're putting in your mouth, the game of modern
civilisation is over.

~~~
jacobush
Ah, the Chinese system. Pervasive corruption and token execution of
scapegoats.

~~~
contingencies
Sorry, but I trust the always fresh, usually picked under 24 hours ago food
sold in the market here in China _far_ more than at the end of a global supply
chain dominated by multiple layers of near-monopolistic intermediaries. None
of that cold chain, international shipping nonsense. Here we work on volume
and speed.

~~~
EliRivers
I've never picked up a packet of infant formula and wondered so much if it's
going to kill my child that I purchase a different brand that had to be
smuggled to me across the HK border.

I expect that something picked off a field and delivered to you unprocessed is
probably relatively safe (although those fields are, by and large, unregulated
and uninspected). Anything that has gone through an unregulated, uninspected
factory? Significantly less safe.

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banku_brougham
The best defense my family has settled on is to buy from farmers markets
(whole fish, butchered meat), or buy fresh as in vegetables and fruits.

That offers no protection against hormone injected meats, or plants bred to
look nice but with zero-nutrients, so we shop at reputable markets and hope
they have a positive influence on the supply chain.

Its not exaggerating to say that many people in small african towns are eating
more nutritious foods than we are getting in our modern, corrupted world.

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hobarrera
This article left me impressed at the level of processing in foods available
in the first world. While this probably results in lower prices, it just reads
to me like problems from a completely different world.

I live in Argentina, and, while I don't consume fish, I've always noticed at
the supermarket that they're sold whole: with head and tail included. Buying
oranges per kilo is cheaper than buying juice (0.69USD a kilo, which yields
generally above 500mL), so frequent juice consumers have motivation to just
squeeze it themselves. There's only a single brand of actual "orange juice"
sold in most places, while consumption of sodas or flavoured waters is what's
common the most.

Some things like basil and parsley are sold as whole plants, because it's so
cheap to just move/sell that around, that it's the norm. Some fancier
supermarkets have basil in the pot, so you can keep the plant alive at home
and have REALLY fresh basil.

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holri
This is why Foodcoops and CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) are booming.
They bring producers and consumers back into a direct relationship.

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redtuesday
Could something like SCiO [1] help customers to avoid stuff like that?

EDIT - oh, in one of the pictures of the article SCiO is used.

[1]
[https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/](https://www.consumerphysics.com/myscio/)

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julie1
I normally buy non pasteurized natural apple juice at the fresh market from a
place that I chose just because the guy was nice to my wife.

One day he was closed, so I went for the other one that sold another non
pasteurized _healthy_ juice.

I brought it home and was kind of puzzled : I put my yeast, and set my home
made setup for making my cider and it was not kicking as much as usual. So I
tripled the dose of yeast. Finally kicked.

After 9 days I tried it. It was alcoholized AND sugarished. One of my highest
batch. And I was really puzzled. Yeast makes alcohol out of sugar. And I had
put my regular chaptalization. Nothing that should have been that sugarish AND
alcoholized.

It was weirldy tasting like sorbier (rowan and mountain-ash). I knew this
taste, because my great mother used to make us drink this horror as a water
syrup when I was kid. Once you know you never forget. Beuark.

And I got sick for the first time the day after. So I inquired.

When I told my story to other vendors they told me it was a classic in
"healthy food", sorbitol helps conserves without being actively searched.
Hence my triple yeast kick.

The funny part is that I realized you need no labs to detect fraud, you need
to have eaten the "right" food as a kid. You need to be critical,
experimenting, thinking. And confrontational.

You know, I began making my alcohol for the same reasons my great father did
when he was a (Belgian) migrant in France. Because he was poor and wanted
something _cheap_ of a quality he liked.

I learned making my malossol, my ketchup, my tomato sauce, my mistelle.... to.
Because, coding is not enough skills.

And nowadays, I am better at appreciating food and detecting food fraud.

I really appreciate what being poor has taught me, I don't really appreciate
that most customers are so ignorant they make food more expensive and less
edible for "healthy reasons". Something is kind of wrong globally. But I kind
of don't care, me, I can survive.

~~~
Laforet
Sorbitol is not a preservative, your juices probably had sorbic acid which is
used as an anti-fungal, but for a good reason:

I grew up in a region where historically the rates of liver cancer were much
higher than the national average: The summers there are long and extremely
humid, perfect breeding conditions for mildrew in the food supply and people
are constantly exposed to aflatoxin, a Group 1 carcinogen[1]. However
thankfully the situation is improving as people realise the danger and use
preservatives when it is appropriate to do so. Although having lived there for
quite a long time I am still more likely to develop liver cancer than you.

Basic food chemistry is not fraud, if anything it saved many lives.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin)

~~~
julie1
Sorry, I just can recognize the taste of the plant, not the molecule.

Thanks for the precision.

I do agree with you. I still think people should accept that you cannot
delegate knowledge to elite and learn. I also accept what you say about the
knowledge that saves life.

We would be better protected if people were part of the chain of control and
accepted that science can be done in their kitchen and that we need to
cooperate because it is hard to have a job a family and be perfect in
everything.

Nobody's perfect and we should accept it.

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kazinator
> _Small retail businesses selling spices in larger quantities may buy direct
> from their countries of origin — which provides another opening for
> organised criminals to penetrate supply chains that are not as heavily
> regulated, says Elliott._

I'm confused, is this about food or FUD?

Yeah, " _their_ countries of origin" \--- those damn crooked little stores run
by colored folk!

Why, I'm running scared to the nearest SuperValu, Trader Joe's or Walmarts,
who would never buy cases of stuff direct from suppliers in those same
countries!

> _Elliott says he declined through fear an invitation from a Turkish
> processor to fly over and tour its facilities. “I thought, ‘I don’t think
> I’ll do that, because I’ll probably never come home again.’”_

Undoubtedly, Elliott once saw _Midnight Express_ , and thought it was a travel
documentary.

~~~
davidw
As you point out, it's necessary to be vigilant about protectionism trying to
masquerade as 'food safety'.

However, there are real concerns too: [http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-
home-of-olive-oil-and-m...](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-home-of-
olive-oil-and-mozzarella-is-still-the-mafias-toxic-waste-land)

At the same time, Italy is also a victim of protectionism against things like
prosciutto and salame and other wonderful foods that are difficult to get in
the US.

So... best to judge on a case by case basis.

