To many, food fraud is about trivial acts of cheating undertaken by a few dodgy butchers or fast-food outlets. Perhaps it is a handful of sawdust popped into the sausage mix, or a little something added to the lamb to eke it out a bit. While there is no doubt such acts occur fairly frequently and they certainly shouldn’t, food fraud is really much more complex, sinister and organised, and it has the potential to ruin businesses and the lives of those affected. I have had personal contact with a number of food-business operators who have told me their biggest dilemma is to decide if they should cheat in the same way as their competitors, or go out of business. I am also acutely aware that companies who ‘do the right thing’ can lose contracts to those who clearly don’t.
For as long as food has been prepared and sold there has been cheating. Looking at the history of food fraud is a wonderful way to explore the darker side of human nature. There have been scams that have poisoned people and scams that have killed people, but most often the fraud goes undetected. This is the ‘business model’ of the fraudster, of course. The longer he or she, or in many cases ‘they’, get away with it, the more profit they make from their deception. My own view of the horse-meat fraud, based on intelligence I was able to source, was that it had been going on for at least five years before a random test alerted the nation to the scale of the problem. I uncovered a scam with oregano in the UK recently, and a few reliable sources have told me that this had been going on for a lot longer.
Food fraud becomes food crime when the level of organisation increases to the point that formal or informal networks of perpetrators are involved, and have differing roles in the criminal activity. Firstly, there is the ‘fraud inventor’, i.e. the person (or persons) who devises the way of cheating; there are some excellent examples of the ingenuity of such deceptions in this insightful book. Secondly, there are those that deal with the logistics – the people who organise the transportation of the frequently produced goods across countries, borders and, in some cases, across the globe. Thirdly, there are those that develop the countermeasures to detection working out how to evade laboratory testing and auditing. The final ‘expert’ of the gang is often the enforcer, those that threaten and bully the most vulnerable in the food industry to turn a blind eye or become complicit in the fraud itself. I have met some of these at first hand, and know the degree of menace that comes with them. Would I be brave enough to stand up to them if I was a small food company that realised the police wouldn’t be overly bothered about a food fraud issue? I have often wrestled with this thought, and on a good day believe I might.
Sorting the Beef from the Bull gives a fascinating insight into many of the complexities I have referred to. The examples selected should enable the reader to have a much better understanding of the driving forces behind food fraud, the lengths the cheats will go to in order to make a profit and the ways in which science is trying to help deliver the means of introducing more deterrents to one of the world’s fastest-growing industries. Barely a day goes by now without news of another scam cropping up somewhere in the world. Worryingly, quite a lot of them could impact the UK in a way that would make Horsegate feel like hors d’oeuvres.
Professor Chris Elliott
Pro Vice Chancellor, University of Belfast