Poor old Fonterra! The New Zealand dairy giant is in the news again for a problem with milk powder in China, but this time it could have been any food company. Its product has been on-sold several times, and time-expired milk powder has been repackaged and sold at a discounted rate.
I haven't been able to find out whether the original powder packaging was marked with a "Best before" date, or a "Use by" date and these terms are not used in China. According to National Standard GB7718-2011, the General Rules for the Labeling of Prepackaged Foods, in China, the labeling consist of production date and date of minimum durability.
Clearly, Fonterra is blameless in this case, and, with a long supply chain, it is difficult for the company to control what happens to its product.
The obvious concern in China, beyond any illegal activity, is the potential hazard to the consumer.
Can time-expired milk powder be hazardous to the consumer? In my opinion, this is highly unlikely. Properly packed and stored milk powder will keep for years - bacteria will not grow in the very low water activity in the powder. However, repackaging offers the possibility of contamination. The most likely issue is that the powder may become oxidised, leading to taste defects.
So, is this a big deal? Yes - the consumer is entitled to receive food products in good condition and not be sold inferior goods, and this includes not receiving perfectly safe but time-expired products.
Showing posts with label food fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food fraud. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Food Fraud
Food fraud is nothing new - it was mentioned in the UK in 1771 by Thomas Smollet and food adulteration was common in the Victorian era.
Food fraud usually takes the form of passing off inferior materials as more expensive products. It can be as simple as adding chalk to flour, supplementation of milk powder with melamine or passing off a low value product as one of greater worth. The latter often involves violation of trade marks or brand names.
Why do unscrupulous suppliers do this? Simply put, it's greed. If you can sell low value materials as high quality products, you can make a killing. Sometimes this occurs literally, for example, the not uncommon adulteration of spirits with methanol, an industrial chemical, or the attempt to smooth wine by adding glycol.
When I first began teaching in a Bachelor of Food Technology degree, I was horrified to read a full-page advertisement in a glossy trade magazine: "Why sell meat when you can sell water?" The advertiser was selling sodium tripolyphosphate, a water binding agent that can be injected into meats including fish. It makes the meat appear more succulent and acts as a preservative, but also increases the sale weight.
So this practice continues. The most recent description comes from foodprocessing.com.au
It appears that the authorities in China have been investigating many cases of food fraud and over 900 people have been arrested. One example is the manufacture of fake mutton from fox, mink and rat by the addition of chemicals. The amounts involved are truly staggering (where do they find so many foxes?). Presumably, the meat is comminuted, as cuts of rat are unlikely to be similar to mutton, though it might be a different matter with fox meat. It would be particularly disturbing if the products were labelled "Product of New Zealand" - this is a prime example of "passing off". It would not be the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Food fraud in any form is stealing. The consumer is not getting what he or she is paying for. The Chinese authorities are right to come down hard on the perpetrators, but it's an extremely difficult thing to stamp out because of the enormous rewards of getting away with it.
Food fraud usually takes the form of passing off inferior materials as more expensive products. It can be as simple as adding chalk to flour, supplementation of milk powder with melamine or passing off a low value product as one of greater worth. The latter often involves violation of trade marks or brand names.
Why do unscrupulous suppliers do this? Simply put, it's greed. If you can sell low value materials as high quality products, you can make a killing. Sometimes this occurs literally, for example, the not uncommon adulteration of spirits with methanol, an industrial chemical, or the attempt to smooth wine by adding glycol.
When I first began teaching in a Bachelor of Food Technology degree, I was horrified to read a full-page advertisement in a glossy trade magazine: "Why sell meat when you can sell water?" The advertiser was selling sodium tripolyphosphate, a water binding agent that can be injected into meats including fish. It makes the meat appear more succulent and acts as a preservative, but also increases the sale weight.
So this practice continues. The most recent description comes from foodprocessing.com.au
It appears that the authorities in China have been investigating many cases of food fraud and over 900 people have been arrested. One example is the manufacture of fake mutton from fox, mink and rat by the addition of chemicals. The amounts involved are truly staggering (where do they find so many foxes?). Presumably, the meat is comminuted, as cuts of rat are unlikely to be similar to mutton, though it might be a different matter with fox meat. It would be particularly disturbing if the products were labelled "Product of New Zealand" - this is a prime example of "passing off". It would not be the first time this sort of thing has happened.
Food fraud in any form is stealing. The consumer is not getting what he or she is paying for. The Chinese authorities are right to come down hard on the perpetrators, but it's an extremely difficult thing to stamp out because of the enormous rewards of getting away with it.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Toxic salt in Poland?
Anonymous sent me a comment after I posted "Is Vinegar just for Fish and Chips?".
In fact, the comment was not relevant to the original post, but I followed up on the quote Anonymous sent me. It appears that an investigation has been broadcast by an independent Polish television station, TVN. In the report, the reporter presented evidence of industrial salt - obtained as a waste by-product of calcium chloride production and claimed to contain dangerous carcinogens - being sold wholesale to the food industry as edible salt.
I have been unable to verify this report, because the commentary is, presumably, in Polish, but it has also been reported on CNN iReport, labelled as "Not vetted by CNN".
The programme claimed that up to 1000 tons per month of the waste product, labelled as being intended only for de-icing of roads or as a chemical industry raw material, has been purchased over the last 10 years. The salt was made as a by-product by a fertiliser company in Poland. Three Polish businesses have repackaged and on-sold the salt to numerous food processing plants as edible.
The Polish government has made some arrests of those thought to be responsible, but has not published the identities of any food processors who received the salt.
The concern is that toxins and potential carcinogens have been incorporated into the Polish food supply and, by implication, to some exported foodstuffs.
Food fraud is by no means a new thing and knows no national bounds. Where there's a fast buck to be made, you can bet that someone will try it. Unfortunately, this is not a victimless crime - those who suffer are often the unwitting consumers or their children, as we saw in the melamine milk scandal. Only the vigilance of regulatory authorities and investigative reporters can hope to reduce our exposure to food fraud.
In fact, the comment was not relevant to the original post, but I followed up on the quote Anonymous sent me. It appears that an investigation has been broadcast by an independent Polish television station, TVN. In the report, the reporter presented evidence of industrial salt - obtained as a waste by-product of calcium chloride production and claimed to contain dangerous carcinogens - being sold wholesale to the food industry as edible salt.
I have been unable to verify this report, because the commentary is, presumably, in Polish, but it has also been reported on CNN iReport, labelled as "Not vetted by CNN".
The programme claimed that up to 1000 tons per month of the waste product, labelled as being intended only for de-icing of roads or as a chemical industry raw material, has been purchased over the last 10 years. The salt was made as a by-product by a fertiliser company in Poland. Three Polish businesses have repackaged and on-sold the salt to numerous food processing plants as edible.
The Polish government has made some arrests of those thought to be responsible, but has not published the identities of any food processors who received the salt.
The concern is that toxins and potential carcinogens have been incorporated into the Polish food supply and, by implication, to some exported foodstuffs.
Food fraud is by no means a new thing and knows no national bounds. Where there's a fast buck to be made, you can bet that someone will try it. Unfortunately, this is not a victimless crime - those who suffer are often the unwitting consumers or their children, as we saw in the melamine milk scandal. Only the vigilance of regulatory authorities and investigative reporters can hope to reduce our exposure to food fraud.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Is Food less safe these days? Part 3
The final in this three part New Year soliloquy on food safety
You'll find the earlier parts in the panels below this one.
Communication: Globalisation has had another effect: within hours we know what has happened in other parts of the world. Multimedia cell phones allow people to send pictures and text; the Internet lets ordinary people put their thoughts in front of anyone who has a computer and of course the news media have worldwide coverage and transmit reports via satellite to every continent. The effect of all this is that we know almost immediately of large scale or unusual cases of food poisoning and food fraud as they occur throughout the world, thus increasing the perceived frequency of incidents.
Evolution: When I was an undergraduate microbiologist in the '60s, E. coli O157:H7 was unheard of. It was first identified as a human pathogen in 1982. Other new serotypes have also been recognized, usually as a result of an outbreak. It appears that evolution is continuing at a visible rate, at least in the microbial world. Dr Chris Bell and Alec Kyriakides† have expressed it beautifully: “Genetic promiscuity is facilitated by a range of genetic elements including plasmids, transposons, conjugative transposons and bacteriophages* . The ability to evolve through horizontal gene transfer and acquire ‘foreign’ DNA, has resulted in novel phenotypes and genotypes emerging”. This mix-and-match behaviour has resulted in the formation of diarrhoea-causing strains that possess previously unreported combinations of virulence factors. The study of DNA sequences in old lineages of E. coli has shown that these lines have acquired the same virulence factors in parallel. Natural selection has thus favoured an ordered acquisition of genes and a progressive build-up of molecular mechanisms that increase virulence (Reid et al., 2000. Nature, 406 64-7). Just this week in the journal Science, John Chen and Richard P Novick have reported that staphylococcal bacteriophage can transfer staphylococcal pathogenicity "islands", pieces of DNA containing superantigen genes and other transferable elements, to Listeria monocytogenes at the same high frequencies as they transfer within Staphylococcus aureus. See here
This might sound esoteric, but the practical result is that we will see more novel virulent bacteria that will in the future cause new food borne illnesses.
Obviously, the examples I have given above contain elements of more than one of the highlighted causes. Does this all add up to an answer to my original question? I think that we can draw some general conclusions.
• Modern food manufacturing processes may be technically more advanced than traditional food production
• These processes can be very reliable and make vast amounts of safe food at affordable prices
• When something does go wrong, the results may be catastrophic because of the scale of operations
• Human error and fraud are ever-present hazards to a safe food supply
• Our perception of the frequency of food poisoning or food fraud incidents may be influenced by the ease of international communication
• Microbial evolution means that we will never produce totally safe food
On balance, I think that our food is actually safer than it was 25 years ago.
†Bell, C. & Kyriakides, A. (2002) Pathogenic Escherichia coli. IN
Foodborne pathogens: Hazards, risk analysis and control. Blackburn, C. de W. & McClure, P.J. Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge, UK.
* Plasmid – a small circular independently replicating piece of DNA in bacteria; Plasmids often carry virulence factors, antibiotic resistance or toxin coding genes
Transposon - sequence of DNA that can move around to different positions within the genome of a single cell, possibly causing mutation
Conjugative transposon - integrated DNA elements that excise themselves to form a circular intermediate, which can transfer by conjugation to a recipient and integrate into the recipient's genome. Conjugative transposons have a broad host range and are probably as important as plasmids in the spread of antibiotic resistance genes in some genera of disease-causing bacteria (A A Salyers et al., (1995) Microbiol Rev. 59(4): 579–590).
Bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria and may ferry small sequences of bacterial DNA from one host cell to another. The DNA may integrate into the recipient’s genome and confer new characteristics, such as the ability to synthesise new enzymes.
You'll find the earlier parts in the panels below this one.
Communication: Globalisation has had another effect: within hours we know what has happened in other parts of the world. Multimedia cell phones allow people to send pictures and text; the Internet lets ordinary people put their thoughts in front of anyone who has a computer and of course the news media have worldwide coverage and transmit reports via satellite to every continent. The effect of all this is that we know almost immediately of large scale or unusual cases of food poisoning and food fraud as they occur throughout the world, thus increasing the perceived frequency of incidents.
Evolution: When I was an undergraduate microbiologist in the '60s, E. coli O157:H7 was unheard of. It was first identified as a human pathogen in 1982. Other new serotypes have also been recognized, usually as a result of an outbreak. It appears that evolution is continuing at a visible rate, at least in the microbial world. Dr Chris Bell and Alec Kyriakides† have expressed it beautifully: “Genetic promiscuity is facilitated by a range of genetic elements including plasmids, transposons, conjugative transposons and bacteriophages* . The ability to evolve through horizontal gene transfer and acquire ‘foreign’ DNA, has resulted in novel phenotypes and genotypes emerging”. This mix-and-match behaviour has resulted in the formation of diarrhoea-causing strains that possess previously unreported combinations of virulence factors. The study of DNA sequences in old lineages of E. coli has shown that these lines have acquired the same virulence factors in parallel. Natural selection has thus favoured an ordered acquisition of genes and a progressive build-up of molecular mechanisms that increase virulence (Reid et al., 2000. Nature, 406 64-7). Just this week in the journal Science, John Chen and Richard P Novick have reported that staphylococcal bacteriophage can transfer staphylococcal pathogenicity "islands", pieces of DNA containing superantigen genes and other transferable elements, to Listeria monocytogenes at the same high frequencies as they transfer within Staphylococcus aureus. See here
This might sound esoteric, but the practical result is that we will see more novel virulent bacteria that will in the future cause new food borne illnesses.
Obviously, the examples I have given above contain elements of more than one of the highlighted causes. Does this all add up to an answer to my original question? I think that we can draw some general conclusions.
• Modern food manufacturing processes may be technically more advanced than traditional food production
• These processes can be very reliable and make vast amounts of safe food at affordable prices
• When something does go wrong, the results may be catastrophic because of the scale of operations
• Human error and fraud are ever-present hazards to a safe food supply
• Our perception of the frequency of food poisoning or food fraud incidents may be influenced by the ease of international communication
• Microbial evolution means that we will never produce totally safe food
On balance, I think that our food is actually safer than it was 25 years ago.
†Bell, C. & Kyriakides, A. (2002) Pathogenic Escherichia coli. IN
Foodborne pathogens: Hazards, risk analysis and control. Blackburn, C. de W. & McClure, P.J. Woodhead Publishing, Cambridge, UK.
* Plasmid – a small circular independently replicating piece of DNA in bacteria; Plasmids often carry virulence factors, antibiotic resistance or toxin coding genes
Transposon - sequence of DNA that can move around to different positions within the genome of a single cell, possibly causing mutation
Conjugative transposon - integrated DNA elements that excise themselves to form a circular intermediate, which can transfer by conjugation to a recipient and integrate into the recipient's genome. Conjugative transposons have a broad host range and are probably as important as plasmids in the spread of antibiotic resistance genes in some genera of disease-causing bacteria (A A Salyers et al., (1995) Microbiol Rev. 59(4): 579–590).
Bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria and may ferry small sequences of bacterial DNA from one host cell to another. The DNA may integrate into the recipient’s genome and confer new characteristics, such as the ability to synthesise new enzymes.
Is Food less safe these days? Part 2
You'll find Part 1 in the panel below this.
Globalization: The globalized food supply means that raw materials may be processed outside of our own country and the foods transported to our local suppliers for distribution. The opportunities for poor process control and contamination are again significant. Many countries rely heavily on imports of food. The development of Chinese industry means that these imports are often sourced from China, though not exclusively. The Chinese government is moving to improve control over food manufacture, but faces an uphill battle in such a large country with so many diverse regulatory authorities.
Greed: The huge demand for food is a temptation for some unscrupulous manufacturers to try to make a fast buck by adulterating food or passing off poor quality materials. The prime example in our time is the use of melamine to increase the apparent protein content of milk and pet food. See here However, food fraud has been going on literally for centuries.
Adulteration of food is usually done with inferior materials to increase the bulk of the real item and thus increase profits. In 1820, a German scientist Frederick Accum published his book “A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons”. He described sloe leaves added to tea, lozenges made from pipe clay, custards poisoned with laurel leaves, floor sweepings mixed into pepper and copper used to colour pickles green.
In 1857 Arthur Hill Hassal, an English physician and microscopist, wrote a book “Adulterations Detected, or Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds in Food and Medicine”. He noted that “Adulteration prevails in nearly all articles which it is worth while to adulterate, whether it is food, drink or drugs”. Watering of milk or of “cream ice” was a popular activity, but clay and dust were used to bulk up many foods. These days, companies have analytical techniques to detect adulteration of food, but this works only if the company is not involved in the fraud. Government organizations like the New Zealand Food Safety Authority and the US Food and Drug Administration cannot guarantee the safety of foods by end product testing. See here The best that can be achieved is management of food safety through risk management programmes.
The following new book offers interesting reading: Wilson B (2008). “Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee”. London: John Murray Publishers.
In the final, Part 3: click here: Communication and Evolution
Globalization: The globalized food supply means that raw materials may be processed outside of our own country and the foods transported to our local suppliers for distribution. The opportunities for poor process control and contamination are again significant. Many countries rely heavily on imports of food. The development of Chinese industry means that these imports are often sourced from China, though not exclusively. The Chinese government is moving to improve control over food manufacture, but faces an uphill battle in such a large country with so many diverse regulatory authorities.
Greed: The huge demand for food is a temptation for some unscrupulous manufacturers to try to make a fast buck by adulterating food or passing off poor quality materials. The prime example in our time is the use of melamine to increase the apparent protein content of milk and pet food. See here However, food fraud has been going on literally for centuries.
Adulteration of food is usually done with inferior materials to increase the bulk of the real item and thus increase profits. In 1820, a German scientist Frederick Accum published his book “A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons”. He described sloe leaves added to tea, lozenges made from pipe clay, custards poisoned with laurel leaves, floor sweepings mixed into pepper and copper used to colour pickles green.
In 1857 Arthur Hill Hassal, an English physician and microscopist, wrote a book “Adulterations Detected, or Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds in Food and Medicine”. He noted that “Adulteration prevails in nearly all articles which it is worth while to adulterate, whether it is food, drink or drugs”. Watering of milk or of “cream ice” was a popular activity, but clay and dust were used to bulk up many foods. These days, companies have analytical techniques to detect adulteration of food, but this works only if the company is not involved in the fraud. Government organizations like the New Zealand Food Safety Authority and the US Food and Drug Administration cannot guarantee the safety of foods by end product testing. See here The best that can be achieved is management of food safety through risk management programmes.
The following new book offers interesting reading: Wilson B (2008). “Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee”. London: John Murray Publishers.
In the final, Part 3: click here: Communication and Evolution
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
