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The truth about food fraud
Is that tuna in your sandwich? Or was the fish in the can a different species altogether? From careless labelling to outright deception, food fraud in Britain has reached epidemic proportions - and most of us have no idea what we're being sold. How can we sort the organic wheat from the GM chaff? Kate Ravilious uncovers the tricks of a very dirty trade
20 November 2006
You've invited some friends around for a special dinner party and have planned a delicious menu. For starters, fresh cantaloupe melon served with succulent slices of prosciutto di parma. Then, a main course of wild Scottish salmon, jersey royal potatoes and organic baby carrots, with a couple of chilled bottles of grand cru chablis. Afterwards, a dessert of Greek yoghurt drizzled with acacia blossom honey. To round things off, some slivers of manchego cheese with Scottish oatcakes followed by a cup of rich arabica coffee.
But what if some of your expensive ingredients are not what they purport to be? Did that salmon really swim along the river Dee? Are those muddy carrots definitely organic? Were the jersey royals lifted out of the rich Jersey soil, or did they come from the altogether damper loam of Ireland? And that manchego - are you sure it was made from sheep's milk and flown in from the high, rocky plains of La Mancha in Spain?
Food fraud is big business. The UK Food Standards Agency believes that around 10 per cent of our weekly shopping may be counterfeit. Many of the everyday goods that we buy - honey, orange juice, ham, butter and coffee - generate serious money for the food criminals. From printing misleading labels to diluting or modifying the food itself, it's easier than ever for suppliers to dupe consumers.
Last week, an inspection by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) at Heart of England Eggs, a major supermarket supplier in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, raised suspicions that battery-farmed eggs were being packaged and labelled as (more expensive) free-range. With such a wide distribution network, these eggs could have found their way on to the shelves of supermarkets across the country.
Britons eat 9 billion eggs each year, and just under a third are free-range. But Defra suspects that almost 30 million eggs labelled as free-range are in fact no such thing. By the time they reach the consumer, it is almost impossible to tell. But Defra has developed a highly accurate means of determining the truth. When eggs are first laid, their shells are still relatively soft. In battery farms, newly-laid eggs rest on wire racks, leaving tiny marks on the surface. Invisible to the naked eye, these marks can be seen under ultraviolet light - not an option for the busy shopper, but a key weapon for food scientists in the war against fraud. And with the stakes so high, it's the appliance of science that offers the best hope of a fairer deal for consumers.
At the Government's Analytical and Scientific Services centre in Edinburgh, Andrew Mackie leads me through a maze of laboratories to demonstrate the variety of tests he and his colleagues can carry out. Whirring machines spit out spectroscopic profiles - "fingerprints" that show the way a substance absorbs, emits or scatters light. Bubbling columns result in printed chromatographs, showing the separation of each compound contained in a food product. Mackie has a huge variety of tests at his disposal.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) carries out spot checks on all types of food and drink to ensure that they are both safe to consume and that the customer is getting what they are paying for. And while some of the surveys have uncovered startling levels of counterfeit trade, things may be about to change.
Backed by a major new European Commission initiative to clamp down on food fraud, scientists are developing ever more sophisticated ways of tracing the origins of our food. One of the most recent breakthroughs is a DNA test that is used to detect whether products are free from genetically modified organisms. A small quantity of DNA is extracted from the food and then multiplied millions of times using a process called a polymerase chain reaction. Having amplified the DNA, it is possible to trace the food's family tree. "It is the best way to identify different species," says Mackie.
Recently this technique was used by the FSA to uncover a multi-million pound scam involving basmati, the unique variety of rice with a superlative texture and taste. "It consists of very long, slim grains and when it cooks the grains lengthen but don't fatten," explains Mark Woolfe, a scientist who works at the at the FSA's enforcement division in London. Basmati's unique properties have been selectively bred over thousands of years, high in the hills of north-western India and around the Pakistani border. Because of the higher price that basmati commands, some farmers and producers have tried to con the consumer, particularly with higher-yielding hybrid varieties that are sold on as basmati. The grains look similar in the packet, but when cooked they don't produce the same delicate taste.
Up until the mid-1990s the FSA had a team of rice specialists who would try and identify different rice varieties by visual inspection, but it's nigh-on impossible to spot the difference in appearance between a hybrid variety of basmati and the real thing. Then in the late 1990s scientists developed the new DNA test, similar to that used by the police to trace criminals, and the true extent of the basmati problem was revealed.
In 2002, at the University of Bangor, scientists carried out DNA tests on rice for the FSA and found that only 54 per cent of the bags labelled as basmati contained pure basmati rice. The remaining 46 per cent had all been diluted with inferior varieties, some by as much as 60 per cent. This year the FSA began to prosecute some of the fraudsters, and so far two Essex-based companies, Basmati Rice and Surya Rice, have been fined £8,000 each for selling mislabelled bags of rice.
Now the basmati fraud appears to be diminishing. A survey conducted by the Rice Association earlier this year found that only 16 per cent of basmati rice packs were diluted with non-basmati rice.
DNA testing has massive potential for fighting food fraud. It could be used to distinguish between cantaloupe melons and the very similar-looking charentais. It can confirm that your honey was made with blossom from the acacia tree. But DNA testing can't pick up on every kind of food crime. Take that grand cru chablis 2000. "A DNA test might tell us the grape variety, but it can't confirm where it was grown," says Mackie.
Robert Oger, from the Walloon Agricultural Research Centre in Belgium, thinks he might have the solution to the problems that DNA testing cannot solve. Under the umbrella of GeoTraceAgri, a project funded by the European Commission, the centre has been developing a satellite system to monitor food crops.
"Using remote sensing we can identify the nature of the fields and their environment," he explains. For example, his team can calculate an expected yield for each field. They will note what kind of crops are being grown and, significantly, how far away they are from the nearest roads and industries - which could explain away the presence of any chemical contaminants. Afterwards they can keep a continuous eye on the farm using satellite images.
In the case of something like your bottle of chablis, he hopes that eventually you will be able to key a unique number, printed on the bottle, into a website and take a look for yourself at the vines that the grapes came from. "The idea is to build something similar to a Google Earth for food products, so that someone with a bottle of wine on their table can see exactly where it originated," says Oger.
This system will work well for premium products grown on a small scale, such as wine, specialist olive oil and that arabica coffee that you were planning to serve after dinner. But still it can't provide definitive proof for the origin of your produce. Until now, the only way of tracing a food's origin is to follow the paper trail: stamps and certifications that accompany it on its journey. But it is all too easy for crooked producers to fake a food's background and create bogus paperwork, and many of us are getting ripped off. Now science has come up an ingenious solution for that, too.
Locked inside every plant and animal is a chemical memory of its environment. Factors such as soil type rainfall levels leave a unique chemical imprint known as an isotope ratio.
Imagine comparing jersey royals grown in Jersey with some impostors grown in Ireland. The potatoes look identical, but the isotopic signature will reveal the sunny skies under which the jersey royals grew, as compared to the damper climate that the Irish potatoes endured. In this case, isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen (from water) are the key.
Both oxygen and hydrogen have heavy and light isotopes. In colder climates, evaporation is less vigorous and fewer heavy isotopes make it into the rain-cloud mix. Consequently Irish rain (and Irish potatoes) have a higher proportion of lightweight oxygen and hydrogen isotopes than Jersey rain (and Jersey potatoes). This relationship can also be used to distinguish coastal from inland areas and mountains from plains (clouds tend to lose heavy isotopes as they move inland or gain altitude). And if those "Jersey potatoes" weren't grown in Jersey, the fraud can be exposed, without recourse to a paper trail.
"The technique is most powerful when used to look at products made solely from raw materials sourced from small distinct geographical regions, as is often the case with protected foods," says Simon Kelly, a scientist at the Government-funded Institute of Food Research in Norwich.
Since 1992 a number of regional foods and drinks have been protected by European law and given protected designation of origin (PDO) status. Italian prosciutto di parma, Spanish manchego cheese, whitstable oysters, jersey royal potatoes and shetland lamb are all examples. Isotope testing is ideal for spotting fake PDOs.
And it is even possible to narrow the food's origin down even further by exploiting isotopes in soil and rocks. "Geology can change over just hundreds of metres, so potentially we can pin down an individual farm or valley," says Kelly. Soil is made up from rocks. Plants absorb nutrients from soil and animals eat plants, meaning that all food carries a trace of its local geology. The key element is strontium, which has two natural isotopes of interest: 86 and 87. Very old rocks tend to have more strontium 87, whereas younger rocks are biased towards strontium 86. For some foods this signature can be very distinct. "Broadly speaking, Southern Africa has very old geology and so we find that the isotopic content of strontium 87 in South African beef is enormous compared to that of European beef," says Kelly.
Isotopes are even enabling the FSA to distinguish between wild and farmed fish. Wild fish are sleeker than their inactive farmed cousins and they eat a less-processed diet. This shows up in their isotope and fatty-acid profiles. "We can differentiate between wild and farmed fish including species like salmon, sea bass and sea bream," says Woolfe.
Already the isotope technique has paid its way, uncovering a massive double-dealing butter operation in 2003. A group of German companies were exporting Irish butter to Estonia (then not a member of the EU). Each time a butter lorry crossed the border from Germany to Poland, the company was given EU subsidies because of the lower market prices outside the EU. Once in Estonia the butter was re-packaged and labelled to make it look like it had originated in Estonia. The lorry was then reloaded and driven back to Germany, where the company received another dollop of cash, this time because of state protection measures to reduce duty on products coming in from prospective EU countries.
Using isotopic testing, the German authorities were able to show that 22 out of 25 butter samples had not in fact originated from Estonia, as the packet claimed. Now the companies involved are being prosecuted for this butter "merry-go-round".
Isotopic testing is an impressive new tool, but it, too, has its limitations. One area that is still a real problem is telling organic food from non-organic. Your taste buds may tell you that organic gala apples are crisper and sweeter than their non-organic cousins, but this doesn't constitute scientific proof.
Many of us are prepared to pay a premium for carrots that were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, or chicken reared without the routine use of antibiotics. Organic is now big business, estimated to be worth £16.7bn globally. And its popularity is growing - in the UK, demand for organic food increased by 30 per cent last year.
Currently, all food sold as organic in the UK must be registered with a recognised organic accreditation organisation such as the Soil Association. To pass the organic test, farmers and producers must have their premises inspected and provide paper traceability with everything they sell. "We go to every farm and calculate its expected yield," says Keith Ball, who works in the Soil Association Certification department.
But it is still all too easy for the unscrupulous farmer to fiddle his figures or change his habits after the inspection has passed. "Finding a test for organic food is the holy grail," says Paul Brereton, director of the EU's Trace programme based at the Central Science Laboratory (CSL) in York.
Recently, Mitchell Kelly, a member of the Trace team at CSL, has made some progress. He has developed a reliable way of testing the provenance of "organic" pork and chicken. The technique looks at antibiotics, which are permitted to be used in organically reared animals, but only for curing infections, and then only once a year. "One way to check this is to look at the deposition patterns of the antibiotic in the growing bones of pigs and chicken, like tree rings," says Woolfe. By shining ultraviolet light on a cross-section from the animals' bones the scientists can identify growth rings and show how many of these rings contain antibiotic chemicals.
But the organic carrots you bought for your dinner party are still a problem. Currently all scientists can do is test for what shouldn't be there. "The presence of a non-permitted preservative would mean that the food was not produced according to the regulation, and so was not organic," says Ball.
For some products, the deception has become so bad that producers have taken it into their own hands to catch the conmen. The makers of major spirit brands including Gordon's gin and Smirnoff vodka now add a natural marker to their products that can be detected using a simple "dipstick". Only the genuine brand of spirit will contain the secret marker, which makes the dipstick change colour. If your pub landlord has poured an inferior brand into his Gordon's bottle, the dipstick will stubbornly refuse to change.
"In 1999, a survey of 1,000 outlets revealed that 8 per cent of pubs were refilling or substituting their spirits at any one time," says Philip Scatchard from the International Federation of Spirits Producers. By 2006 substitution levels had fallen to 2 per cent thanks to the dipstick tests.
Meanwhile, for whisky (where the dipstick test doesn't work) the drinks multinational Diageo has developed a portable authenticator. The test works by shining a UV light through the whisky sample and analysing the light that comes out the other side. "Each whisky has a unique profile due to the way it has been made and the kind of cask it has matured in," says Willie McKenzie, who works for Diageo and helped to develop the test.
The efforts of the drinks companies show how effective food-fraud tests can be when there's a brand to defend and - ultimately - a lot of money behind a project. But adding secret markers is not an option with simple organic produce, and colour comparison is endlessly varied from, say, one organic carrot to another.
Returning to our hypothetical dinner party, of all the produce on the table - from the prosciutto to the expensive chablis - the organic baby carrots are still the hardest for scientists to authenticate. The addition of a chemical marker would be far from true to the ideals of the organic movement, and anyway, with no megabrand to bankroll the project and so many different suppliers around the world, how could one uniform system possibly be expected to work?
So of all the produce on the shelves at your local supermarket, the organic shelf remains the most difficult to police, requiring so many tests to determine whether so many different pesticides and fertilisers have - or have not - been used. Are you still sure that you know exactly what you're buying?
Tuna
There's tuna and there's tuna - and then there's bonito. Bonito is a member of the mackerel family that, due to its average quality and the high EU import levies on some fish, is significantly cheaper than its chunky cousin, tuna. The trouble is, in products that are generically labelled "tuna", some manufacturers exchange cheaper species for more expensive ones. This is especially prevalent in processed tinned tuna, where identifying the different species of tuna and bonito that have been used is difficult.
Eggs
Breakfasts around the country were spoilt by two recent announcements from Defra. The first was that, following an investigation of imported eggs in north London, one in 30 boxes was found to contain salmonella. The second was that around 30 million eggs may have been wrongly labelled as free range.
British farmers produce 8.8 billion eggs every year, of which 131 million are exported. This creates a gap between supply and demand, so 1.4 billion eggs are imported from the Continent.
Since Edwina Currie sparked the salmonella crisis in 1988, Britain has become more careful about egg hygiene. Since 1998, most British eggs have carried the red lion mark, ensuring that hens have been vaccinated against salmonella. Egg-related cases of salmonella dropped from 22,254 in 1997 to 6,677 in 2005. Another way to check the provenance of an egg is to look at the number printed on its shell. On free-range eggs, the figure starts with number 1, followed by a code for its country of origin. Organic eggs start with 0, barn eggs 2, and eggs from caged birds with 3.
Lean Mince
Watch out, bolognese enthusiasts: that extra-lean mince might not be so low-fat after all. The Association of Public Analysts' recent survey suggests that much of the minced beef, lamb, pork, turkey and chicken that claims to be a reduced-fat alternative is, in fact, just as unhealthy as "standard" mince. A total of 27 per cent of all mince types are now labelled as "lean" and "extra lean".
Those descriptions, however, are open to interpretation. For instance, "standard" minced beef that was sampled for the survey ranged from 1.9 per cent to 32.3 per cent fat. "Lean" products ranged from 4 per cent to 15.7 per cent fat, and "extra lean" from 1.9 to 17.7 per cent fat. Clearly, there is a huge overlap between these categories.
The worst offender was the "extra lean" mince. Forty per cent of extra-lean beef contains more than the 9 per cent maximum fat limit recommended by the APA. Two per cent of "extra-lean" beef mince contains more than 25 per cent fat - the maximum recommended fat level for "standard" mince.
Scallops & Scampi
A 2002 survey by the FSA found worryingly high levels of water in raw scallops and peeled scampi tails - nearly half the scallops contained 10 per cent added water or more, while some contained as much as 54 per cent. The situation with scampi was far worse - 86 per cent of ice-glazed peeled scampi had more than 10 per cent added water. Meanwhile, about a quarter of breaded scampi either did not give a declared scampi content on its packaging, or overstated its scampi content by up to 5 per cent.
Honey
Only 10 per cent of the honey Britons eat is actually produced in Britain. But for ethical consumers keen to cut down on their food miles, sourcing locally is incredibly important. It came as a shock, then, when, in 2004, a beekeeper in the Scottish borders, Richard Brodie, was caught passing off Argentine honey as his own.
An investigation revealed a world of shady dealings in the honey industry. Some farmers, for instance, were administering too many antibiotics to poorly bees. More significantly, the quality of imported honey was put under a harsh spotlight. Whole batches from India and China were found to be contaminated with chloramphenicol, an antibiotic banned in food production the world over. Honey from Vietnam, Cyprus, Tanzania, Moldova, Romania, Argentina, Portugal, Spain and Bulgaria was also found to contain traces of the antibiotic.
King Edward Potatoes
The King Edward is a versatile spud, and has long been the mainstay of the traditional British roast dinner. So one can understand why some unscrupulous members of the food industry have falsely labelled their floury down-market fare as a King Edward. Recently, the FSA took samples from shops, wholesale markets and catering suppliers and found that 35 per cent of its samples had been wrongly labelled King Edward. Of that 35 per cent, almost a third were ambo potatoes, the King Edward's starch rival.
Rice
Genetically modified rice should not be on sale in Britain. It is illegal here, just as it is in all EU countries. But in September, several types of GM rice were found in British supermarkets. The problem started when the Bush administration admitted it had found genetically modified material in some American long-grain rice that was ready for export. This GM rice had been developed by Bayer CropScience to tolerate weedkiller and had spread around the US as a result of cross-pollination. The European Commission has since stated that this GM rice has been found in 33 out of 162 samples of imported US rice. Opinions are split among scientists as to whether GM rice can cause serious harm.
Organic Meat
When you tuck into your rib of organic beef that you bought from a local butcher or farmers' market, you'd like to think you can taste the acres of untreated grass on which the animal has led a happy life. But you could be kidding yourself. An investigation launched into the sale of bogus organic meat carried out earlier this year revealed that many farmers and traders are passing off non-organic meat as the more expensive organic variety.
Organic meat generates £200m of sales every year in Britain, and the industry is growing. Rogue traders have spotted an opening. If an ordinary steak costs between £10 and £15 per kilo, an organic steak can cost twice that. Likewise, a battery chicken that might normally cost £3 can cost up to £11 if it said to be organic.
Chicken
Bulking up a chicken breast with water is an old supplier's trick, but the FSA had not realised how widespread the problem was until it conducted a snap survey in 2001.Its investigation found that almost half the frozen chicken breasts they examined had a meat content of between 5 and 26 per cent less than appeared on packaging, and that some chicken breasts contained as much as 43 per cent added water.
Moreover, just under a quarter of the frozen chicken breasts sampled had elevated levels of hydroxyproline, indicating that hydrolysed proteins derived from collagen had been introduced to the product. Only 3 per cent of those products informed the consumer of this fact.
Is that tuna in your sandwich? Or was the fish in the can a different species altogether? From careless labelling to outright deception, food fraud in Britain has reached epidemic proportions - and most of us have no idea what we're being sold. How can we sort the organic wheat from the GM chaff? Kate Ravilious uncovers the tricks of a very dirty trade
20 November 2006
You've invited some friends around for a special dinner party and have planned a delicious menu. For starters, fresh cantaloupe melon served with succulent slices of prosciutto di parma. Then, a main course of wild Scottish salmon, jersey royal potatoes and organic baby carrots, with a couple of chilled bottles of grand cru chablis. Afterwards, a dessert of Greek yoghurt drizzled with acacia blossom honey. To round things off, some slivers of manchego cheese with Scottish oatcakes followed by a cup of rich arabica coffee.
But what if some of your expensive ingredients are not what they purport to be? Did that salmon really swim along the river Dee? Are those muddy carrots definitely organic? Were the jersey royals lifted out of the rich Jersey soil, or did they come from the altogether damper loam of Ireland? And that manchego - are you sure it was made from sheep's milk and flown in from the high, rocky plains of La Mancha in Spain?
Food fraud is big business. The UK Food Standards Agency believes that around 10 per cent of our weekly shopping may be counterfeit. Many of the everyday goods that we buy - honey, orange juice, ham, butter and coffee - generate serious money for the food criminals. From printing misleading labels to diluting or modifying the food itself, it's easier than ever for suppliers to dupe consumers.
Last week, an inspection by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) at Heart of England Eggs, a major supermarket supplier in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, raised suspicions that battery-farmed eggs were being packaged and labelled as (more expensive) free-range. With such a wide distribution network, these eggs could have found their way on to the shelves of supermarkets across the country.
Britons eat 9 billion eggs each year, and just under a third are free-range. But Defra suspects that almost 30 million eggs labelled as free-range are in fact no such thing. By the time they reach the consumer, it is almost impossible to tell. But Defra has developed a highly accurate means of determining the truth. When eggs are first laid, their shells are still relatively soft. In battery farms, newly-laid eggs rest on wire racks, leaving tiny marks on the surface. Invisible to the naked eye, these marks can be seen under ultraviolet light - not an option for the busy shopper, but a key weapon for food scientists in the war against fraud. And with the stakes so high, it's the appliance of science that offers the best hope of a fairer deal for consumers.
At the Government's Analytical and Scientific Services centre in Edinburgh, Andrew Mackie leads me through a maze of laboratories to demonstrate the variety of tests he and his colleagues can carry out. Whirring machines spit out spectroscopic profiles - "fingerprints" that show the way a substance absorbs, emits or scatters light. Bubbling columns result in printed chromatographs, showing the separation of each compound contained in a food product. Mackie has a huge variety of tests at his disposal.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) carries out spot checks on all types of food and drink to ensure that they are both safe to consume and that the customer is getting what they are paying for. And while some of the surveys have uncovered startling levels of counterfeit trade, things may be about to change.
Backed by a major new European Commission initiative to clamp down on food fraud, scientists are developing ever more sophisticated ways of tracing the origins of our food. One of the most recent breakthroughs is a DNA test that is used to detect whether products are free from genetically modified organisms. A small quantity of DNA is extracted from the food and then multiplied millions of times using a process called a polymerase chain reaction. Having amplified the DNA, it is possible to trace the food's family tree. "It is the best way to identify different species," says Mackie.
Recently this technique was used by the FSA to uncover a multi-million pound scam involving basmati, the unique variety of rice with a superlative texture and taste. "It consists of very long, slim grains and when it cooks the grains lengthen but don't fatten," explains Mark Woolfe, a scientist who works at the at the FSA's enforcement division in London. Basmati's unique properties have been selectively bred over thousands of years, high in the hills of north-western India and around the Pakistani border. Because of the higher price that basmati commands, some farmers and producers have tried to con the consumer, particularly with higher-yielding hybrid varieties that are sold on as basmati. The grains look similar in the packet, but when cooked they don't produce the same delicate taste.
Up until the mid-1990s the FSA had a team of rice specialists who would try and identify different rice varieties by visual inspection, but it's nigh-on impossible to spot the difference in appearance between a hybrid variety of basmati and the real thing. Then in the late 1990s scientists developed the new DNA test, similar to that used by the police to trace criminals, and the true extent of the basmati problem was revealed.
In 2002, at the University of Bangor, scientists carried out DNA tests on rice for the FSA and found that only 54 per cent of the bags labelled as basmati contained pure basmati rice. The remaining 46 per cent had all been diluted with inferior varieties, some by as much as 60 per cent. This year the FSA began to prosecute some of the fraudsters, and so far two Essex-based companies, Basmati Rice and Surya Rice, have been fined £8,000 each for selling mislabelled bags of rice.
Now the basmati fraud appears to be diminishing. A survey conducted by the Rice Association earlier this year found that only 16 per cent of basmati rice packs were diluted with non-basmati rice.
DNA testing has massive potential for fighting food fraud. It could be used to distinguish between cantaloupe melons and the very similar-looking charentais. It can confirm that your honey was made with blossom from the acacia tree. But DNA testing can't pick up on every kind of food crime. Take that grand cru chablis 2000. "A DNA test might tell us the grape variety, but it can't confirm where it was grown," says Mackie.
Robert Oger, from the Walloon Agricultural Research Centre in Belgium, thinks he might have the solution to the problems that DNA testing cannot solve. Under the umbrella of GeoTraceAgri, a project funded by the European Commission, the centre has been developing a satellite system to monitor food crops.
"Using remote sensing we can identify the nature of the fields and their environment," he explains. For example, his team can calculate an expected yield for each field. They will note what kind of crops are being grown and, significantly, how far away they are from the nearest roads and industries - which could explain away the presence of any chemical contaminants. Afterwards they can keep a continuous eye on the farm using satellite images.
In the case of something like your bottle of chablis, he hopes that eventually you will be able to key a unique number, printed on the bottle, into a website and take a look for yourself at the vines that the grapes came from. "The idea is to build something similar to a Google Earth for food products, so that someone with a bottle of wine on their table can see exactly where it originated," says Oger.
This system will work well for premium products grown on a small scale, such as wine, specialist olive oil and that arabica coffee that you were planning to serve after dinner. But still it can't provide definitive proof for the origin of your produce. Until now, the only way of tracing a food's origin is to follow the paper trail: stamps and certifications that accompany it on its journey. But it is all too easy for crooked producers to fake a food's background and create bogus paperwork, and many of us are getting ripped off. Now science has come up an ingenious solution for that, too.
Locked inside every plant and animal is a chemical memory of its environment. Factors such as soil type rainfall levels leave a unique chemical imprint known as an isotope ratio.
Imagine comparing jersey royals grown in Jersey with some impostors grown in Ireland. The potatoes look identical, but the isotopic signature will reveal the sunny skies under which the jersey royals grew, as compared to the damper climate that the Irish potatoes endured. In this case, isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen (from water) are the key.
Both oxygen and hydrogen have heavy and light isotopes. In colder climates, evaporation is less vigorous and fewer heavy isotopes make it into the rain-cloud mix. Consequently Irish rain (and Irish potatoes) have a higher proportion of lightweight oxygen and hydrogen isotopes than Jersey rain (and Jersey potatoes). This relationship can also be used to distinguish coastal from inland areas and mountains from plains (clouds tend to lose heavy isotopes as they move inland or gain altitude). And if those "Jersey potatoes" weren't grown in Jersey, the fraud can be exposed, without recourse to a paper trail.
"The technique is most powerful when used to look at products made solely from raw materials sourced from small distinct geographical regions, as is often the case with protected foods," says Simon Kelly, a scientist at the Government-funded Institute of Food Research in Norwich.
Since 1992 a number of regional foods and drinks have been protected by European law and given protected designation of origin (PDO) status. Italian prosciutto di parma, Spanish manchego cheese, whitstable oysters, jersey royal potatoes and shetland lamb are all examples. Isotope testing is ideal for spotting fake PDOs.
And it is even possible to narrow the food's origin down even further by exploiting isotopes in soil and rocks. "Geology can change over just hundreds of metres, so potentially we can pin down an individual farm or valley," says Kelly. Soil is made up from rocks. Plants absorb nutrients from soil and animals eat plants, meaning that all food carries a trace of its local geology. The key element is strontium, which has two natural isotopes of interest: 86 and 87. Very old rocks tend to have more strontium 87, whereas younger rocks are biased towards strontium 86. For some foods this signature can be very distinct. "Broadly speaking, Southern Africa has very old geology and so we find that the isotopic content of strontium 87 in South African beef is enormous compared to that of European beef," says Kelly.
Isotopes are even enabling the FSA to distinguish between wild and farmed fish. Wild fish are sleeker than their inactive farmed cousins and they eat a less-processed diet. This shows up in their isotope and fatty-acid profiles. "We can differentiate between wild and farmed fish including species like salmon, sea bass and sea bream," says Woolfe.
Already the isotope technique has paid its way, uncovering a massive double-dealing butter operation in 2003. A group of German companies were exporting Irish butter to Estonia (then not a member of the EU). Each time a butter lorry crossed the border from Germany to Poland, the company was given EU subsidies because of the lower market prices outside the EU. Once in Estonia the butter was re-packaged and labelled to make it look like it had originated in Estonia. The lorry was then reloaded and driven back to Germany, where the company received another dollop of cash, this time because of state protection measures to reduce duty on products coming in from prospective EU countries.
Using isotopic testing, the German authorities were able to show that 22 out of 25 butter samples had not in fact originated from Estonia, as the packet claimed. Now the companies involved are being prosecuted for this butter "merry-go-round".
Isotopic testing is an impressive new tool, but it, too, has its limitations. One area that is still a real problem is telling organic food from non-organic. Your taste buds may tell you that organic gala apples are crisper and sweeter than their non-organic cousins, but this doesn't constitute scientific proof.
Many of us are prepared to pay a premium for carrots that were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, or chicken reared without the routine use of antibiotics. Organic is now big business, estimated to be worth £16.7bn globally. And its popularity is growing - in the UK, demand for organic food increased by 30 per cent last year.
Currently, all food sold as organic in the UK must be registered with a recognised organic accreditation organisation such as the Soil Association. To pass the organic test, farmers and producers must have their premises inspected and provide paper traceability with everything they sell. "We go to every farm and calculate its expected yield," says Keith Ball, who works in the Soil Association Certification department.
But it is still all too easy for the unscrupulous farmer to fiddle his figures or change his habits after the inspection has passed. "Finding a test for organic food is the holy grail," says Paul Brereton, director of the EU's Trace programme based at the Central Science Laboratory (CSL) in York.
Recently, Mitchell Kelly, a member of the Trace team at CSL, has made some progress. He has developed a reliable way of testing the provenance of "organic" pork and chicken. The technique looks at antibiotics, which are permitted to be used in organically reared animals, but only for curing infections, and then only once a year. "One way to check this is to look at the deposition patterns of the antibiotic in the growing bones of pigs and chicken, like tree rings," says Woolfe. By shining ultraviolet light on a cross-section from the animals' bones the scientists can identify growth rings and show how many of these rings contain antibiotic chemicals.
But the organic carrots you bought for your dinner party are still a problem. Currently all scientists can do is test for what shouldn't be there. "The presence of a non-permitted preservative would mean that the food was not produced according to the regulation, and so was not organic," says Ball.
For some products, the deception has become so bad that producers have taken it into their own hands to catch the conmen. The makers of major spirit brands including Gordon's gin and Smirnoff vodka now add a natural marker to their products that can be detected using a simple "dipstick". Only the genuine brand of spirit will contain the secret marker, which makes the dipstick change colour. If your pub landlord has poured an inferior brand into his Gordon's bottle, the dipstick will stubbornly refuse to change.
"In 1999, a survey of 1,000 outlets revealed that 8 per cent of pubs were refilling or substituting their spirits at any one time," says Philip Scatchard from the International Federation of Spirits Producers. By 2006 substitution levels had fallen to 2 per cent thanks to the dipstick tests.
Meanwhile, for whisky (where the dipstick test doesn't work) the drinks multinational Diageo has developed a portable authenticator. The test works by shining a UV light through the whisky sample and analysing the light that comes out the other side. "Each whisky has a unique profile due to the way it has been made and the kind of cask it has matured in," says Willie McKenzie, who works for Diageo and helped to develop the test.
The efforts of the drinks companies show how effective food-fraud tests can be when there's a brand to defend and - ultimately - a lot of money behind a project. But adding secret markers is not an option with simple organic produce, and colour comparison is endlessly varied from, say, one organic carrot to another.
Returning to our hypothetical dinner party, of all the produce on the table - from the prosciutto to the expensive chablis - the organic baby carrots are still the hardest for scientists to authenticate. The addition of a chemical marker would be far from true to the ideals of the organic movement, and anyway, with no megabrand to bankroll the project and so many different suppliers around the world, how could one uniform system possibly be expected to work?
So of all the produce on the shelves at your local supermarket, the organic shelf remains the most difficult to police, requiring so many tests to determine whether so many different pesticides and fertilisers have - or have not - been used. Are you still sure that you know exactly what you're buying?
Tuna
There's tuna and there's tuna - and then there's bonito. Bonito is a member of the mackerel family that, due to its average quality and the high EU import levies on some fish, is significantly cheaper than its chunky cousin, tuna. The trouble is, in products that are generically labelled "tuna", some manufacturers exchange cheaper species for more expensive ones. This is especially prevalent in processed tinned tuna, where identifying the different species of tuna and bonito that have been used is difficult.
Eggs
Breakfasts around the country were spoilt by two recent announcements from Defra. The first was that, following an investigation of imported eggs in north London, one in 30 boxes was found to contain salmonella. The second was that around 30 million eggs may have been wrongly labelled as free range.
British farmers produce 8.8 billion eggs every year, of which 131 million are exported. This creates a gap between supply and demand, so 1.4 billion eggs are imported from the Continent.
Since Edwina Currie sparked the salmonella crisis in 1988, Britain has become more careful about egg hygiene. Since 1998, most British eggs have carried the red lion mark, ensuring that hens have been vaccinated against salmonella. Egg-related cases of salmonella dropped from 22,254 in 1997 to 6,677 in 2005. Another way to check the provenance of an egg is to look at the number printed on its shell. On free-range eggs, the figure starts with number 1, followed by a code for its country of origin. Organic eggs start with 0, barn eggs 2, and eggs from caged birds with 3.
Lean Mince
Watch out, bolognese enthusiasts: that extra-lean mince might not be so low-fat after all. The Association of Public Analysts' recent survey suggests that much of the minced beef, lamb, pork, turkey and chicken that claims to be a reduced-fat alternative is, in fact, just as unhealthy as "standard" mince. A total of 27 per cent of all mince types are now labelled as "lean" and "extra lean".
Those descriptions, however, are open to interpretation. For instance, "standard" minced beef that was sampled for the survey ranged from 1.9 per cent to 32.3 per cent fat. "Lean" products ranged from 4 per cent to 15.7 per cent fat, and "extra lean" from 1.9 to 17.7 per cent fat. Clearly, there is a huge overlap between these categories.
The worst offender was the "extra lean" mince. Forty per cent of extra-lean beef contains more than the 9 per cent maximum fat limit recommended by the APA. Two per cent of "extra-lean" beef mince contains more than 25 per cent fat - the maximum recommended fat level for "standard" mince.
Scallops & Scampi
A 2002 survey by the FSA found worryingly high levels of water in raw scallops and peeled scampi tails - nearly half the scallops contained 10 per cent added water or more, while some contained as much as 54 per cent. The situation with scampi was far worse - 86 per cent of ice-glazed peeled scampi had more than 10 per cent added water. Meanwhile, about a quarter of breaded scampi either did not give a declared scampi content on its packaging, or overstated its scampi content by up to 5 per cent.
Honey
Only 10 per cent of the honey Britons eat is actually produced in Britain. But for ethical consumers keen to cut down on their food miles, sourcing locally is incredibly important. It came as a shock, then, when, in 2004, a beekeeper in the Scottish borders, Richard Brodie, was caught passing off Argentine honey as his own.
An investigation revealed a world of shady dealings in the honey industry. Some farmers, for instance, were administering too many antibiotics to poorly bees. More significantly, the quality of imported honey was put under a harsh spotlight. Whole batches from India and China were found to be contaminated with chloramphenicol, an antibiotic banned in food production the world over. Honey from Vietnam, Cyprus, Tanzania, Moldova, Romania, Argentina, Portugal, Spain and Bulgaria was also found to contain traces of the antibiotic.
King Edward Potatoes
The King Edward is a versatile spud, and has long been the mainstay of the traditional British roast dinner. So one can understand why some unscrupulous members of the food industry have falsely labelled their floury down-market fare as a King Edward. Recently, the FSA took samples from shops, wholesale markets and catering suppliers and found that 35 per cent of its samples had been wrongly labelled King Edward. Of that 35 per cent, almost a third were ambo potatoes, the King Edward's starch rival.
Rice
Genetically modified rice should not be on sale in Britain. It is illegal here, just as it is in all EU countries. But in September, several types of GM rice were found in British supermarkets. The problem started when the Bush administration admitted it had found genetically modified material in some American long-grain rice that was ready for export. This GM rice had been developed by Bayer CropScience to tolerate weedkiller and had spread around the US as a result of cross-pollination. The European Commission has since stated that this GM rice has been found in 33 out of 162 samples of imported US rice. Opinions are split among scientists as to whether GM rice can cause serious harm.
Organic Meat
When you tuck into your rib of organic beef that you bought from a local butcher or farmers' market, you'd like to think you can taste the acres of untreated grass on which the animal has led a happy life. But you could be kidding yourself. An investigation launched into the sale of bogus organic meat carried out earlier this year revealed that many farmers and traders are passing off non-organic meat as the more expensive organic variety.
Organic meat generates £200m of sales every year in Britain, and the industry is growing. Rogue traders have spotted an opening. If an ordinary steak costs between £10 and £15 per kilo, an organic steak can cost twice that. Likewise, a battery chicken that might normally cost £3 can cost up to £11 if it said to be organic.
Chicken
Bulking up a chicken breast with water is an old supplier's trick, but the FSA had not realised how widespread the problem was until it conducted a snap survey in 2001.Its investigation found that almost half the frozen chicken breasts they examined had a meat content of between 5 and 26 per cent less than appeared on packaging, and that some chicken breasts contained as much as 43 per cent added water.
Moreover, just under a quarter of the frozen chicken breasts sampled had elevated levels of hydroxyproline, indicating that hydrolysed proteins derived from collagen had been introduced to the product. Only 3 per cent of those products informed the consumer of this fact.
