Cheese and ham pizzas with no cheese --- or ham!
SORTING THE BEEF FROM THE BULL by Richard Evershed & Nicola Temple (Bloomsbury Sigma £16.99)
IN JANUARY 2013, food crime hit the headlines. We all lost our appetite for frozen beefburgers when it was revealed that horsemeat had entered the food chain. Lots of us are probably still wary that we might be eating poor old Dobbin.
Perhaps we should be thankful we don’t live in China. In 2014, Walmart stores there had to recall large amounts of highly-prized donkey meat because they had been adulterated with not-so-highly-prized fox meat. Or Malaysia where pork DNA was found in chocolate bars. Or Bangladesh where firms have used formalin to plump up fruit. Its more common use is to preserve human corpses.
The truth, as this eye-opening book shows, is that food crime is a global problem.
Although it gets more attention when scandals emerge, meat is actually less of a target for scams than many other foods. Fishy frauds are more prevalent.
It’s all too easy to mislabel fish and, when red snapper worth £4.50 a kilo can be replaced by Labrador redfish worth 36p a kilo, it’s all too tempting.
Because names of fish vary so widely — Atlantic cod, for instance, has 200 names worldwide — there’s plenty of scope for the unscrupulous to fool us. Confusion is added by perfectly legitimate marketing campaigns designed to give under-utilised species more customer-friendly identities.
‘Slimeheads’ in the U.S., which no one in their senses would eat, became ‘orange roughy’, which people do. Here in the UK, Marks & Spencer were allowed to change the name of ‘witch flounder’ to ‘Torbay sole’.
It’s little wonder, with a global market so bafflingly complex, that IUU (illegal, unreported, unregulated) fishing is now estimated to be worth between £10-20billion a year. It’s not just fish and meat, though. As Richard Evershed and Nicola Temple make clear, almost any foodstuff can attract the fraudsters’ attention. The cheese on your next pizza might be fake. One survey showed that 60 per cent of ham and cheese pizzas contained neither ham nor cheese.
There’s fake milk in India and fake eggs in China. Chilli powders can be coloured with Sudan dyes more commonly used in floor polishes. Even honey, which might seem one of the purest and most natural of human foods, is not safe. According to the European Parliament it’s one of the top ten foods most likely to be adulterated.
What is being done to police the world’s food chain? Few frauds are as easy to detect as that of the Chinese firm which pretended its fruit came from Australia. Looking for an image to put on their packaging, they came up with one they thought was ideal — a panorama of grassland with two hairy-maned lions in the foreground.
Not every nation is as proactive as Denmark which has a ‘Food Flying Squad’, conjuring up a pleasing image of a Scandinavian Sweeney with officers ramming the cars of food fraudsters and shouting ‘You’re nicked!’ in Danish.
However, Evershed and Temple’s book is ultimately a heartening one. The new science of food forensics is finding plenty of ways to combat fraud, from DNA barcoding, which enables clear differentiation between species, to electronic noses and tongues, which detect adulterating additives.
In the cat-and-mouse game between the conmen and the scientists, the good guys can win.