Entry #9

 

The $40 Billion Food Fraud Economy

Fake Food Fraud 

Have you ever thought to yourself while eating something “Is this real food?” or “What’s in this?” You probably have many reasons why you would even consider wondering about those questions. Fake food is real and so is food fraud. Food fraud is when manufactures or laborers intentionally hide stuff from us and consumers buy something although it’s not what they think it is. There is $40 billion dollars worth of food fraud where only 10% of food in the food industry is actual real food. Anything outside of that 10% is fake food that is commercially adulterated. There is a public safety concern where fake food that is also known as Economically Motivated Adulteration (EMA) robs consumers of nutrients and can potentially kill them.

Fake food

In this video you see a woman who talks about olive oil. She starts to pour olive oil straight from the bottle that reads “Extra Virgin Olive Oil” and as she is pouring it into a small bowl, she “You think this is olive oil? Wrong.” She explains that in the process of making olive oil a cheaper oil is mixed in with the olive oil and how the label still reads “100% olive oil.” A second example given in this video which is parmesan cheese. Foods that say it contains parmesan cheese were found by the FDA to be false. A third example given is spices. Spices are known to be vulnerable to food fraud because they contain high levels of heavy metals and can be mixed and diluted with other ingredients like plant stems as shown in the video. Why is the FDA doing more the try to prevent food fraud and fake food from being sold to consumers? The FDA is only mandated by law to inspect 2% of imported seafood which is very low seeing that 85% of seafood in the US is imported.

Fake Olive Oil

The FDA uses intentional and unintentional means of tracking safety. Food fraud is motivated by the economical gain where’s the unintentional is motivated by any harmdoing of fake food consumed. Other than that, there is no way for the FDA to estimate how often fraud can happen and neither can they estimate the dilution and substitutions of food. During the pandemic there was an astonishing 21% increase in food fraud and the more companies can defraud consumers the more it will cost us. So why is the FDA not doing more to protect consumers from food fraud and contracting life threatening illnesses from fake food? The FDA says, “It’s only their job to make sure food doesn’t hurt you not police the laborers.”

FDA Approved

Before watching this video, I was completely unaware that fake food was a real thing and how dangerous it is. When I go to the grocery store to buy extra virgin olive oil, I expect it to be just that not diluted olive oil. When I want to purchase things like spices, fish or something that is stated on the packaging, I expect it to be those things as stated on the label. Not things that are loaded with high levels of heavy metals or a cheaper type of fish instead of the real thing. I don’t think consumers are completely aware of what is going on in our food industry and what they are buying and ingesting. This is not fast food so why is there such a large amount of food fraud and fake food sold in grocery stores? These are now concerns we all need to be aware of when buying groceries for your next meal. I know I'll be doing more research on fake foods and how to spot them!