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Adulterate – a word similar to adultery and arguably as scandalous.
In 2008, approximately 52,000 children in China were hospitalised owing to the adulteration of milk powder with the nitrogen-rich organic compound, melamine. Six children died. Yet a Google search on this scandal brings up only a quarter of the results that ‘Ashton Kutcher adultery’ does. It would seem as though our society is far more interested in the alleged affair(s) of a celebrity than an event affecting thousands of people – innocent babies – involving one of the United States’ biggest food trade partners. Is this a reflection of our insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip or our apathy towards the food we eat? It’s probably both ... and perhaps it’s time we refined our tastes.
Defining the problem
‘Food adulteration’ means to reduce the quality of a product by substituting or adding something cheaper. Adulteration is most often motivated by the desire to make a quick buck and in 2009 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defined economically motivated adulteration as ‘the fraudulent, intentional substitution or addition of a substance in a product for the purpose of increasing the apparent value of the product or reducing the cost of its production, i.e., for economic gain’.1 Bee Wilson, in her book Swindled, broke this down into two very simple principles: poisoning and cheating.
The United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) estimates that about 10 per cent of the food we buy from supermarket shelves is adulterated, but this is really just an educated guess. In 2010, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) conducted a national study that involved the analysis of 117,000 food samples collected from all over India. They found that about 13 per cent of samples had been adulterated, but that the adulteration rates could be as high as 40 per cent in some locations (Chhattisgarh) and as low as 4 per cent in others (Delhi). Few other countries have done such a wide-scale assessment of adulteration.
Adulteration is just one of a number of ways we can be cheated in what we eat, though it is perhaps the most common. After all, some beef or chicken in a lamb kebab or some cheaper variety of rice labelled as basmati can bump up profits with relatively low risk of being detected. But food fraud is diverse in its methods of poisoning and cheating. Food that is past its ‘use by’ or ‘best before’ date can be deceitfully repackaged and sold. Animal by-products can be recycled back into the food chain. Products can be purposely mislabelled in terms of their species or country of origin in order to fetch a higher price. False statements can be made with regard to the production of the product, such as claims that eggs are free-range, produce is organic or salmon are wild-caught. These are all acts of fraud that earn someone somewhere along the food chain easy money, while others have to pay the price.
Misrepresentation of food in any way is morally wrong. As consumers, we are at the mercy of labels and if they are misleading or untrue, we are at risk. Some producers go to great lengths to create a genuine premium product, potentially with superior taste and/or nutritional benefits. Conscientious consumers are likely to be willing to pay more for such products. But when a product is misrepresented, consumers are being cheated out of money, they are being cheated out of nutrition and the legitimate producers are being cheated out of business.
Estimates of what food fraud costs the global food industry each year range from £6.4 billion to £31 billion (US$10 billion to $49 billion), depending on the source. Food fraud can drive down prices across the board as businesses try to compete with the price on a fraudulent product. When fraud is detected it can force the industry to conduct rigorous testing on a wide variety of products and potentially recall products; companies can begin to lose sales and can ultimately go bankrupt. The melamine milk incident in 2008 forced China’s dairy giant, Sanlu Group Co. Ltd, into bankruptcy by December of that year. More than 30 milk brands were affected globally by the adulterated milk, forcing more than 60 countries to ban or recall Chinese dairy products at an estimated cost of £11.5 billion (US$18 billion).
In 2007, leading US pomegranate juice manufacturer, POM Wonderful, sued the small California-based beverage company, Purely Juice Inc., for falsely advertising one of its products as 100 per cent pomegranate juice. Suspicious of Purely Juice’s low prices, POM Wonderful secured tests from seven independent laboratories that confirmed that the Purely Juice samples contained little or no pomegranate juice and consisted mainly of corn syrup and other fruit juices. Purely Juice claimed a supply chain issue, stating that they were unaware that their supplier of 100 per cent concentrate was not providing the real thing. In 2008, Purely Juice, with annual revenues of approximately $10 million (£6.5 million), was ordered to pay nearly $2 million (£1.3 million) to POM Wonderful for damages, disgorgement of wrongful profits and legal costs. Purely Juice appealed against the decision, but in 2010 the higher court affirmed the lower court’s decision and the president and founder of Purely Juice, Paul Hachigian, was held personally liable. Purely Juice is now out of business. The economic costs can be acute.
The costs of food fraud go well beyond a company’s bottom line. There are also social, environmental and health costs associated with these practices. There have been many cases throughout the UK now where kebabs and curries have been labelled as lamb or chicken, but have largely contained cow or pig. You will even learn in Chapter 5 that raw chicken breasts have been adulterated with cow and pig protein. This presents an enormous challenge to millions of people whose religious beliefs don’t allow the consumption of cows or pigs, including the UK’s second largest religious group, Muslims.
Some of the environmental consequences of food fraud have been brought to light by the US organisation Oceana. Between 2010 and 2012, Oceana collected more than 1,200 seafood samples from 674 retail outlets in 21 states to determine whether products were being labelled accurately. They found that 33 per cent of these samples were mislabelled. Among other consequences, this dishonest labelling of species can undermine sustainable fishing practices and conservation efforts. First, it creates a market for illegal fishing, including the capture of at-risk species. Second, it misleads consumers into thinking that certain species are readily available, which may not necessarily be the case. Red snapper is a commercially important species that has had harvest restrictions put in place to help conserve it. Yet, if it’s on every menu, the perception is that the species is abundant, when in fact what’s really on the menu is farmed tilapia. Third, consumers who are trying to make sustainable seafood choices using the various consumer guides, such as the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide or the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, may not be buying the sustainable product they think they are. Instead, they may be contributing to the overfishing of vulnerable stocks (more in Chapter 4).
It is human health, however, that arguably carries the greatest cost when it comes to food fraud. An estimated 300,000 children fell ill in the 2008 melamine scandal in China. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, over 50,000 of these children were hospitalised and six died (we’ll revisit this in Chapter 6). In 1981, more than 1,000 deaths and 25,000 serious injuries in Spain were attributed to olive oil that had been adulterated with industrial quality rapeseed (canola) oil. Subsequent investigations suggest that tomatoes heavily dosed with pesticides may have been the true cause of this Spanish outbreak, though oil remains the official culprit (more on this in Chapter 3). In 1986, eight Italians died and 30 were hospitalised when they drank wine adulterated with methyl alcohol, an ingredient of antifreeze and solvents. Austrian wine has been adulterated with diethylene glycol (DEG), the major component of some brands of antifreeze (we discuss this in Chapter 8). There are reports of phoney tofu cakes made from gypsum, paint and starch being sold in Shanghai, mystery meats in London curries and milk adulterated with urea in India. When you begin to delve into the many ways our food is adulterated it is surprising there aren’t more deaths and illnesses associated with food fraud.
Of course, the stories captured by the media are only the acute cases. When a large number of people fall ill in a short period of time it’s easier to track the source. What we can’t even begin to comprehend, however, are the long-term health consequences of substances that slowly accumulate within our body tissues. The long-term health effects of using plasticisers as clouding agents in fruit juices (Chapter 8) and jams, adding the illegal colour additive metanil yellow to turmeric (Chapter 7) or the antibiotic residues in unregulated meats are, as yet, unknown.
It’s necessary to put the human health concern into perspective though. Approximately 48 million Americans become ill from foodborne diseases, such as Salmonella, each year. About 128,000 of these people will end up in hospital and 3,000 will die. In the UK, these numbers are considerably lower: about one million people suffer from foodborne illnesses each year, 20,000 of them will receive treatment in hospital and there will be around 500 deaths. Similar estimates for food fraud-related illnesses simply don’t exist, but it is no doubt several orders of magnitude less. The difference, however, is that foodborne illnesses are generally a result of accidental contamination and poor food-handling regimes. Fraud, on the other hand, is intentional. Someone, somewhere in the food supply chain has made a conscious decision that puts others at risk, and this is very alarming if you consider that this could be done with the intent to harm rather than simply to make a quick buck.
The fraud forecast: cloudy with a chance of harm
This was the motivation behind the US launching the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD) – a Homeland Security Center of Excellence – in 2004. After 9/11 the US took a closer look at its points of vulnerability. Food came out as an obvious threat to homeland security as people consume it multiple times per day and the supply chains can be long, international and somewhat anonymous due to their complexity. The NCFPD was set up as a multi-disciplinary group of researchers to improve detection of food adulteration and to address the vulnerabilities in the US food system in terms of where it could be prone to attack with the intent to harm.
Researchers at the NCFPD are looking for ways to bring together data so that it can help to make predictions. The idea is that data would be gathered from a number of different sources and analysed to look for factors that might spark incidents of adulteration. For example, a report of prolonged drought in Spain that has led to low olive yields, combined with a history of adulteration in the olive oil business, would raise a red flag.
‘We speak a lot about triggers,’ said Dr Amy Kircher, Director of the NCFPD, ‘and this can be climate change or even newly touted health benefits of a particular product. For example, when the health benefits of pomegranate were being heavily advertised, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of pomegranate products out there. But the US was still producing the same number of pomegranates. Production hadn’t increased. How is the gap being filled?’
The idea is that the food fraud forecast would be used to inform decision-making, rather than leading to complete closures for industries. ‘It is still looking for a needle in a haystack in terms of finding adulterated products,’ said Kircher, ‘but this tool would at least allow us to say, “don’t look at the whole haystack, just look in this bottom corner”.’
Even knowing which corner of the haystack to look in might give regulators the edge they need to move towards a proactive rather than a reactive strategy. Prior to the European horse meat scandal – referred to now in the UK as Horsegate – the US didn’t conduct DNA testing on their minced beef. Now they do. The adulterators will now be looking to identify the next weakness in the system.
In fact, Kircher refers to the adulterators as ‘intelligent adversaries’. After all, food fraud can be big business and while scientists on one side are finding sophisticated techniques for detecting the adulterated food, there are scientists on the other side developing equally sophisticated techniques for adulterating it. It is a cat and mouse game – an arms race between scientists and fraudsters – and by its very nature it will always be so.
Traditions of trickery
History certainly would suggest this will always be the case; food fraud is not a new phenomenon. Ten thousand years ago, as our farming ancestors began producing surpluses that could be traded, the possibility for food fraud emerged. People learned to grind grains, ferment fruit to preserve it and turn milk to butter and yogurt to make it more easily digestible; these were the most basic of processed foods. Ingenious prehistoric entrepreneurs, recognising the enhanced value of these premium and specialist goods, would have realised there was a profit advantage in replacing more expensive foodstuffs with cheaper ones. The simple act of adding water to milk could easily have gone undetected by the recipient, since the change in appearance and taste would have been unobservable. But the profit margin for the producer was improved. Indeed, detecting added water in food remains one of the major challenges of the food fraud field, and it’s a theme we will return to in later chapters.
And the fraud continued. In ancient Rome, lead was added to soured wine to mask the flavour. It has been argued that this was the reason many wealthy Romans were sterile as well as mentally incompetent.2 In the eighteenth century, alum, a colourless compound used in dyeing and tanning, was used in bread to make it appear more fashionably white. It was common practice for storekeepers to have two sets of weights behind the counter – one for buying and one for selling. Copper sulphate gave pickles a more appealing though utterly unnatural green vibrancy, which meant they fetched a better price than their pallid pickled shelf-mates. Leaves were picked from sloe shrubs, which commonly grow along British hedgerows, and boiled with the poisonous compound copper acetate to be passed off as green tea. Beer was adulterated with cocculus indicus, a drug that caused convulsions due to the active ingredient picrotoxin. This provided the drinker with a somewhat more inebriating effect in order to hide the fact that the brewers had been sparing with the hops and malt. In fact, food fraud was so widespread during the nineteenth century that one New York Times journalist wrote in 1872 that ‘most people come to accept it nowadays as practically inevitable’ and added that it was best people didn’t really know ‘what abominable messes they are constantly putting down their throats under the most innocent disguises’.3 Indeed, best not to know what scrapings from the floor have been added to your premium black pepper.
Today’s food fraud may be more sophisticated, but it is certainly no less pervasive. Just in the time we’ve been writing this book, there have been at least five scandals in UK headlines: nut protein in spices, rat sold as mutton in China, unidentified meat in curries, goat’s cheese made from sheep milk and cheap oriental perch sold as sea bass. The horse meat scandal heightened awareness of the issue and one doesn’t have to look too far before yet another scandal is uncovered.
Behind every decision to commit a fraudulent act there are costs, benefits and motivators. On one side of the scale there is a reward (usually money) and a trigger (being undercut by competitors). On the other side of the scale there is effort, risk and one’s ability to sleep at night (guilt). Each person’s sense of guilt is probably well established, but if the scales can be tipped so that effort and risk far outweigh the rewards and triggers, we stand a chance of reducing food fraud.
Money is a powerful reward and unless it miraculously decreases in importance, it will continue to be so in the future. With the exception of fraudulent acts that are intended to harm, the goal behind all other food fraud is economic gain. This can be as simple as someone seizing a one-off opportunity to make a little extra cash by watering down some freshly squeezed juice at a market stall, right up to organised criminal networks turning over huge annual profits (fraud can be big business). In fact in 2015, Europol reported that criminal networks are increasingly turning to the food and beverage industry as an arena to conduct their ‘business’. But at the root of it all – whether it’s small crime or big crime – lies greed, and there are strong biological and social factors that drive us to want more resources than our neighbours. An olive grower in Italy, struggling to keep the family business alive, who watches nearby growers get rich by adulterating their oil with cheaper oils must be tempted to make their own product stretch a little further too. It takes a strong moral compass to resist temptation under such conditions. Desperation can steer people in unexpected directions.
In the mid-nineteenth century, 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres) of French vines were destroyed by Phylloxera, a relative of the aphid with a ravenous appetite for the sap of grape vines. Desperate times called for desperate measures and vast amounts of raisins were imported from Greece to create raisin wines. Some vignerons prepared bottles of wine with little or no grape products at all, going for a laboratory approach to the situation and using only chemicals. None of the labels on the bottles ever suggested it was anything other than the real thing. No doubt those involved considered themselves creative problem-solvers rather than criminals – sometimes it’s a matter of perspective.
Not unexpectedly, the desire to earn a little extra cash is most rampant during tough economic times. Yet these are also the times when people may be most tolerant of food fraud. Low-income households are looking for cheap calories and may turn a blind eye to even the most questionable of deals. In the mid-nineteenth century, putrid meat and cheese would be ‘polished’ by adding a layer of fresh fat or cheese to the surface to make it appear edible. Fishmongers would paint the gills of decaying fish to make them appear fresh. The vendors got away with this because the poor working class would do their shopping on a Saturday night after they got paid and it was easier to disguise foul products in the low light conditions of the evening market. People keen to appear wealthier than they were would buy dodgy alum-laced loaves to impress guests with their fashionably white bread. Yet they knew, based on the price, that the deal was too good to be true. Between trying to keep up with the Joneses and simply providing for their families, those living on limited incomes in the 1800s often knew they were being swindled, but had limited choice. Today people with limited incomes are still the most vulnerable to fraud. Highly processed foods are often a cheaper alternative to fresh fruit and vegetables; there are not only more opportunities to adulterate a processed food, but there is also a lower risk of being caught. Perhaps the worst fraud of all, however, is that many of these foods contain empty calories – they are high-calorie food with little nutritional benefit. But this is perhaps a different story.
While economic gain sits on one side of the fraud scale, risk sits on the other. Low inspection rates reduce the risk of fraudulent food being detected, particularly when it comes to imports. The FDA, for example, has increased its overseas inspections, but still only inspects a very small fraction of the facilities that supply food to the US. Approximately 1 to 2 per cent of imports are physically inspected and only about 0.5 per cent will be tested in a lab. When you consider that the US imports 91 per cent of its seafood, this presents a reasonably low risk for fraudsters exporting to the US. Undeniably this is, as Kircher stated, looking for a needle in a haystack. With limited resources for inspections, priority will always go to checking foods that are known to pose a medium to high risk to public health – i.e. food with a history of causing foodborne illnesses. Under this model, testing for fraud will remain a reactive process.
Yet increasing the risk of detection can be a powerful deterrent for fraudsters. In 1995, the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) – now known as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – reported that 35 per cent of commercial maize oil collected off grocery store shelves was adulterated with undeclared oil. Advancements in the detection methods used to test maize oil, which we will go into detail about in Chapter 3, increased the sensitivity of detection, and six years later when the tests were repeated, none of the oil samples from the shops had been adulterated to detectable levels. The risk of getting caught had increased and this alone was enough to deter the fraudsters without any changes to regulations.
As well as low risk, fraudsters are looking for low effort. There needs to be an opportunity to commit fraud and it needs to be relatively easy, though it’s likely that even the laziest criminals are willing to put in some effort for the right amount of money. The long and largely anonymous food supply chains and plethora of consumer-ready products present countless opportunities. Our food whizzes about the globe at an astonishing rate. An extreme example of this was provided by Felicity Lawrence, a special correspondent for the Guardian and author of numerous books on food labelling. She tracked a plastic tray of stir-fry baby vegetables, purchased from Marks & Spencer for £2.99 (US$4.70). The tray included asparagus shoots, miniature corn, dwarf carrots and leeks, tied together with a single chive. She found that the chives, trays and packaging had all been shipped from England to Kenya. There, women working in refrigerated packing sheds next to the Nairobi airport carefully tied the Kenyan produce (the asparagus, corn, carrots and leeks) together with the English chives and placed them on the plastic trays, which were then wrapped in plastic and shipped back to the UK. The chives had made a 13,679-kilometre (8,500-mile) round trip, and in all honesty most likely ended up in the bin or the compost.
The problem is that rarely do our products these days come through a straight-up-and-down supply chain; more often than not, it is a supply network. A comforting mug of hot chocolate on a cold winter day has approximately 31 points in its supply network – between the sugar, milk, cocoa and packaging, 31 businesses have had a hand in the final product. Seen another way, there have been 31 opportunities for adulteration. It was the complexity of this supply network that made tracking the source of the horse meat in the UK so difficult. The ‘beefburgers’ sold at Tesco, for example, were supplied by a factory that was sourcing its ingredients from about 40 different suppliers. The mix of ingredients going into the burgers can change on the production line every half hour, making it even more challenging to pin suppliers to particular batches. Multiply this challenge by the number of ingredients in a ready-made meal like lasagne and suddenly the chain begins to look more like a web.
Just as increasing the risk of getting caught can tip the scales on fraud, so can reducing the opportunities. It is yet another reason, among many, to try and reduce the number of steps from farm to fork. The UK now imports approximately 50 per cent of all its food, whereas 30 years ago it imported just over 25 per cent. Campaigns such as ‘Buy British’ or the 100-mile diet are steps towards a sustainable food system that supports local producers, builds long-term relationships with suppliers and has potential health benefits as a result of eating seasonally and locally. But there are sustainability claims against buy-local campaigns. These argue that it is environmentally less costly to produce food in some areas of the world as the fewer additions required for growing (fertilisers or day-length) outweigh the additional travel costs. Importing peppers from Spain, for example, may have a smaller ecological footprint than growing them in polytunnels or greenhouses in Britain. However, an additional benefit of sourcing food more locally is that it removes some of the anonymity from the supply chain.
To give local producers a competitive edge over cheap imports, government tariffs are often introduced on imported goods. Yet these tariffs can, unfortunately, be a trigger for food fraud. In 2003, the US International Trade Committee (ITC) agreed with US catfish farmers that the importation of Vietnamese catfish was causing losses to the US market. US catfish farmers simply couldn’t compete with the price of the Vietnamese imports in what became known as the catfish wars. The ITC imposed higher tariffs – raising catfish import duties from 5 per cent to upwards of 64 per cent. In theory, this should have evened out the playing field for the US farmers and encouraged the purchase of US products. An unintentional side effect was that distributors began importing Asian catfish as grouper – a higher-value finfish – to avoid the tariffs. One import company alone avoided approximately US$63 million in tariffs; the ex-CEO of Sterling Seafood, a New Jersey seafood importing company, admitted to importing more than five million kilos (11 million pounds) of Vietnamese catfish between 2004 and 2006 and selling them under the labels of grouper and sole. When the catfish–grouper scandal started breaking in 2007, grouper consumers lost their confidence in the product. Subsequent studies showed that more than half of consumers changed their seafood purchasing habits after this scandal broke, turning to non-grouper products instead. This no doubt had a significant impact on places like Florida where commercial landings of grouper were worth about US$21 million (£13.4 million) at the dockside in 2007.4
While fraudsters need to have the opportunity to commit fraud, it also needs to be relatively easy. Though there are numerous examples of sophisticated fraud (the fake eggs we mention in the Introduction for one), the truth is that the easier it is, the more likely it is. Mixtures and ground-up foods, such as cheap oil mixed with expensive oil, papaya seeds ground with peppercorns and horse minced with beef, are at the opposite end of the spectrum to making elaborate fake eggs. For these easier to adulterate foods, there needs to be either less opportunity or greater risk of getting caught in order to tip the scale on the fraudsters.
Uncertain futures = more food fraud
While the economic rewards and the opportunities to commit food fraud are unlikely to disappear any time soon, there is yet another looming reason to believe food fraud will be a part of our future. An uncertain environment, brought about by climate change, is likely to generate the conditions that can trigger fraudulent acts. Predictions are that we will see an increase in extreme weather events, such as flooding and drought, which can have serious implications for agricultural yields. We’ve had many examples of this on a small scale already. In 2003, the UK experienced exceptionally hot weather and most UK lettuce matured quickly and all at once. Producers had a commitment to supply supermarkets with lettuce throughout the summer, but with UK lettuce finished, they had to import lettuce from the US to fill their orders. They sold the lettuce at a loss in order to maintain good relationships with the supermarkets. The agreements between most supermarkets and suppliers put the onus of a fluctuating demand or supply on the suppliers. A supplier must provide a certain quantity of product to the supermarket, but if the supermarket sells less than expected, they are not obliged to take the whole quantity. This leaves the supplier with an unexpected surplus they have to unload or waste. Yet, alternatively, if there is more demand than the supermarket expected, suppliers have to source the product from elsewhere. More extreme weather in the future could compromise the stability of the supply chain, putting suppliers in an even more challenging position.
Extreme weather events can lead to economic instability, disruptions to the infrastructure we depend on for our food supply and many other trickle-down effects. Let’s consider rice for a moment, a staple food for half the world. The global rice market was estimated to be worth £14.6 billion (US$23 billion) in 2011. Owing to its very specific growing requirements, rice production is concentrated in South and South-east Asia. Thailand is the world’s largest rice exporter, producing 28 per cent of global rice exports; Vietnam and India round out the top three rice exporters. These are three countries that are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and extreme weather events. We have a commodity that is both concentrated in terms of where it can be produced and vulnerable to climate change. The global supply of rice could be significantly affected in the future with few alternative growing regions.
China is the world’s biggest consumer of rice, munching through approximately 127 million tonnes of the fluffy grain each year. The country has historically been self-sustaining in its rice needs as it is also the world’s biggest producer of rice. Since 2011, however, China has increased its imports fourfold. This increased reliance on other countries for their favourite grain is partly due to rising consumption, but also because drought has hurt China’s crop production, sending domestic prices higher. Future climate change could perpetuate this problem, increasing China’s reliance on imports. So, what happens when a country with a voracious appetite for 127 million tonnes of rice enters a global market that trades a comparably measly 33.5 million tonnes of rice each year? We could see markets destabilise and prices could soar in response to a global shortage of this major staple food for some of the world’s most impoverished people. This could be a red flag for food fraud; we have seen rice scams in the past, including fake rice made from plastic resin and potato starch.
Climate change may also increase the prevalence of disease. Milder weather in south-west England in the last few years, for example, has increased the infectious period of some livestock diseases, such as blowfly strike. Adult flies are emerging earlier in the spring and infecting animals for longer. With 80 per cent of UK sheep flocks affected by these parasites each year, an increased prevalence of the disease can have serious implications not only for animal welfare, but also for industry yields. Low yields due to extreme weather and disease, economic hardship brought on by natural disasters and interrupted movement of food globally – these are all the conditions that could force otherwise honest people into shady territory.
The effects of climate change will most certainly not be limited to the land. Over the last 25 years, temperatures in the North and Baltic Seas have risen five to six times faster than the global average. As a result, there has been a shift in the species found there. Cold-water-loving species, such as cod, haddock and whiting, have declined in numbers while warm-water-loving species, such as red mullet, red gurnard and John Dory, have all increased. Even as little as a 1–2°C change in water temperature around the UK could mean very different species living in these waters. This could present a problem for British consumers, who tend to be very traditional in their seafood choices. Approximately 80 per cent of seafood bought in UK supermarkets is cod, haddock, tuna, salmon or prawns. Four of these five species are either farmed (salmon) or imported (cod, tuna and prawns). There have been large pushes from supermarkets, governments, non-government organisations (NGOs) and celebrity chefs to educate the British public about alternative species, and to make people more comfortable cooking and eating UK-caught species such as squid, sardines, coley and dab. While these campaigns to eat lesser-known fish can be very successful in the short term, Brits generally go back to their favourite five over the longer term. This inflexibility among British consumers to try new species may increase their vulnerability to mislabelling and fraud in the future. There is an economic incentive to label a species as a fish that’s in demand and there is more opportunity to mislabel when seafood is imported.
So, with greed, economic hardship, disasters and globalisation of our food supply all fuelling food fraud, we should expect to continue being swindled in the future. The question is whether we are likely to see more of it or whether we can start to tip the scales on fraudsters. Improvements in detection technologies and forecast systems, such as the one being developed by the NCFPD, could increase the risk of detection. Industry changes that improve the integrity of the food supply network and changes to consumer behaviour could reduce the opportunities for fraud. Will it all be enough, though, to make us more confident consumers in the future?
The cheap food conundrum
Perhaps before we can become confident in what we buy, we need to be realistic about our food. While globalisation of the food supply opens up new opportunities for sourcing produce and ingredients, it has also created unrealistic consumers. We now have seemingly unlimited choices at the supermarket. We can buy fresh lettuce in December just as easily as we can in July. We have, for the most part, lost touch with eating seasonally, we have become nothing short of delusional in terms of what food should cost and there are many steps between the food we buy and the people who grow it.
In 1900 the average family in the US spent 43 per cent of their income on food, while in 2013 this had decreased to 13 per cent. Conventional food systems have maximised efficiency to provide cheap food and consumers have come to expect bargain buys. Supermarkets keep the price of certain staples and highly processed foods low to remain competitive. For example, in 2012, scorching heat and severe drought affected over 80 per cent of the US corn crop – a staple of animal feed and processed food ingredients. That summer the US government predicted the low corn yield would cause a 4 to 5 per cent increase in the cost of fresh produce such as beef, pork, eggs and dairy – well above the average inflation increase of about 2 to 3 per cent. Yet US supermarkets managed to keep the cost of packaged food products low. How is this possible when surely the cost of the ingredients going into those packaged products increased?
The highly processed packaged food industry is very efficient, which is why it costs more to buy a bag of apples than a box of macaroni cheese. It is also far more expensive and labour-intensive to transport fresh fruit and vegetables to the supermarket without spoiling than it is most prepackaged food. Between cost and convenience to the customer, it is not surprising that ready-made meals are one of the fastest growing sectors in the food industry. In the UK, high-end ready-made meal sales in supermarkets topped £2.3 billion (US$3.6 billion) in 2013 – a growth of 8 per cent over the previous year. The growth was attributed to consumers being more cash-conscious and switching from a meal out to a ready-made meal in. In 2007, the US imported US$60 billion (£38.1 billion) worth of consumer-ready food, including processed food products, which was a 100 per cent increase over 1998 consumer-ready imports. Despite more than half of consumers reporting that they plan to eat fewer prepared meals and cook more, purchasing behaviour would suggest otherwise.
It is possible, however, that the days of finding a good deal are nearing an end. Many believe that the cheap food era is over. In 2013, the United Nations (UN) predicted a 40 per cent rise in global food prices over the next 10 years. They credit a growing middle class in countries such as China and India with an unprecedented demand for meat. If the cheap food era is indeed over, we as consumers may be particularly vulnerable to fraud during this time of transition. There could be a substantial gap between what deal-seeking consumers are willing to pay for food and the actual cost of production – the perfect conditions for tempting fraudsters to source cheaper ingredients, such as horse meat.
Horse kicks governments into gear
While the horse meat scandal luckily did not compromise anyone’s health (in fact it may have actually improved it owing to the lower fat content of horse compared with beef), it did help awaken us all to our vulnerability when it comes to food. At some level, the whole thing seemed like some schoolboy prank. As though somewhere a group of bullies were laughing and pointing fingers and saying ‘You’ll NEVER guess what we put in little Tommy’s burger!’ As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The horse meat scandal prompted governments around the world to avoid being made a fool of twice.
Since Horsegate, food fraud seems to have moved up government priority lists. Britain launched a review into its food supply networks, led by Professor Chris Elliott from Queen’s University, Belfast, and subsequently introduced a dedicated Food Crime Unit. In late 2013, the US FDA released a new proposed rule to protect food from intentional adulteration. The European Union (EU), previously more focused on food safety issues, has now mapped the tools and mechanisms that exist within their member states for fighting food fraud. The EU is also in the midst of assessing and developing EU-wide protocols for testing for fraud and they are in the process of extending mandatory origin labelling to more food products, including unprocessed meats (such as horse), milk and single-ingredient foods. The general trend is that governments are trying to be more proactive on food fraud, either by increasing the risk of detection or by reducing the opportunities to commit it.
There also seems to be a push, at least within the UK, to shift enforcement bodies from a very administrative, ticking-the-right-box approach to a more policing and investigative approach. Professor Elliott, in his investigations, came across one meat processor that had been audited 300 times in the previous calendar year and the biggest issue to crop up was that the fire extinguishers needed to be moved. Inspectors might need to start channelling their inner Sherlock and move beyond placement of fire extinguishers (still important) to opening closed doors leading into back rooms and closets, scrutinising the books and generally investigating things that simply don’t look right.
Some countries have fully embraced this policing approach to food inspections. In 2006, the Danish Food Administration formed the Danish Food Flying Squad. Journalists had uncovered fraud within the meat trade in Denmark – tonnes of expired meat was being circulated in the market. The Squad started with six people and by 2013 had grown to 18. Just as its name suggests, the Flying Squad arrives at a location by helicopter, unannounced, and the business has no more than five minutes to prepare for the inspection. The inspectors have a no-closed-door policy so if doors are locked and keys are conveniently misplaced, a locksmith is called immediately. They have a culture of suspicion because they believe that if you don’t look specifically for fraud, you won’t see it. The Flying Squad conducts routine inspections, but also follows up on consumer complaints and anonymous tips. The Flying Squad inspectors have more authority than the police in terms of entering premises and they have the authority to confiscate equipment, collect and document evidence and hand out warnings and fines. The UK’s Food Crime Unit has already said it will be taking some lessons from Denmark in terms of its approach.
Can we blame government?
If governments hadn’t started to take action in the face of such gastro-affronts as horse meat in burgers, there would have been a public outcry. When the horse meat scandal hit Europe in 2013 consumers were blaming retailers, retailers were blaming suppliers and everyone was blaming the government. Which begs the question of who is really responsible? Who can we rely on to differentiate the beef from the bull?
As everyone likes to blame government, let’s start there. A government’s role is to develop the legal framework that secures the rights and freedoms of its citizens. As well as ensuring that certain rights and safeguards are in place, the government must also then enforce them.
In the UK, enforcement of food safety and food standard controls on food products is the responsibility of local authorities – with the exception of certain meat facilities, which are the responsibility of the FSA. Food quality, hygiene and safety issues are dealt with by environmental health officers in district councils. Composition and labelling of food products is enforced by trading standards officers in county councils. Many of these local authorities rely on contractors to help them complete their inspection programmes as they simply don’t have the capacity to fulfil all of their duties. Since 2008, there has been a reduction in food law enforcement staff in 63 per cent of local authorities.5 Local authorities are working with limited resources and have the discretion to set their own budget priorities; food law enforcement may not be top of the list.
The local authorities work with and are audited by the FSA. This is the agency in the UK tasked with protecting public health and consumer interests in relation to food and drink. As well as working with local authorities on enforcement, the FSA works with businesses to make sure they are delivering safe food products. This includes safety-related food labelling, such as allergens and ‘use by’ dates.
While the FSA is responsible for safety-related labels, there are two other government departments in England with responsibilities around food labelling as of 2010. Nutrition labelling is the responsibility of the Department of Health, and food authenticity and composition labelling is the responsibility of Defra. The National Audit Office attributed this montage of government responsibilities as one of the contributing factors that enabled the horse meat scandal to occur. There is confusion among stakeholders as to who to contact or where to get information and it weakened the government’s ability to share intelligence. This distribution of responsibilities was also one of the first realisations made by Professor Chris Elliott in his review of UK food supply networks. He claimed that although each of the government departments works hard in its area of responsibility, they aren’t working together. In response, the UK government set up the Food Integrity Committee with members at the ministerial level to help gather up the fragments of food responsibility within government.
The UK government isn’t alone in this division of responsibility around food. The FDA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) take leading responsibility for food safety in the United States. The FDA is responsible for the safety of all domestic and imported food products except for meat and poultry, which land on the plate of the USDA. Eggs in their shell are the responsibility of the FDA, but crack them open and they become the responsibility of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). In 2013, the Canadian government moved responsibility for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) over from Agriculture to Health Canada. Though there are still three bodies with responsibilities for food – CFIA, the Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada – they are at least all under the responsibility of one minister. In China, food safety is the responsibility of no fewer than 10 different government departments.
In terms of food fraud, governments are also well positioned to collect, collate and share information. The Netherlands, with their long history of food trade and therefore an equally long history of food fraudsters, have extensive experience in gathering information on food fraud. In 2013, the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) gathered 120,000 pieces of information around food fraud. All of that information turned into just 20 actionable cases. The US Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) hosts the Food Fraud Database, which provides details on foods that have been reported as adulterated in the media and peer-reviewed literature. It states the adulterants found in the food and the detection methods used to find them. Searching through the database gives you a very basic indication of what foods are most vulnerable to fraud and the diverse adulterants that have been used to stretch them out. After Horsegate, the EU realised that no statistics existed on the incidence of food fraud in the EU. Gathering information is the first and most basic step in tackling the issue; it builds an understanding of where the vulnerabilities lie and eventually can support actions. In addition, it’s critical to share this information because just as food moves around the globe and criminals operate across different countries, information must be equally mobile.
Government also has a responsibility to deter criminal activity through law enforcement. While there seem to be endless examples of food fraud, prosecutions related to food fraud are far more elusive. A year after the horse meat scandal in the UK came to light, there had still been no prosecutions. The first prosecution in the UK related to horse meat sales (not Horsegate itself) did happen late in 2013. A random test on pork sausages bought in Dartford, England exposed its equine side; it contained nearly 50 per cent undeclared horse meat. The food importer, Expo Foods Ltd, was fined £5,000 and a further £2,500 (combined, around US$11,400) to offset the council’s investigation costs. The first charges directly related to Horsegate weren’t laid until March 2014, 15 months after the discovery of the undeclared horse DNA in frozen burgers.
Despite the existence of the legal framework for prosecuting food fraudsters, there seems to be a gap between the possible penalties and the punishment handed out to these criminals. In 2012, two executives of the Hitchin’ Post Steak Co., a poultry-slaughtering and processing business in the US, were indicted on charges of selling misbranded and adulterated poultry products. Their alleged crimes carried the following maximum penalties upon conviction:
•Five years in a federal prison and a fine of US$250,000 (£158,000) for conspiracy to transport and sell misbranded or adulterated poultry.
•One year in a federal prison and a fine of US$100,000 (£63,500) for unauthorised use of an official mark of inspection.
•One year in a federal prison and a fine of US$100,000 (£63,500) for selling or processing poultry products that were misrepresented as having been inspected.
•Three years in prison and a fine of US$250,000 (£158,000) for selling adulterated poultry products.
•Three years in prison and a fine of US$250,000 (£158,000) for unauthorised use of an official mark of inspection on adulterated poultry products.
•Three years in prison and a fine of US$250,000 (£158,000) for misrepresenting that the poultry products had been inspected.
If they had been convicted and sentenced to maximum penalties this adds up to 16 years’ imprisonment and a potential US$1,200,000 (£762,700) in fines. What actually happened was rather different. Both of the Hitchin’ Post executives entered plea agreements; the Vice President was sentenced to one year on probation and a US$5,000 (£3,178) fine, and the General Manager was sentenced to one year on probation and ordered to pay US$15,453 (£9,822) in fines and restitution. With minimal penalties, food can be a profitable arena for organised criminal activity.
Following the melamine milk scandal in China, 21 people were tried for their involvement. The head of Sanlu was sentenced to life in prison and fined more than US$3.1 million (£2 million). Farmer Zhang Yujun, who produced and sold hundreds of tonnes of melamine-laced protein powder, was executed in November 2009 along with middleman Geng Jinping, who sold more than 900 tonnes of tainted milk.
There is clearly great disparity in terms of the penalties associated with food fraud. It would seem logical, however, that if we want to tip the scales on fraudsters, the punishment must at least be enough to counter any financial benefits of committing the crime. Heavier jail sentences and fines for those who are caught might also make a more convincing deterrent. In November 2014, Taiwan boosted fines for food fraud 10-fold to try and restore confidence in their consumers after olive oil made by Wei Chuan Foods Corp was found to contain restricted food colouring.
Professor Elliott identified zero tolerance as one of the pillars of food integrity. When he described this pillar at a conference he made reference to a concept in criminology known as the ‘broken windows theory’. Very simply, the theory is that if a building has a few broken windows that go unrepaired, vandals will break a few more windows. Fix those windows quickly, however, and vandals are less likely to break them. The bottom line is: fix the problems even when they’re small, and punish even small fraudulent acts with stiff penalties. Enforcement is where government can take a leadership role.
The Danish Flying Squad handed out approximately half a million pounds’ worth of fines in the first year of its operation. Seven years later, it is handing out about a quarter of these fines and this is largely to do with increased compliance. Businesses don’t want to get caught so they have improved their self-regulation. Not only does the Flying Squad hand out fines and then bill the business for their time, they also name and shame the companies by publishing the names of businesses found breaking the law and issuing press releases to get the word out. Beyond that, they’ve even had a TV crew follow them on the job – much like the reality show Traffic Cops or the US equivalent Cops.
The responsibility of industry
Tough penalties will motivate the food industry to do a thorough audit of their supply networks because they do not want to be held responsible for fraud. It goes without saying that the food industry – from producers to packagers to distributors to retailers – has responsibility when it comes to food fraud. The industry bears considerable economic cost when fraud is committed – recalled products, increased testing and lost sales due to lack of consumer confidence. It therefore has a vested interest in ensuring the integrity of the supply network, knowing where the areas of risk are in the supply lines and how the business would respond in the event that the supply network is compromised.
KPMG, a global network of audit, tax and advisory professionals, works with food industry clients to examine and manage their supply risk. As part of the analysis, clients map their supply networks from end to end, looking at the multiple levels of their suppliers (i.e. who supplies their suppliers). They consider all the risks they are exposed to through their supply network and how a global event could have an impact on their supply. They take a close look at their auditing processes – their own as well as those of their suppliers. This is no small task. Walk up and down the aisles of a modern supermarket. Think about the number of products on those shelves and then the number of ingredients in each product. The task of resolving where they come from, let alone ensuring their integrity, seems insurmountable. The number of products stocked by the average US supermarket went from just under 9,000 in 1975 to 47,000 in 2008. The average supermarket in the UK stocks a relatively sparse 30,000 items. Much of this growth stems from new varieties of the same product – there’s no longer one box of Cheerios on the shelf, but 11 varieties of Cheerios. While some variety is good, imagine how this increases the supply network. Original Cheerios has seven ingredients; with the expanded range, the ingredient list more than triples. The supply network has virtually exploded, but the systems in place to manage that network have not kept pace with this expansion.
As confirmed by the Elliott report, one of the biggest changes industry can make towards reducing its risk of exposure to food fraud is to shorten its supply chains. One of the retailers held up as a good example of this is McDonald’s in the UK. Perhaps not a name you were expecting? In the UK, beefburgers have three stops before they reach McDonald’s – farm to slaughterhouse to processor. The restaurant chain buys all its beefburgers from the processor OSI Food Solutions and has done so since 1978. Linden Foods, a slaughterhouse and boning plant, has supplied OSI for 15 years. Linden Foods can trace each batch of meat back to the farm it came from. All shipments between locations are labelled and sealed to avoid any tampering and electronic tracking ensures that the number of patties going into restaurants equals the number going out. The supply chain is short and the relationship with the suppliers is long term.
The UK government has stated that it will support industry’s efforts to put in place a robust and effective supply chain audit system. NSF International, independent experts in food safety and quality, are working with the FSA to develop tools for industry that help them identify products that are vulnerable to fraud.
Alongside the top-down support from government, industry could be further motivated to make changes with bottom-up support from its customers. At the moment, however, there seems to be little evidence that the integrity of the food chain or fraud more generally is a primary consideration for most consumers. We consumers are complex creatures – a behaviouralist’s nightmare. What we buy depends on who we’re with, our mood, who we’re buying the food for, recent trends and news headlines, our current account balance and even the weather. However, the recurring drivers in our purchasing decisions over the long term are convenience, health, enjoyment and value for money. At the moment, there’s no proof that retailers and restaurants will gain any competitive advantage for the integrity of their food supply network. Yet, Waitrose – known for its commitment to small local producers, rigorous sourcing policies and sustainability – came out of the horse meat scandal unscathed and reported an 11 per cent boost in sales in its wake. This was likely to be as a result of discouraged Tesco shoppers moving over to Waitrose. In 2014, Waitrose experienced the biggest period of expansion in the company’s history, while Tesco reported a 6 per cent fall in profit, and then later reported that even these profits had been grossly overstated. As technology becomes available that enables consumers to have instant access to information regarding the supply chain, retailers that have that information may have a distinct advantage over others.
To combat fraud, industry will also need to share information with government (and presumably vice versa). If governments are to be repositories of information, which ultimately leads to the identification and prosecution of criminals within the system, then they need information. Andrew Opie, Director of Food and Sustainability for the British Retail Consortium (BRC), says the retail sector has started to do this. Not only have retailers carried out an extensive review of how they share information, but they’ve also looked at ways to shorten supply chains, and the BRC has developed new tools for auditing the supply chain that directly target food fraud. Things appear to be heading in the right direction.
Watchdog organisations and watchful consumers
Independent organisations operating outside of both industry and government, such as Oceana and Which?, also have an important role to play in combating food fraud. Many organisations are conducting their own targeted testing of products. Which? has helped to break the news of numerous food fraud scandals in the UK. They operate by conducting research and testing, which generates media attention. This in turn gets the public activated about the issue the organisation is campaigning on, thereby fuelling their work to change policy.
The media also have a role in the fight against food fraud. They must find the appropriate balance of ensuring that food fraud is kept in the consciousness of the public without overwhelming them with so many stories of gloom and doom that people are paralysed into a state of apathy. Beyond just reporting scandals, the media have also been critical investigators in breaking them. Felicity Lawrence and her colleagues at the Guardian have conducted numerous in-depth investigations involving the food industry – from undercover footage of unhygienic chicken processing to the exploitation of immigrant workers. It was Danish journalists who broke the expired meat scandals that led to the establishment of the Flying Squad. Back in the nineteenth century, the esteemed publication the Lancet printed weekly articles about the adulterated food found around London and publicly named and shamed the retailers selling these products – address details and all. Media stories, if reported well, play a critical role in educating the public, though they rarely offer consumers suggestions on how to reduce their vulnerability to fraud. They do a splendid job, however, of keeping pressure on government as well as industry. The media could even help to build an environment where integrity of food products provides a competitive advantage within the industry.
We as consumers must also take some responsibility for food fraud. As already mentioned, we tend to have unrealistic expectations of what food should cost, but we’ve also lost touch with how food should look, smell, taste and behave. Saffron threads should look and smell a particular way, fresh olive oil tastes very different from old olive oil and pure freshly squeezed orange juice should not last for a week in the fridge.
There is such a plethora of intense synthesised flavours in our food these days that it may be affecting our food preferences. A child that has been exposed to artificial strawberry flavour in ice cream, sweets, gum, milk, cereal and goodness knows what else all of her life can still perceive the taste of a real strawberry. Yet she will probably have a preference for the fake strawberry flavour she has been raised with. After all, it’s far more intense than a real strawberry, the flavour is consistent and it lasts longer on the palate. But what does this mean for our understanding of what natural foods should taste like?
If you’ve bought or made proper fresh bread, you know that it’s completely unnatural for a loaf to last a whole week without becoming stale or mouldy. Commercial bulk-made loaves include preservatives and are dipped in antifungals in order to keep them fresh. This obviously isn’t fraud. It’s an important process that keeps food from being wasted. It is, however, an example of how we have become accustomed to how our food is processed without truly considering what that means.
We have a very sophisticated built-in fraud detection system. There is a common misconception that humans have a poor sense of smell. We have relatively small snouts compared with other animals and fewer chemical receptors. Yet behavioural tests have shown that we are equally good, if not better, at smell perception than some of our fellow mammals. We even outperform canines for some odorants. Trichloroanisole (TCA; see Appendix), which is a natural compound that can give wines a musty or corky flavour, can be detected by some people down to a few parts per trillion. So the system is in place, we just need some training in how to use this rather sophisticated equipment – a fine-tuning if you will.
All of us, from government to consumer, share in the responsibility for combating fraud in our food supply. But nobody should be blamed for food fraud except the criminals themselves. The best thing we can do as consumers is arm ourselves with some knowledge and, where available, tools to help reduce our vulnerability to fraud. Professor Lisa Jack, head of the Food Fraud Group at the University of Portsmouth, has given an analogy of having a police station in your community. There’s clearly a police presence, but you still lock your door when you leave the house and take precautions against theft. The same should be true of food fraud.
And then there’s science ...
Science has an incredible role to play in all of this. There are many cutting-edge techniques that are helping to detect fraud – from DNA analyses to identify your fish fillets, to stable isotope analyses that can trace the origins of a tomato back to a sun-kissed valley in Italy. However, just as the detection techniques are getting more sophisticated, so are the scientific methods for committing fraud. If the fraudsters know that watered-down milk is going to fail a test owing to its low protein content, they find a way to adulterate it further to get it past that test (we’ll talk about this in Chapter 6).
These criminals are getting creative in how they mess with our most basic ingredients. Who would think that a grain of rice would be anything other than the seed of a plant? Sure, we might expect some mislabelling of basmati, but to actually make a fake grain of rice by mixing together a combination of potato starches and plastic resins? What about building an entire egg, shell and all? Well, it’s disturbing, yet there’s also something rather incredible about it.
We wanted to write this book to share some of the outstanding science behind food fraud – detecting it as well as committing it. Partly we have felt that in all the coverage of food scandals, the science has been largely overlooked and, being science geeks ourselves, we think this is too interesting to ignore. But also we feel that knowledge is a powerful tool and understanding what’s possible makes for more informed consumers. Science can give consumers the tools to help them reduce their vulnerability – to lock that door against food fraud. From kitchen chemistry to new technologies in the pipeline, there are things we can do to sort the beef from the bull.