Name: How Americans Are Tricked Into Buying Fake Food
Uploaded: 2024-08-13T13:33:39.000Z
Duration: 12 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Okay, so you think this is olive oil, right?

Adverbs of manner

Well, maybe some of it is, but this is actually a classic example of food fraud.

Extra virgin olive oils are being switched out with cheap ones.

And fraudulent to sell something labeled as something else.

Their Parmesan cheese products do not contain any Parmesan cheese.

As there was no one brand that stood out as completely safe.

I guarantee you any time a product can be passed off as something more expensive, it will be.

Counterfeits, dilutions, substitution, and mislabeling.

Food fraud not only harms consumers' wallets, it puts their health and safety at risk.

We might not know the overall impact of food fraud.

Because so much of what fraudsters do is hidden from us and has been for centuries.

Some estimates say food fraud affects at least 1% of the global food industry, at a cost as high as $40 billion a year, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Grocery manufacturers of America estimated that 10% of the commercially available food in the United States is adulterated.

It means if you're not on that eight item or less checkout line, you've got something in your cart when you leave the supermarket that's probably bogus.

Here's how, and why, fake food sits secretly in our kitchen cabinets.

According to the FDA, food fraud is considered Economically Motivated Adulteration, or EMA.

It's a monetary impact to the consumer and to the food manufacturers, but it's also a potential public safety, public health impact.

It robs us of nutrients and can kill people and has done.

Larry Olmstead researched food fraud for years and published his book, Real Food, Fake Food, in 2016.

As I worked on this book, my definition of fake food became any time what you buy is not what you think you're buying.

Doesn't really matter whether it's legal or illegal.

You're buying something that's not what you think it is.

The worst offenders can include seafood, meat, dairy, honey, alcohol, spices.

The fraud happens more with more expensive foods.

Take your extra virgin olive oil as an example.

Fraud usually occurs here when a cheaper oil is added to the more expensive oil, and the label still reads 100% extra virgin olive oil.

Olive oil has been adulterated for thousands of years because it is of high value and it is sought out.

They might flavor it with beta carotene and maybe color it with a little chlorophyll to make it a little more green.

And so then you've got a lower quality, cheaper oil.

So both of these olive oils I got at the grocery store, and both of them are the store brand.

This one had a label of 100% Mediterranean blend of extra virgin olive oil.

So the olives were sourced from a bunch of different European countries, and it said it was packed in Italy.

And when I purchased this one, this one was a 100% California extra virgin olive oil.

First pressed, cold pressed, unfiltered, no artificial colors, preservatives, or flavors.

It said that these olives were harvested in October, November 2022, and that it would be good on your shelf until August 2024.

And this one had way more information about where this olive oil came from.

Now let's look at the spice market as another one that's vulnerable to fraud.

Think of an expensive spice like saffron.

This tiny amount cost me $20 at the store.

Saffron can be bulked up with some other material like plant stems and sold as the same, according to the FDA.

Popular spices like basil and chili powder from a range of different brands.

Anything that's kind of colored orange, brown and ground up can be passed off as turmeric.

The FDA says seafood fraud can occur when a less expensive species of fish is substituted for a more expensive species.

After all, it's kind of hard to know what fish you're buying, right?

If you're an experienced chef or fishmonger, you can look at like a red snapper fillet and tell whether it's red snapper.

You know, most of the fish we eat is white fish.

Every fillet looks pretty much the same, which is why there's so much substitution.

The FDA is mandated by law to inspect 2% of the imported seafood, which is, I think, a very, very low bar.

In fact, the U.S. imports as much as 85% of its fish.

Federal Fisheries Enforcement is serious business.

Customs tear open a container filled with frozen fish from Thailand.

First, it's important to understand the matrix that food fraud lives in.

There's intentional and unintentional types of food risk.

Unintentional risks include food safety and quality, like accidental foodborne illnesses.

CDC estimates about 50 million people a year contract a foodborne illness.

Only 20%, one in five of those, can be identified.

So there's, you know, 40 million people a year getting sick from something they ate that we don't know what it is.

And a good guess would be that fraud has something to do with that.

That's where food fraud is alongside food defense.

The difference is fraud is motivated by economic gain and defense is motivated by harm.

If you have a ton of coffee and you can turn that into 1.2 tons by adding some cheap filler to it, you've just increased your profits by 20%.

And a lot of these products pass through a lot of hands.

They go from small growers to big trucks to tankers to boats to processing plants.

It's not necessarily like this big company that's selling you coffee that's ripping you off.

It can happen in a lot of ways along the way.

Even the FDA says it can't estimate how often this fraud happens or its economic impact.

Over the last 10 years, the most common fraud committed is lying about an animal's origin and dilution or substitution.

Both ranking at 16% of incidents recorded.

Dilution and substitution are exactly what they sound like.

Perhaps somewhere along the supply chain, the real expensive process of refining something like fresh olives is ignored.

Maybe a little canola oil is added instead.

When an ingredient or part of a food is intentionally left out, taken out, or substituted altogether.

And that substitute can be a non-food substance.

That's the 14% of the recorded food fraud incidents using non-food substances.

The pandemic has given us a chance to focus on supply chains and forced us to.

For example, during the pandemic, labeling fraud really spiked in 2021 to 21% of the types of fraud that were committed and recorded.

You know, if we knew all about it, why hasn't it been solved?

The key was we weren't focusing on prevention.

Food fraud prevention, if we do it right, is boring.

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How Americans Are Tricked Into Buying Fake Food

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