You may not always be eating what you think you’re eating. Natalie Whittle wrote about food fraud and how things came to be this way:

• The story of a fish “freshly caught off the coast of Scotland” illustrates why food fraud is so difficult to catch. The fish is captured by a Russian ship, sent to China to be fileted, then sent to Korea to be stored, and sold on to other intermediaries from there.
• Organized crime has been getting into this business because it’s so easy to infiltrate and because it requires things that they normally have – like haulage, storage, and money laundering capabilities.
• It’s innocuous items that are targets for fraud. The apple juice you’re drinking may not be what you think it is. Margins may be low but a lot more apple juice is drunk than champagne.
• Similarly testing indicates that 25% of dried oregano is cut with things like olives, and hazelnut leaves.
• The industry is hitting back. A lab in Belfast uses a £500,000 machine that has been repurposed to detect chemical traces of foreign food instead of cancer.

Read more here.

Source: Financial Times

Via: Marginal Revolution