Food Fraud- Food that is not what it says, FDA needs to crack down

Is your food what it says?

The expensive “sheep’s milk” cheese in a Manhattan market was really made from cow’s milk. And a jar of “Sturgeon caviar” was, in fact, Mississippi paddlefish.

Some honey makers dilute their honey with sugar beets or corn syrup, their competitors say, but still market it as 100 percent pure at a premium price.

And last year, a Fairfax man was convicted of selling 10 million pounds of cheap, frozen catfish fillets from Vietnam as much more expensive grouper, red snapper and flounder. The fish was bought by national chain retailers, wholesalers and food service companies, and ended up on dinner plates across the country.

“Food fraud” has been documented in fruit juice, olive oil, spices, vinegar, wine, spirits and maple syrup, and appears to pose a significant problem in the seafood industry. Victims range from the shopper at the local supermarket to multimillion companies, including E&J Gallo and Heinz USA.

Such deception has been happening since Roman times, but it is getting new attention as more products are imported and a tight economy heightens competition. And the U.S. food industry says federal regulators are not doing enough to combat it.

“It’s growing very rapidly, and there’s more of it than you might think,” said James Morehouse, a senior partner at A.T. Kearney Inc., which is studying the issue for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the food and beverage industry.

John Spink, an expert on food and packaging fraud at Michigan State University, estimates that 5 to 7 percent of the U.S. food supply is affected but acknowledges the number could be greater. “We know what we seized at the border, but we have no idea what we didn’t seize,” he said.

The job of ensuring that food is accurately labeled largely rests with the Food and Drug Administration. But it has been overwhelmed in trying to prevent food contamination, and fraud has remained on a back burner.

The recent development of high-tech tools — including DNA testing — has made it easier to detect fraud that might have gone unnoticed a decade ago. DNA can be extracted from cells of fish and meat and from other foods, such as rice and even coffee. Technicians then identify the species by comparing the DNA to a database of samples.

Another tool, isotope ratio analysis, can determine subtle differences between food — whether a fish was farmed or wild, for example, or whether caviar came from Finland or a U.S. stream.

The techniques have become so accessible that two New York City high school students, working with scientists at the Rockefeller University and the American Museum of Natural History last year, discovered after analyzing DNA in 11 of 66 foods — including the sheep’s milk cheese and caviar — bought randomly at markets in Manhattan were mislabeled.

“We put so much emphasis on food and purity of ingredients and where they come from,” said Mark Stoeckle, a physician and DNA expert at Rockefeller University who advised the students. “But then there are things selling that are not what they say on the label. There’s an important issue here in terms of economics and consumer safety.”

It is not clear how many food manufacturers, importers and retailers are testing products, but large companies with valuable brands to protect have been increasingly using the new technology, said Vincent Paez, director of food safety business development at Thermo Fisher Scientific, which sells some of the equipment and performs laboratory analysis, including DNA testing.

Still, of the hundreds of customers who bought 10 million pounds of mislabeled Vietnamese catfish — including national chains and top rated restaurants — only one or two caught the deception, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns, who prosecuted the Fairfax fish importer. “It was the rare exception, not the norm,” he said.

Heinz USA and Kraft Foods, two giant food makers with well- established internal controls, nevertheless fell victim to “Operation Rotten Tomato,” a conspiracy in which the scion of a California farming dynasty was indicted this month. He was accused of disguising millions of pounds of moldy tomato paste as a higher- grade product and selling it to foodmakers.

And E&J Gallo, the nation’s largest wine seller, sold 18 million bottles of Red Bicyclette Pinot Noir between 2006 and 2008 that had been filled in France with wine made from cheaper merlot and syrah grapes, according to a French court that last month indicted a dozen of its citizens in a scam dubbed Pinotgate.

At the FDA’s first public meeting on food fraud last year, groups across the industry complained that it is not doing enough.

“If it’s not going to hurt or kill someone, FDA’s resources are limited enough that they can’t take time to address it,” said Bob Bauer, a spokesman for the National Honey Packers & Dealers Association and the North American Olive Oil Association.

Both groups have petitioned the FDA to set standards for honey and olive oil, which would make it possible for companies to sue competitors that sell an adulterated product. The olive oil industry has been waiting for FDA to act on its request since 1991; major honey and beekeeping groups have been waiting since 2006. An agency spokesman said those requests are pending.

One longtime crabmeat seller on the Chesapeake Bay said he has complained, without results, to the FDA for years about a competitor who imports cheap crab and repackages it as Chesapeake blue crab, a different species that can be sold for twice or three times the price.

The National Seafood Inspection Laboratory, part of the Marine Fisheries Service, randomly sampled seafood from vendors between 1988 and 1997; it found that 34 percent had been mislabeled and sold as a different species. In 2004, scientists at the University of North Carolina estimated that 77 percent of snapper sold in the United States is mislabeled.

“With the recession, people are trying to make money in any way, shape or form,” said William Gergits, a co-founder of Therion International LLC, which specializes in DNA-based testing services. “Southeast grouper and red snapper fisheries here are limited. If you think about all the restaurants in Florida, there’s not enough supply to go to those restaurants.”

Despite growing imports, the FDA inspects just 2 percent of fish coming into the United States from other countries.

The agency wants to create a surveillance system that would alert regulators to likely fraud, said Jennifer Thomas, director of enforcement at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She said the FDA regularly swaps intelligence with two other agencies that share responsibility for catching seafood fraud. It has also bought a $170,000 DNA sequencer for its Seattle field office.

She pointed to several FDA actions against food fraud in recent months, including the first debarment of a seafood importer, suggesting that may be a deterrent.

Peter Xuong Lam, president of Virginia Star Seafood Corporation of Fairfax, was convicted last year of selling the mislabeled catfish. Ten other individuals and companies were also charged. Lam was sentenced to five years in prison and is barred from importing food into the United States for the next 20 years.

Authentification should be a standard practice throughout the food industry, Stoeckle said: “If it’s simple enough that high school students with some supervision can do it, it moves out of the research application to something you can do regularly.”

Source

Banned Foods Trivia about 7 banned foods

The following is a list of some foods and beverages that have been banned either because the particular species is endangered or because, if ingested, they can seriously threaten the health, safety, and well-being of the consumer.

1. Japanese Puffer Fish (fugu)

Also known as blowfish, these creatures are so named for their ability to inflate themselves to several times their normal size by swallowing water or air when threatened.

Although the eyes and internal organs of most puffer fish are highly toxic, the meat is considered a delicacy in Japan and Korea. Still, nearly 60 percent of humans who ingest this fish die from tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin that damages or destroys nerve tissue. Humans need only ingest a few milligrams of this toxin for a fatal reaction to occur.

Most puffer fish poisoning is the result of accidental consumption of other foods that are tainted with the puffer fish toxin rather than from the ingestion of puffer fish itself. Symptoms include rapid numbness and tingling of lips and mouth, which are generally resolved within hours to days if treated promptly.

2. Absinthe

Absinthe has been found to be the cause of negative neurological effects.

Banned in 1905 in the U.S, this ban was only recently lifted in 2007!
In Switzerland the ban was lifted in 2000.
Absinthe has been found
to be the cause of negative
neurological effects.
The exact origin of absinthe is unknown,
but this strong alcoholic liqueur was probably first commercially produced
around 1797. It takes its name from one of its ingredients, Artemisia absinthium, which is the botanical name for the bitter herb known as wormwood.

Green in color due to the presence of chlorophyll, it became an immensely
popular drink in France by the 1850s. Said to induce creativity, produce hallucinations, and act as an aphrodisiac, the bohemian lifestyle quickly embraced it, and absinthe soon became known as la fee verte (the green fairy). But in July 1912, the Department of Agriculture banned absinthe in America for its “harmful neurological effects,” and France followed in 1915.

The ban was lifted in the United States in

3. Foie Gras- I am not sure on this one, since Trader Joe’s still sells pate and I know restaurants still sell it. So I did a little research. It was banned in Chicago in 2006, then the resturants and Chefs brought a lawsuit against the city to allow it back. It seems they got their foie gras back in May 2008.
See NYT article here.

Foie gras, which literally means “fatty liver,” is what actor Roger Moore calls a “delicacy of despair.” When Moore discovered how geese were tortured to create the hors d’oeuvre, he was so appalled that he teamed up with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and APRL (Animal Protection and Rescue League) to educate the public.

In order to create foie gras, ducks and geese are painfully force-fed up to four pounds of food a day by cramming it down their throats through metal pipes until, according to Moore, “they develop a disease that causes their livers to enlarge up to ten times their normal size!”

Investigations into foie gras farms have revealed such horrible, unabashed cruelty to animals that the dish has been banned in many countries and many parts of the United States.




4. Casu Marzu Maggot Cheese (ok, this one sounds sick!)

Casu Marzu Maggot Cheese

Casu marzu, which means "rotting cheese" in Sardinian, is not just an aged and very smelly cheese, it is an illegal commodity in many places. Casu marzu is a runny white cheese made by injecting Pecorino Sardo cheese with cheese-eating larvae that measure about one-half inch long.

Tradition calls for this cheese to be eaten with the maggots running through it. Sardinians claim these critters make the cheese creamier and that it's absolutely delicious. This cheese is widely, but not openly, eaten in Sardinia, even though the ban on it is only enforced sporadically.

5. Sassafras

Now recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a potential carcinogen, sassafras is the dried root bark of the sassafras tree native to eastern North America. Throughout history, sassafras has been used for making tea, as a fragrance for soap, a painkiller, an insect repellent, and a seasoning and thickener for many Creole soups and stews.

But the best-known use of sassafras lies in the creation of root beer, which owes its characteristic flavor to sassafras extract. In 1960, the FDA banned the ingredient saffrole -- found in sassafras oil -- for use as an additive because in several experiments massive doses of sassafras oil were found to induce liver cancer in rats. It should come as no surprise that chemicals and artificial flavors are used to flavor root beer today.

6. Blackened Redfish ( I wondered why I never see this on the menu anymore!)

Yummy blackened redfish, all fished out I guess!

In 1980, New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme publicized his recipe for blackened redfish, which is still very popular today. The recipe was so popular that it sparked a blackened redfish craze in the 1980s, which so severely threatened the redfish stock that the Commerce Department had to step in and close down fisheries in July 1986.

In Florida, strict conservation measures were enforced for two years, and to this day, the state requires that anglers keep only one redfish per day and release any that do not fall into the 18- to 27-inch limit, handling their catch as little as possible to assure that the fish survives upon release.

7. Ortolan (I had never heard of this bird before)

Cute little birdy, he is only a mouthful, poor guy.

In the same cruel fashion as foie gras, this tiny bird has little to sing about, as historically it was horribly tortured before being eaten as a gastronomic treat by the aristocracy of France.

Its fate was often to be captured, have its eyes poked out, and be put in a small cage, then force-fed until it grew to four times its normal size. Next the poor bird would be drowned in brandy, roasted, and eaten whole.

Now considered a protected species in France, the ortolan is also in decline in several other European countries. Nevertheless, hunters still kill about 50,000 birds per year even though it is illegal to sell them.

Tags: Absinthe, banned food trivia, Banned Foods, Blackened Redfish, Casu Marzu Maggot Cheese, foie gras, Ortolan, puffer fish, Sassafras