Food and drink fraud is a real problem in London, especially fake alcohol, which leads to organ damage, blindness and death. Lots of local smaller shops get caught selling faked wine and vodka, a market trader recently caught with fake spices (basically was flavoured dust and dirt with shoe polish colourings and fake flavours), and plenty of fake branded food goods.
I've been to Moscow a few times, and despite it being only three or four days drive from France, Spain, and Italy, it's nearly impossible to get a decent bottle of wine there. Bottom shelf stuff is obviously counterfeit, and even the top shelf imports are like putting one bullet in your revolver and pulling the trigger.
I'm with the Chinese on this one; the penalty for fucking with the food supply is... well, death does seem a little extreme, so maybe I'm not completely with the Chinese on it, but I can certainly see where they're coming from.
If you can't trust what you're putting in your mouth, the game of modern civilisation is over.
Sorry, but I trust the always fresh, usually picked under 24 hours ago food sold in the market here in China far more than at the end of a global supply chain dominated by multiple layers of near-monopolistic intermediaries. None of that cold chain, international shipping nonsense. Here we work on volume and speed.
I've never picked up a packet of infant formula and wondered so much if it's going to kill my child that I purchase a different brand that had to be smuggled to me across the HK border.
I expect that something picked off a field and delivered to you unprocessed is probably relatively safe (although those fields are, by and large, unregulated and uninspected). Anything that has gone through an unregulated, uninspected factory? Significantly less safe.
The best defense my family has settled on is to buy from farmers markets (whole fish, butchered meat), or buy fresh as in vegetables and fruits.
That offers no protection against hormone injected meats, or plants bred to look nice but with zero-nutrients, so we shop at reputable markets and hope they have a positive influence on the supply chain.
Its not exaggerating to say that many people in small african towns are eating more nutritious foods than we are getting in our modern, corrupted world.
This article left me impressed at the level of processing in foods available in the first world. While this probably results in lower prices, it just reads to me like problems from a completely different world.
I live in Argentina, and, while I don't consume fish, I've always noticed at the supermarket that they're sold whole: with head and tail included.
Buying oranges per kilo is cheaper than buying juice (0.69USD a kilo, which yields generally above 500mL), so frequent juice consumers have motivation to just squeeze it themselves. There's only a single brand of actual "orange juice" sold in most places, while consumption of sodas or flavoured waters is what's common the most.
Some things like basil and parsley are sold as whole plants, because it's so cheap to just move/sell that around, that it's the norm. Some fancier supermarkets have basil in the pot, so you can keep the plant alive at home and have REALLY fresh basil.
I normally buy non pasteurized natural apple juice at the fresh market from a place that I chose just because the guy was nice to my wife.
One day he was closed, so I went for the other one that sold another non pasteurized _healthy_ juice.
I brought it home and was kind of puzzled : I put my yeast, and set my home made setup for making my cider and it was not kicking as much as usual. So I tripled the dose of yeast. Finally kicked.
After 9 days I tried it. It was alcoholized AND sugarished.
One of my highest batch. And I was really puzzled.
Yeast makes alcohol out of sugar. And I had put my regular chaptalization. Nothing that should have been that sugarish AND alcoholized.
It was weirldy tasting like sorbier (rowan and mountain-ash). I knew this taste, because my great mother used to make us drink this horror as a water syrup when I was kid. Once you know you never forget. Beuark.
And I got sick for the first time the day after. So I inquired.
When I told my story to other vendors they told me it was a classic in "healthy food", sorbitol helps conserves without being actively searched. Hence my triple yeast kick.
The funny part is that I realized you need no labs to detect fraud, you need to have eaten the "right" food as a kid. You need to be critical, experimenting, thinking. And confrontational.
You know, I began making my alcohol for the same reasons my great father did when he was a (Belgian) migrant in France. Because he was poor and wanted something cheap of a quality he liked.
I learned making my malossol, my ketchup, my tomato sauce, my mistelle.... to. Because, coding is not enough skills.
And nowadays, I am better at appreciating food and detecting food fraud.
I really appreciate what being poor has taught me, I don't really appreciate that most customers are so ignorant they make food more expensive and less edible for "healthy reasons".
Something is kind of wrong globally. But I kind of don't care, me, I can survive.
Sorbitol is not a preservative, your juices probably had sorbic acid which is used as an anti-fungal, but for a good reason:
I grew up in a region where historically the rates of liver cancer were much higher than the national average: The summers there are long and extremely humid, perfect breeding conditions for mildrew in the food supply and people are constantly exposed to aflatoxin, a Group 1 carcinogen[1]. However thankfully the situation is improving as people realise the danger and use preservatives when it is appropriate to do so. Although having lived there for quite a long time I am still more likely to develop liver cancer than you.
Basic food chemistry is not fraud, if anything it saved many lives.
Sorry, I just can recognize the taste of the plant, not the molecule.
Thanks for the precision.
I do agree with you. I still think people should accept that you cannot delegate knowledge to elite and learn. I also accept what you say about the knowledge that saves life.
We would be better protected if people were part of the chain of control and accepted that science can be done in their kitchen and that we need to cooperate because it is hard to have a job a family and be perfect in everything.
> Small retail businesses selling spices in larger quantities may buy direct from their countries of origin — which provides another opening for organised criminals to penetrate supply chains that are not as heavily regulated, says Elliott.
I'm confused, is this about food or FUD?
Yeah, "their countries of origin" --- those damn crooked little stores run by colored folk!
Why, I'm running scared to the nearest SuperValu, Trader Joe's or Walmarts, who would never buy cases of stuff direct from suppliers in those same countries!
> Elliott says he declined through fear an invitation from a Turkish processor to fly over and tour its facilities. “I thought, ‘I don’t think I’ll do that, because I’ll probably never come home again.’”
Undoubtedly, Elliott once saw Midnight Express, and thought it was a travel documentary.
At the same time, Italy is also a victim of protectionism against things like prosciutto and salame and other wonderful foods that are difficult to get in the US.
I thought the article was informative. As for your last point there may well be some good explanation, like a throwaway comment in good humor, which gets interpreted literally by the journalist.
