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Bird eggs are perfect structures that contain all of the materials needed to support the growth of a new life or, in many unlucky cases, provide a highly nutritious meal to any number of different critters. It takes 25 hours for an egg to form within a female bird; one hour for the microscopic egg cell to attach to a globule of yolk and pass through the oviduct, where it may (or may not) become fertilised, and then reach the lime-producing section of its journey. There it will sit for 24 hours as it is coated with a hard shell to protect its precious contents. The finishing touch is a layer of pigment to help camouflage the egg, which is added just before it is laid – much like a wax spray that is applied as a car leaves the car wash. It’s truly a remarkable process.
Unfertilised versions of these little packages, mostly of the chicken variety, have become an important part of our diet. They are the basis of the full English breakfast, the foundation for a slathering of hollandaise sauce (not to mention part of the hollandaise sauce itself), and when the whites are whipped into a frenzy with sugar they become the most delicate of meringues.
Now, what if we told you that we could emulate that perfect little package in a fraction of the time the chicken takes to make it? All you need is a few ingredients that can be purchased online. First, take some sodium alginate. This comes from brown algae and when it binds with water it forms a viscous gum. It’s commonly used in the food industry to increase viscosity and also largely responsible for those gelatinous chunks that you find in wet cat food. Mix this sodium alginate with water and stir for about one and a half hours. Then add some gelatin, which you can buy at your local supermarket for making trifles, jams or yogurt, and mix this in thoroughly. Leave it for about 10 hours until any bubbles have disappeared. Then add in some sodium benzoate and alum – both widely used food preservatives. Maybe throw in some lactones if you have them (if not, they’re available online), as these are the compounds that contribute to the aroma of butter, cheese, eggs and other foods. This is our base substance and it can be made well in advance.
Next, put some of this mixture into a bowl and add a little colouring agent – something labelled ‘orange red powder’ might work. This is your yolk mixture and you can now pour it into yolk-shaped moulds. Dip these moulds briefly into edible calcium chloride. This is a permitted food additive that’s used to firm up soybean curds for tofu and is commonly used as an electrolyte in sports drinks. This will just help to coagulate those yolks so they stay together nicely.
Pour a portion of the remaining ‘egg white’ mixture into a plastic mould, add your ‘egg yolk’ and dip that whole thing into the calcium chloride again to stabilise it all. Finally, pluck out your firm gelatinous egg and dip it into a mixture of melted paraffin wax and gypsum powder (plaster) to create that wonderful hard shell. Simple, really, and in a 25-hour period you can pop out way more eggs than a chicken can! They can be placed into egg cartons and sold at the market and profits are double to quadruple those of traditional chicken farmers. Oh, and a little bonus is that any leftover ‘egg white’ mixture can be dyed green or purple and with a little added juice (just a splash), you’ve got yourself some fake grapes as well! No chicken can do that.
Fake eggs started appearing in China in the mid-1990s and continue to crop up from time to time. The fakes are so good that people are cooking them up and eating them. There’s loads of information online to show people how to tell the fakes from the real thing (hint: the fakes don’t have a shell membrane – that thin layer of skin below the shell). The health consequences of eating these eggs are unclear; though most of these ingredients are already used in food products, they are not used in the quantities found in the fake eggs.
Given the title of the book, you probably expected us to jump immediately into the 2013 European horse meat scandal. Perhaps start with some groaner joke or clever pun about eating horse meat. Sorry to disappoint, but we had to rein in that type of humour as we thought it could all be a bit much really. Besides, in terms of creative food fraud we thought slipping some horse into a batch of minced beef wasn’t nearly as imaginative as creating an entire egg from a bunch of powders and liquids. Although we have to admit that the horse meat scandal did spur us into writing this book (groan ... OK, we’re done ... promise).
Building eggs from chemical compounds is, as far as we’re concerned, an extreme example of food fraud. It’s a carefully manufactured replica of the real thing with only one purpose – to fool trusting people into buying it in order to earn the perpetrator some money. Yet we process food to replicate other things all the time. There are soy-based products that taste and act like cheese. Fish paste is flavoured and fashioned to look like crab. A week-old cut-up apple has been dipped in additives to make it look like a freshly cut apple. And gelatin, sugar and some other additives are mixed together into fried-egg-shaped sweets for the delight of children. So why is one fake egg acceptable while the other is not? Because it is less about what we do to the food and more about what we say on the packaging.
Food science has allowed us to store, ship and conveniently whip up meals like never before. It has led to a diverse alimentary landscape and revolutionised food in ways we never thought possible – ways most consumers may still not realise are possible, in fact.
As an analogy, let’s consider for a moment how computer-generated imagery (CGI) has transformed cinema. It has enabled the lines between reality and fiction to be blurred so effectively that viewers aren’t always sure where the stunt person ends and the CGI effect begins. In the right hands this is movie magic, but in the wrong context it can be used to deceive viewers. The same is true of our food. Modern food undergoes a lot of behind-the-scenes processing, which can warp a consumer’s understanding of reality. Our existing food supply has created a perfectly legal and legitimate system that has many blurred lines – grey areas if you will. And it is within these shadows that criminals can commit food fraud.
When we began the research for this book on food fraud we very soon became overwhelmed. Food fraud is, quite frankly, an enormous topic – it could fill many books, some of which would be far more interesting than others. There is an entire story about the political and legal structure that seems to both prevent and enable food fraud. Another story lies in the economics of it all – the cost to industry, the cost to consumers and the financial benefits for the fraudsters themselves. Then there are the non-economic costs of food fraud – the environmental and social costs as well as the threat to human health. Another important story is how food fraud is linked to other criminal activities including drug trafficking, tax evasion, illegal immigration and even slavery.
It wasn’t long into this journey that we started to truly question how and where we buy food, the integrity of our food supply, the benefits and drawbacks of a global supply network and what our most basic values are around food. There are many books and as many movements that are looking at alternative systems to help build resilience, sustainability and integrity into our food supply. While this is a fascinating discussion, we didn’t feel this was our story.
We are science geeks (well, one of us is an internationally renowned analytical organic chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society and the other is a geek). We felt that the science story was by far the most interesting and perhaps also the most overlooked in the popular media. So while we necessarily touch on economics, health, legislation and politics in each chapter, we have largely lumped much of this discussion into Chapter 1 so we would have more room to talk about the science in the rest of the book.
The science of detecting (and committing) food fraud has evolved over the centuries. In Chapter 2 we discuss some of the first scientists to tackle food fraud and the basic tools they had to work with. Their discoveries provided the first evidence of the prevalence of food fraud and this ultimately helped to shape the first food policies on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, since those first policies were put in place, our food networks have become complex and globalised. These days, our food whizzes around the planet, getting processed and mixed into ready-meals that no longer bear any resemblance to living things that once grew. We have created an ideal environment for criminals to operate within our global food system. And now we must face the challenge this creates in terms of relying on labels to tell us what this unrecognisable food is and developing tests to confirm that what the label says is true – authentication.
In Chapter 2 we also look at how the scientific method is applied to first frame and then test questions of food authenticity. We put all of this into practice by working through a case study with one of the purest food substances on the planet: honey. Let’s face it, it’s bee barf in a jar with very little human processing required – it’s the perfect simple food. Yet, honey often finds itself in sticky scandals. As we worked through the example of authenticating the different label claims on a hypothetical jar of honey, it became clear to us (and hopefully it will to you too) that this is truly a game of cat and mouse between the scientists detecting fraud and the criminals committing it. If scientists develop a new test to detect corn syrup in honey, the fraudsters will find a new type of syrup that escapes this new detection method. It is a continual evolution and will always be so.
As we work through the honey example, we introduce many of the analytical techniques that come up again in later chapters – in this way, it is a bit of a ‘go-to’ chapter in terms of the methods. However, if we couldn’t use the method in our honey example, we saved it for where we could work it into another example. And this is exactly what we do over the subsequent chapters. We dedicate Chapters 3–9 to foods that are most vulnerable to food fraud. And as we wrote these, we were equally awed by the sophistication (and audacity) of some of the scandals committed and by the cleverness of the methods used to catch them.
We discuss vegetable oil in Chapter 3 – a foodstuff that has a long history of adulteration and yet continues to present modern-day challenges in terms of authentication. Vegetable oil is one of the most adulterated products on the market, with cheap oil frequently added to expensive oil to make it go a little further. Such substitutions are impossible for us to discern as consumers, and surprisingly difficult to distinguish for the food analyst. Vegetable oil has been at the root of swindles that have shaken the US economy and caused hundreds of deaths in Spain; it’s a slippery (and sometimes deadly) deal.
From oil we move to the gross mislabelling of seafood in Chapter 4. We look at how DNA-based methods are trying to overcome the challenge of identifying the most speciose group of vertebrates on the planet. There are over 30,000 described species of fish and many of the commercially important species have more aliases than Simon Templar – Atlantic cod has 56 English names used in Canada alone! This creates confusion as these species move between countries – first to be processed into characterless fillets and then to be sold to consumers. While the optimistic viewpoint is that this is simply a matter of mistaken identity, the fact that it is nearly always cheaper species being substituted for more expensive ones suggests a more malicious intent.
Of course, we can’t ignore horse meat all together (it’s on the cover after all). Chapter 5 explores the methods used to identify what’s really in our burgers as well as our curries, kebabs and chicken breasts. We share cases of putrid meat being redirected back into the human food chain, ‘all beef’ sausages that would be more accurately labelled ‘all but beef’ and ham and chicken that’s just a lot of added water. If you’re vegetarian and think you can skip this chapter, think again. There are cases of meat adulterating our spices and blood products making their way into our baked goods. This chapter isn’t just for carnivores.
From the melamine milk scandal in China to fake milk made of urea and shampoo in India, in Chapter 6 we discuss corruption in our dairy products, including cheese and butter. We discuss how genuine quests to replace many animal-based fats with vegetable-based products has helped equip fraudsters with the tools they need to adulterate our dairy foods. Be warned that some of the examples may churn your stomach.
Shortly after the horse meat scandal in 2013, another food scandal hit the headlines in both North America and Europe. Almond and nut protein was discovered in cumin and paprika. This scandal didn’t seem to make as many headlines as horse meat in the UK, yet it had far greater potential for causing human harm in terms of allergens. Above all, this spicy scandal illustrated how a single substitution – one fraudulent act – can permeate through the food supply. In Chapter 7 we look at the seasoned criminals who use ground spices to hide all manner of cheap adulterants and how analysts go about finding them.
The motivation behind all of the scandals discussed in this book is money. And there is no greater example of the economic gains that can be made by falsifying a food product than in the wine industry. The fine and rare wine market is rife with scandals, but the criminals operating in these circles are often as wealthy as their victims and they have the refined palates and product knowledge that enable them to carry off such scams. In this world, as we explain in Chapter 8, it is more about product knowledge and less about chemical analyses.
In Chapter 9 we look at all things wholesome and good – fresh fruit and vegetables as well as some grains, cereals and pulses (lentils) for good measure. Yet even these seemingly healthful products can’t escape food fraud. While there aren’t any examples (yet) of fabricated tomatoes or parsnips posing as carrots, our fresh fruit and veg is being misrepresented in the way it is preserved, produced and processed. From mangoes sprayed with formalin (a mixture of water and formaldehyde used to preserve tissues) to innovative new methods that keep food looking fresh well beyond what we think is possible, we dip into the grey areas of food production that are legal on paper, but feel deceitful in practice.
Finally, we look at what we can do to reduce our vulnerability to food fraud. As consumers trying to nourish ourselves in an incredibly diverse and complex alimentary landscape, we are forced to trust the information that’s on product labels. Whether we are meant to actually understand what’s on the label is an entirely different story, of course. Yet we don’t want to leave you feeling hopeless (as so many of our editors who never got to read the last chapter did) and there are indeed actions we can take. You’ve taken the first step, which is to open the cover of this book and read this far. We hope that by taking the second step (reading the rest) you will end up a more informed consumer by knowing what is possible in the world of food fraud – both in terms of how it is committed, how it is detected and how to avoid it.