An email message entitled “Bad Food” is being circulated. Snopes.com fact-checking site last September reiterated its 2014 judgment that this message is partly false and partly true.
Warning signs that took me to Snopes included: lack of dates; no author (therefore no credibility); no sources for many claims made. The quarrelsome and prejudicial tone detracts from some important truths, prompting me to return to the subject of food fraud, a fast-growing global practice that includes mislabelling; falsehoods; substitution of cheaper products to cut costs; and counterfeits of brands.
Globalised food systems provide many loopholes for bad food, some legal, some criminal. Organized crime is involved from the longtime Mafia interest in processed meats to Mexican cartels hijacking lime harvests.
Less obvious is restaurant food which is not what is claimed, for instance, truffle oil and lobster. Enterprising Chinese crooks sell fake eggs (yes, yolk, white and shell all fake) so far only in China.
Chinese Canadians have been in the forefront of growing superb, healthy vegetables in B.C. since before Confederation. Fairways is a fine store and I shop there often, but I’m not going to knowingly buy foods which have come from China from any store.
I avoid food from China because standards at both the exporting and importing stages are untrustworthy. How can such vast quantities of foods be properly inspected at either end? There may the same percentage of shameless, reckless, law-breakers in China as in any other population but the size of the population of China means they will produce the most fraudulent food.
While the Canadian Food Inspection Agency cites U.S. data placing fraud at 10 per cent of all food products globally, it admits that the problem is too great for it to do much more than targeted, periodic testing. As yet, there is no Canadian data on the scope of the problem.
More and more Canadians suffer from various food intolerances, ranging from life-threatening to manageable. They have to be protected from the global racketeers.
Researchers at Guelph University testing DNA barcoding technology on dozens of fish fillets from restaurants and grocery stores in Toronto and New York between 2006-07 found almost one-quarter of the samples were mislabelled. That’s just fish.
The mighty Mekong River reaches the Pacific at the Vietnam coast. No one denies that the river is now dangerously polluted, yet I have seen tilapia fillets from Vietnam in local supermarkets. We are a coastal community and we have fisherfolk who know where and how to catch local fish. So why import? Because we have become addicted to low prices and accustomed to shoddy products.
Shop local, know your farmers, know your fishers, grow and catch your own. But the key is to change buying priorities. I know people with very limited incomes who eat much better than people with far more money. They can do this because they have set health and support for local producers ahead of cheapness.
What they save on avoiding bad food they spend on good food.
Marjorie Stewart is past chairwoman of the Nanaimo Foodshare Society.