Fraudulent Food
The caviar in your cupboard can be just as fake as that Louis Vuitton bag in your closet.
In the world of gastronomy, not everything is always as it seems, food can be faked too.
Many foods worldwide frequently fall victim to counterfeit or adulteration in some way without the consumer ever knowing.
Why produce a counterfeit food product?
The main reason behind fraudulent food is one of the main motivators on this planet, and no it’s not sex, but money, cash is the number one reason faked foods exist.
Substituting expensive ingredients for cheaper, low-quality alternatives can significantly reduce the cost of backend production and bolster profits simultaneously, a win-win for the counterfeiter in the short term.
Honey, for example, is commonly adulterated by diluting the real product that bees worked very hard to make, with ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, or rice syrup to give the producer more bang for their buck.
Olive oil, in its pure form, has been used for centuries in cooking, self-care, and preservation but did you know that this slippery liquid gold is one of the most counterfeited foods on the market today?
How is it faked?
Olive oil is faked, by diluting it with inferior oils like soybean, sunflower, or the dreaded canola oil.
For me, learning about olive oil fraud was upsetting, to say the least, because I use olive oil and other natural fats to avoid using shitty oils like the ones I mentioned above.
Diluting olive oil with crap oil is bad enough, but some very sneaky counterfeiters have taken this to the extreme by adding color and artificial flavor to various types of hydrogenated or brominated seed oils and sold as extra virgin, this is just nasty!
If you lived through the 1980s and 90s you probably remember what I call the Red Snapper craze.
This was a time when healthy eating was being sold to us by all of our favorite celebrity chefs of the era.
Fish is healthy, and the favorite healthy fish of the day, for some reason, was the coveted Red Snapper. I even remember going to the seafood counter with my mom at the grocery store and hearing her ask, “Do you carry Red Snapper”?
Why yes we do, the fishmonger would say, and we would take that fish home and cook it in more butter than you would use on your toast in an entire month, and that was our healthy Red Snapper dinner, covered in butter, which was actually margarine.
But not all Red Snapper was the real thing, What?!
Unscrupulous seafood processors would label cheaper fish like Tilapia as Red Snapper or Rock Fish, this intentional mislabeling results in a huge variance in taste, texture, and overall quality leading to customer dissatisfaction.
Milk wouldn’t seem like a food that could be easily faked. Still, unfortunately, food fakers have found nefarious ways to counterfeit or increase the volume of this sweet sweet cow juice by adding weird ingredients like Urea, Formalin, Ammonium sulfate, Boric acid, Caustic soda, Benzoic acid, Salicylic acid, Hydrogen peroxide, Sugars, and Melamine. Gross!
Spices are a food that can be easily faked with other plant materials, starches, and food dyes.
In the culinary world, we understand that real spices are expensive, especially Saffron, which costs upwards of $5,000 per pound, that’s why the real thing is sold in fractions of an ounce and not large bags like the fake stuff is.
What is Saffron?
Saffron is the stigma of the Crocus flower, there are about three stigmas per flower and it takes about 70,000 crocus flowers to produce one pound of Saffron.
It’s easy to see why purveyors of spices would want to cut the pure product with cheaper flowers like marigold petals and corn silk or add a little turmeric to achieve the classic yellow saffron color.
In my opinion, Saffron is overrated, and yes I’ve had the real thing.
Almost any food with status has been counterfeited at some point, coffee, wine, and a host of different cheeses, especially Parmigiano Reggiano, Emmental Swiss, and smoked Gouda.
Cheese can be made impure by substituting expensive dairy fats from milk and cream with cheap vegetable oils and other additives. Counterfeit cheese is only illegal if it is labeled as pure cheese.
Smoked Gouda is quite expensive in its pure form that’s why we see items like “Smoked Gouda Cheese Product” as a cheap alternative to the real thing although your everyday consumer probably wouldn’t know the difference.
Real smoked Gouda melts properly, has a very creamy texture, doesn’t have a weird brown plastic-like rind around the outside, and doesn’t come in the shape of a log, but cheese “product” does.
The “Cheese Product” I’ve ordered from companies like Sysco, usually comes in a log and is labeled “Smoked Gouda Cheese Product”, if you don’t know what “cheese product” is think American cheese and then apply a smoked gouda taste and that’s pretty much it.
In reality “cheese product” is just another name for processed cheese which is an impure bastardization of the real thing, but it occasionally has its place.
Supply chain issues can be another reason a producer or supplier would commit food fraud, and high demand for rare or protected items (e.g., organic or sustainable foods) can lead to fraud by those who want to capitalize on culinary trends.
Ego can lead a consumer to unknowingly purchase counterfeit foods, particularly if it’s an item they really wanted but can’t normally afford and then the deal is too good to pass up.
Fraudsters take advantage of consumers’ willingness to pay more for premium items by selling counterfeit or adulterated versions at outrageous prices, people love to think they are buying something fancy.
Certain foods are difficult for the average consumer to distinguish based on taste or appearance alone. This makes it easier for counterfeiters to sell fake products undetected.
Ultimately, counterfeiting food destroys consumer trust and undermines the hard work and dedication of authentic producers, try to buy the real thing, it usually tastes better anyway.
Great piece chef and you are right! With fish we are often also told it's line caught, fresh but it is frozen or it's from a fish farm. I became vegan years ago and rely a lot on some of the ingredients you mention here. When I eat out, I ask detailed questions and it is hard to come by good olive oil. Best is to buy from a local producer if you can get to know one and pay a little extra. Not easy... Years ago I read how Italy and Spain bought olive oil from Greece and relabelled it after adding drops of it to their crop in order to get to call it extra virgin olive oil. In Italy, some producers fake the prosciutto ham... The other day I was at michelin star chef's street food restaurant in a food market and the chef declared they cook with a mix of oils and soybean oil is one of them. Rapeseed oil is in everything almost that we buy. But as a customer at a restaurant or supermarket, we need to make demands and not buy stuff like that. If we don't they'll keep feeding us unhealthy cheap stuff.
Our KM used to rail about fake foods all the time. I think we talked about particular fish we sold too, where tilapia or cod were usually the fakers standing in for way more expensive fish. I might have heard this about some kind of shellfish, too, like fake scallops that were actually whitefish or something. I don't think the scallops we got were fake, just to be clear, but that there were fake ones out there made of fish chunks.