Food fraud is back in the news with Ron McNaughton, head of the food crime and incidents unit at Food Standards Scotland, quoted as saying that ‘Price increases of food and the war in Ukraine are having a direct impact on food supply chains in Scotland and the UK. These global crises create opportunities for criminals.’
His comments in The Times came as Food Standards Scotland and the Food Standards Scotland and the Food Standards Agency launched Our Food 2021: An annual review of food standards across the UK, an in-depth review of food standards in the UK.
The report cautiously concludes that despite two years of major upheaval following the UK’s departure from the EU, the significant effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently the disruption caused by the war in Ukraine that food standards in the UK have largely been maintained. However, while there has been no evidence of a drop in standards, the report warns of significant challenges ahead.
Sour grapes
While we should be glad that the food standards authorities are keeping a close eye on what is on our plates, the food crime story is so old that it could have been painted on cave walls by our most distant ancestors. Put simply, food fraud has been happening since food started being sold. In ancient Rome, bakers were suspected of bulking out bread with chalk while Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, complained that ‘so many poisons are employed to force wine to suit our taste’.
In her fascinating yet horrifying book, Swindled, Bee Wilson details the tricks of rogue elements in the food industry through the ages. From using short measures to cheat customers to adulterating high value products with cheaper ingredients, there have always been a myriad of methods to con the consumer. Some, such as padding out ground coffee with undeclared chicory or the rather more repulsive baked and powdered horse livers, were unfair. Others, such as painting gills red to make fish seem fresher, were dangerous. And others still, like making sweets appear more attractive to children by dying them brightly using lead and mercury-based colours, were lethal.
Over the centuries, increasing regulation and inspection in tandem with improving scientific techniques that could detect adulteration have made food fraud more difficult in developed countries. But not impossible. Who can forget the great horse meat scandal of 2013 when horse DNA was found in a number of supermarket burger samples?
Sweet nothings add up
Or indeed the manuka honey hustle of 2014? As more and more people praised the health benefits of the honey produced in New Zealand, the more expensive it became and the more attractive it appeared to scammers. The Antipodean country’s manuka producers reckoned that the UK was consuming 1,800 tonnes of the stuff annually. This quantity would have been a cause for celebration were it not for the fact that New Zealand was only producing 1,700 tonnes a year.
The high prices which the best extra virgin olive oil can command make it a ripe product for fraud on an industrial scale. Passing off cheaper Spanish and Greek oil as extra virgin Italian olive oil has long been a lucrative staple for the so-called agromafia. While not without its risks, one imagines that it is also considerably less dangerous a business than trying to muscle in on, say, a Mexican cartel’s cocaine market.
Not that food fraud is always such a high stakes business. Become a regular customer at any farmers’ market and chat to the artisan producers. If you gain their trust then you will probably begin to hear dark mutterings about the chefs who claim to use their premium products on their menus but have not actually bought anything from the producers for years.
Being sold humdrum sausage made from an everyday porker when you paid for hand-crafted saucisson from a rare breed pig is irritating. It does not have the same consequences as selling condemned meat to schools and hospitals, as happened in the UK at the turn of the millennium. However, it is the thin edge of the same wedge.
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