For connected articles and more details, please visit OCA’s The Myth of Organic web page.
When you order sushi at your favourite restaurant or choose up a pound of coffee from your regional supermarket, you assume you happen to be getting the red snapper or Columbian beans as stated on the menu or label.
But not so quick. A expanding quantity of cases of “meals fraud” are occurring in the United States, such that you may possibly not be capable to inform what you’re truly consuming just by seeking at the label.
Worse nevertheless, most of these circumstances are not very publicized incidents like the current scandal of UK supermarkets selling “beef” burgers that in fact contained horse and pig meat. Rather, they’re ongoing cases of blatant misrepresentation among some incredibly typical foods.
What Is Food Fraud?
Meals fraud, defined as “the deliberate substitution, addition, tampering or misrepresentation of food, meals ingredients or food packaging, or false or misleading statements made about a item for financial gain,”1 is the focus of the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention’s (USP) Food Fraud Database,two which already has a lot more than 1,300 records of meals fraud published from 1980 to 2010.
A current update, which added in cases from 2011 and 2012, increased the number of records by 60 percent, or almost 800 new records, and includes some foods you very effectively might eat each and every day, like olive oil, honey, seafood and orange juice.
In some instances, the foods had been diluted with components not listed on the label. In other individuals, the meals was one thing entirely distinct than it claimed to be.