I don't think it's a coincidence that these fake food articles—truffle oil, olive oil, seafood—are springing up after Larry Olmsted recently published Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do about It.
Olmsted exposes rampant fraudulent labeling and deceptive practices in the food industry, including Parmesan cheese, olive oil, truffle oil, seafood (salmon, snapper, white tuna, shrimp), Kobe beef, and more.
I'm about halfway through the book, and it's shocking. It's definitely changed how I shop for certain food and what I order in restaurants.
How can our government be failing us so miserably? Ensuring that our food is safe and properly labeled should be the most basic duties of a government. And yet they are failing us miserably. In April of 2011, a paper was published showing that 69% of store-bought olive oil was fake,[1] and yet the government has done practically nothing to protect us.
In 2013, there was the Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak causing deadly brain absences in children and making hundreds sick. But nothing was done for over a year.[2] Instead of fixing the problems here, the government reacts by allowing China to process our chicken making the problem that much harder trace.[3]
We’ve let Industry and lobbyists take our democracy from us with their super pacs and regulatory capture. When are people going to get fed up with this and demand that our government starts protecting us instead of the industry?
But when federal limits are breached, and officials believe that a recall is necessary, their only option is to ask the producer to remove the product voluntarily. Even then, officials may only request a recall when they have proof that the meat is already making customers sick. As evidence, the F.S.I.S. typically must find a genetic match between the salmonella in a victim’s body and the salmonella in a package of meat that is still in the victim’s possession, with its label still attached.
> How can our government be failing us so miserably? Ensuring that our food is safe and properly labeled should be the most basic duties of a government.
In the United States food is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. Its FDA regulates food and drug safety. The rest of it works with farmers to increase production and ensure food is produced in volume at the lowest cost.
I think you can see the problem here :-(
We have the same problem at the Department of the Interior which regulates open space and its use and takes care of maximizing the land's economic value (i.e. grants mining and other extractive uses like grazing on public lands).
At least the interior department got free drugs and sex from oil company employees while as far as I can tell the ag department doesn't get that kind of "in kind" industry encouragement: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html
PS: Interior is also responsible with relations with the various tribes, which hasn't worked out too well for them either.
I assume you support increased funding to FDA so they can hire more people and facilities to go after these cases, and that you are persuading others to also support this.
* 91% of seafood consumed in the United States is imported, and half of it is farmed. Yet only one-thousandth of 1 percent of imports are inspected for fraud.
* A study of NYC seafood done by Oceana, a non-profit marine conservation group, found fraud in 58% of retail outlets and 39% of restaurants.
* Every sushi restaurant from which samples were collected—100%—served fake fish
* A supermarket test 2011 found that the five top-selling imported "extra virgin" olive oil brands in the United States failed to meet the basic legal standard 73% of the time.
* In 2001, the USDA banned the importation of Kobe eef due to cases of mad cow disease. The ban was lifted in 2012, but only a handful of restaurants/suppliers are able to obtain real Kobe Beef. Yet, we've all seen Kobe beef plastered everywhere on menus; it's all fake.
* Kobe is a completely unregulated term. Under USDA regulations, the legal requirement for calling something Kobe beef is that it qualifies as beef.
> Every sushi restaurant from which samples were collected—100%—served fake fish
I'm confused, what were they serving instead? Bison? Crab? Chicken? Tofu? Sharks? How can you fake fish?
If I'm being honest, this sounds like an exaggeration to me. Maybe rephrase if that's not what you meant?
(Edit: See my comment below [1] referring to Wikipedia -- it appears it's not even clear these are being mislabeled in the first place. Some people just don't think there is a huge distinction between the species; others do. That's another reason why this seems like a gross exaggeration of what is going on.)
>91% of seafood consumed in the United States is imported, and half of it is farmed. Yet only one-thousandth of 1 percent of imports are inspected for fraud.
That shouldn't, by itself, be a problem, right? Any importation is a big deal that requires a license and someone putting their name down as having responsibility for it.
Even with low inspection, as soon as you find the fraud, you fine that importer and cut them off until they have their act together, right? Why doesn't that work as an incentive to prevent blatant abuses?
> Yet only one-thousandth of 1 percent of imports are inspected for fraud.
Yes, and? That's how statistical analysis works. You don't sample every single member of the population, as it would be infeasibly expensive. You can get almost as good results for a small fraction of the cost (through random sampling).
> I don't think it's a coincidence that these fake food articles—truffle oil, olive oil, seafood—are springing up after Larry Olmsted recently published Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do about It.
If he really did publish recently, it can hardly be anything else; the olive oil and seafood results are many years old. They are more likely to have inspired him to write the book than the other way around.
If you buy your seafood whole you avoid a lot of frauds; you can't buy a whole cow but you can absolutely buy a whole fish or pieces of salmon cut in front of you. I would not buy seafood any other way (and I'm not sure I ever have -- seafood doesn't stay fresh for a long time, it feels quite dangerous to buy packaged in a supermarket).
There's industry-level misrepresentation at play here, not just nefarious one-offs by the local fishmonger. On the Pacific coast of the US many retailers (whole foods, etc.) sell fish from the genus Sebastes ("rockfish") as "pacific snapper," though it isn't in Lutjanidae (snappers). From what I've gathered, this practice is old enough that many of the fishermen don't know it isn't what people on the East Coast would consider a snapper.
Having grown up on the Gulf, I was amazed how cheap snapper was the first time I bought it, then promptly disappointed by how bad it was by comparison.
As I said in the last fake food thread, this seems to be a problem tech can help solve. If big-brands fake their olive oil, it _should_ be easy to look up. Luckily computers are really good at indexing. A site where brands are rated (rotten tomatoes), and where you can look up groceries (actually, there are already some barcode scanning apps right?) for a 'true' ingredients list.
Sites like these hopefully ride the wave of public frustration and when the fake-food debacle quiets down, it becomes a more regular sort of rating site (i've often wondered which olive oil tastes best, but hard to compare 12 brands when it takes a month to finish 1 bottle)
"The biggest impostor, fittingly, was farmed Asian catfish, a fish with white flesh that is easily disguised when it’s filleted and drenched in sauce. It was sold in place of 18 types of more expensive fish, including perch, cod and grouper."
This is especially concerning for people who try to avoid farmed fish (to minimize inflicting suffering). Farmed catfish has an incredibly high suffering/kg ratio, 6x that of salmon, 30x that of chicken meat, and 1000x that of beef.
That's actually in interesting (and possibly helpuful) ratio... I've often thought I'd rather only have to kill one animal (cow) for ~200 meals than 100 animals (chickens) for the same number of meals...
What's the SI unit for suffering? How do you calibrate your measurement instruments?
If you have a genuine ethical objection to causing suffering to other living creatures, you can be vegan, lacto-vegetarian, or you can eat meat certified as jhatka by a trusted authority. It is never necessary for you to compare suffering ratios.
If you truly want to minimize the pain you send out into the world, it's zero. That is an easily achievable number. Go vegan. Be kind to everyone. Good luck on your path to enlightenment. If you aren't going for zero, why would you bother half-assing it?
For the record, I don't care whether or not my meal has ever screamed in agony. I can still respect the beliefs of those who do care. But I also don't wish to hear any of them preach to me about it, or let them trick me into enduring some sort of ideological sales pitch.
If you re-read the comment above, you will see that it is not preaching. It is careful to say "for people who try to ... minimize inflicting suffering" -- leaving room for those (like you) who don't care.
Further, I think you are creating an unhelpful dichotomy between zero and nonzero. This dichotomy is not necessary.
It is reasonable to try to reduce suffering, but not drive it to zero (whatever that might imply). Perhaps there's more to the cost function (e.g., endangered species), or perhaps one is skeptical (like you seem to be) that you can measure suffering precisely enough to drive it to zero.
You say zero is easily achievable, but I doubt this. One can argue that the migrant labor that picked your carrots suffered, or that tiny insects were harmed in harvesting your vegetables (not a strawman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism). I'm not advocating that position, but I do claim that "zero" is not easily achievable, if you look carefully.
I recall a recent article on much of olive oil being counterfeit. It made me think how easy it would be to dupe other foods, and I suspect a lot of food is fake or falsely labeled.
How easy would it be to pass a regular banana off as an organic banana? How easy is it to label one thing as something else? Makes you think a bit.
Here's another perspective on it, how often will you notice? If you don't then does it matter?
Before I seem contrarian, I will note that I love sashimi, and of course I can tell the difference between tuna and salmon sashimi. I don't want to think I have a dull tongue, but other times, when I'm just hungry, I don't care. I see the point of worrying about being ripped off when thinking you are buying high end fish, but if I buy cheap fish in a meal from a stall, I don't really expect much in the way of authenticity, so I'm not sure I would care. Perhaps I am just more forgiving.
Put simply: It matters because taste is not the only criteria used to select which seafood to buy.
One might make a choice based on mercury content, environmental friendliness, dietary restrictions (medical or philosophical), to support (or abstain from supporting) a particular industry, or something else entirely.
To allow fraud which can't be detected on the palate is to deny buyers their freedom to choose based on any criteria other than taste.
It is not up to the producer what criteria buyers use when choosing their purchases.
Also, if the consumer shouldn't care, the producer shouldn't either. If the producer thinks it shouldn't matter what it says on the label, well then... no harm in putting the right thing on the label, right? No? I guess it matters then.
Of course it matters, you're being defrauded as a consumer.
Aside from that, it could have health ramifications. Most people eat organic to avoid herbicide exposure, and most people use olive oil because it's considered healthy. Obviously there are countless examples. You should get what you pay for.
Here's another perspective on it, how often will you notice? If you don't then does it matter?
A few years ago I purchased some olive oil while overseas from an outfit that was literally running a large machine pressing olives in front of me.
Shocking, the oil actually smelled like olives vs the stuff in the bottle, which usually smells like nothing. That oil also had a sharp olive taste which is actually missing from the store purchased stuff as well. There is a bit of an olive oil industry starting in texas as well, and that stuff when purchased directly from a farm (orchard?) tastes like olives as well. Makes me wonder if 100% of the olive oil i've been purchasing in the last decade is fake, or per some of the articles strongly cut.
BTW: Its not a function of the age either AFAIK, I purchased nearly a gallon when overseas and it lasted me over a year, all the while maintaining the distinctive smell and taste.
The whole deal with food regulation is it's very hard for a consumer to test for toxic substances/purported nutrition etc. It absolutely matters even if you don't notice.
My understanding is that these types of dupes have been going on for decades. I didn't know about the deceptions in white fish, but my mom has frequently told me that my grandpa (a Swedish commercial fisherman who emigrated to New Jersey) often identified shark being sold as swordfish or other muscular, and more expensive, fish.
If you look at the provided Seafood Fraud map, most of the SF Bay Area 'mislabeling' incidents come from one report dated 2008 [1]. So yes, it's at least 8 years old at this time.
Readit News
Olmsted exposes rampant fraudulent labeling and deceptive practices in the food industry, including Parmesan cheese, olive oil, truffle oil, seafood (salmon, snapper, white tuna, shrimp), Kobe beef, and more.
I'm about halfway through the book, and it's shocking. It's definitely changed how I shop for certain food and what I order in restaurants.
In 2013, there was the Salmonella Heidelberg outbreak causing deadly brain absences in children and making hundreds sick. But nothing was done for over a year.[2] Instead of fixing the problems here, the government reacts by allowing China to process our chicken making the problem that much harder trace.[3]
We’ve let Industry and lobbyists take our democracy from us with their super pacs and regulatory capture. When are people going to get fed up with this and demand that our government starts protecting us instead of the industry?
[1] http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/files/report041211fi...
[2] http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/foster-farms-finally-rec...
[3] https://www.davidwolfe.com/usda-shipping-chickens-china-proc...
The same result applies to software security.
fun quotes:
But when federal limits are breached, and officials believe that a recall is necessary, their only option is to ask the producer to remove the product voluntarily. Even then, officials may only request a recall when they have proof that the meat is already making customers sick. As evidence, the F.S.I.S. typically must find a genetic match between the salmonella in a victim’s body and the salmonella in a package of meat that is still in the victim’s possession, with its label still attached.
In the United States food is regulated by the Department of Agriculture. Its FDA regulates food and drug safety. The rest of it works with farmers to increase production and ensure food is produced in volume at the lowest cost.
I think you can see the problem here :-(
We have the same problem at the Department of the Interior which regulates open space and its use and takes care of maximizing the land's economic value (i.e. grants mining and other extractive uses like grazing on public lands).
At least the interior department got free drugs and sex from oil company employees while as far as I can tell the ag department doesn't get that kind of "in kind" industry encouragement: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html
PS: Interior is also responsible with relations with the various tribes, which hasn't worked out too well for them either.
* 91% of seafood consumed in the United States is imported, and half of it is farmed. Yet only one-thousandth of 1 percent of imports are inspected for fraud.
* A study of NYC seafood done by Oceana, a non-profit marine conservation group, found fraud in 58% of retail outlets and 39% of restaurants.
* Every sushi restaurant from which samples were collected—100%—served fake fish
* A supermarket test 2011 found that the five top-selling imported "extra virgin" olive oil brands in the United States failed to meet the basic legal standard 73% of the time.
* In 2001, the USDA banned the importation of Kobe eef due to cases of mad cow disease. The ban was lifted in 2012, but only a handful of restaurants/suppliers are able to obtain real Kobe Beef. Yet, we've all seen Kobe beef plastered everywhere on menus; it's all fake.
* Kobe is a completely unregulated term. Under USDA regulations, the legal requirement for calling something Kobe beef is that it qualifies as beef.
I'm confused, what were they serving instead? Bison? Crab? Chicken? Tofu? Sharks? How can you fake fish?
If I'm being honest, this sounds like an exaggeration to me. Maybe rephrase if that's not what you meant?
(Edit: See my comment below [1] referring to Wikipedia -- it appears it's not even clear these are being mislabeled in the first place. Some people just don't think there is a huge distinction between the species; others do. That's another reason why this seems like a gross exaggeration of what is going on.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12466029
That shouldn't, by itself, be a problem, right? Any importation is a big deal that requires a license and someone putting their name down as having responsibility for it.
Even with low inspection, as soon as you find the fraud, you fine that importer and cut them off until they have their act together, right? Why doesn't that work as an incentive to prevent blatant abuses?
There's a 0% chance there's a single gram of Kobe beef in those.
Yes, and? That's how statistical analysis works. You don't sample every single member of the population, as it would be infeasibly expensive. You can get almost as good results for a small fraction of the cost (through random sampling).
If he really did publish recently, it can hardly be anything else; the olive oil and seafood results are many years old. They are more likely to have inspired him to write the book than the other way around.
Ah ! That explains how you can find kobe beef burger on a motor way dinner chain in Spain for the same price than a regular "gourmet" burger.
Having grown up on the Gulf, I was amazed how cheap snapper was the first time I bought it, then promptly disappointed by how bad it was by comparison.
Sites like these hopefully ride the wave of public frustration and when the fake-food debacle quiets down, it becomes a more regular sort of rating site (i've often wondered which olive oil tastes best, but hard to compare 12 brands when it takes a month to finish 1 bottle)
This is especially concerning for people who try to avoid farmed fish (to minimize inflicting suffering). Farmed catfish has an incredibly high suffering/kg ratio, 6x that of salmon, 30x that of chicken meat, and 1000x that of beef.
http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-c...
If you have a genuine ethical objection to causing suffering to other living creatures, you can be vegan, lacto-vegetarian, or you can eat meat certified as jhatka by a trusted authority. It is never necessary for you to compare suffering ratios.
If you truly want to minimize the pain you send out into the world, it's zero. That is an easily achievable number. Go vegan. Be kind to everyone. Good luck on your path to enlightenment. If you aren't going for zero, why would you bother half-assing it?
For the record, I don't care whether or not my meal has ever screamed in agony. I can still respect the beliefs of those who do care. But I also don't wish to hear any of them preach to me about it, or let them trick me into enduring some sort of ideological sales pitch.
Further, I think you are creating an unhelpful dichotomy between zero and nonzero. This dichotomy is not necessary.
It is reasonable to try to reduce suffering, but not drive it to zero (whatever that might imply). Perhaps there's more to the cost function (e.g., endangered species), or perhaps one is skeptical (like you seem to be) that you can measure suffering precisely enough to drive it to zero.
You say zero is easily achievable, but I doubt this. One can argue that the migrant labor that picked your carrots suffered, or that tiny insects were harmed in harvesting your vegetables (not a strawman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain_vegetarianism). I'm not advocating that position, but I do claim that "zero" is not easily achievable, if you look carefully.
Why, killohurts, of course.
You could go with millihitlers. https://www.reddit.com/comments/dlu96/new_si_unit_one_hitler...
How easy would it be to pass a regular banana off as an organic banana? How easy is it to label one thing as something else? Makes you think a bit.
Before I seem contrarian, I will note that I love sashimi, and of course I can tell the difference between tuna and salmon sashimi. I don't want to think I have a dull tongue, but other times, when I'm just hungry, I don't care. I see the point of worrying about being ripped off when thinking you are buying high end fish, but if I buy cheap fish in a meal from a stall, I don't really expect much in the way of authenticity, so I'm not sure I would care. Perhaps I am just more forgiving.
One might make a choice based on mercury content, environmental friendliness, dietary restrictions (medical or philosophical), to support (or abstain from supporting) a particular industry, or something else entirely.
To allow fraud which can't be detected on the palate is to deny buyers their freedom to choose based on any criteria other than taste.
It is not up to the producer what criteria buyers use when choosing their purchases.
Also, if the consumer shouldn't care, the producer shouldn't either. If the producer thinks it shouldn't matter what it says on the label, well then... no harm in putting the right thing on the label, right? No? I guess it matters then.
Aside from that, it could have health ramifications. Most people eat organic to avoid herbicide exposure, and most people use olive oil because it's considered healthy. Obviously there are countless examples. You should get what you pay for.
Shocking, the oil actually smelled like olives vs the stuff in the bottle, which usually smells like nothing. That oil also had a sharp olive taste which is actually missing from the store purchased stuff as well. There is a bit of an olive oil industry starting in texas as well, and that stuff when purchased directly from a farm (orchard?) tastes like olives as well. Makes me wonder if 100% of the olive oil i've been purchasing in the last decade is fake, or per some of the articles strongly cut.
BTW: Its not a function of the age either AFAIK, I purchased nearly a gallon when overseas and it lasted me over a year, all the while maintaining the distinctive smell and taste.
If I don't care what kind of fish I am getting, I order fish and chips, or fish tacos.
If I care what kind of fish, I order tuna or eel or salmon or trout...
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320708...
https://www.provenance.org