1088: Counterfeit Foods | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.
Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Jessica Nguyen. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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That's right. Even your perfectly aged artisanal cheese is not safe.
It might just be a cleverly disguised hunk of cheese-flavored plastic, and I'm not really exaggerating here. And that fancy, high-priced bottle of wine you're sipping on, it could be nothing more than grape juice with just a splash of regret.
So grab your napkins, because we're about to dig into the murky world of counterfeit food, where the stakes are high and the stakes are not even real beef. These criminals are not exactly Michelin star material.
Joining me to take a bite out of food crime is writer and researcher Jessica Nguyen. Hey, Jordan.
Can you believe counterfeiting food is a massive, multi-billion dollar industry? I am a little skeptical about this Skeptical Sunday. As a man who goes out to eat a lot, we might be actually asking questions I don't really want the answers to.
That's the lawyer in you, but it won't make you feel better that everything we eat is susceptible to being counterfeited. So from basic staples like milk and bread to high-end products like truffles and aged bourbon, counterfeit foods are everywhere.
Essentially, if you eat food, you're being lied to. And lying to yourself, I guess.
I like to think that I pay enough attention that I'm not getting scammed by my food, but I don't know. Here we go.
But you are. So am I.

And so is everyone listening. If your favorite cheese turns out to be a plastic imitation and your wine is a cheap knockoff, what's the real risk here? Beyond disappointment, of course.
Counterfeit food is a deliberate deception that can have no effect on us or enormous consequences. So it's really subjective.
They can involve mislabeled ingredients. They can be outright fraudulent products imitating brands or types of food and in some cases pose serious health risks.
Counterfeit food is like those fake Rolexes, but for your taste buds. When I was in high school, I bought a bag of pot that turned out to be straight up oregano.
Yeah, I have news for you. Even that oregano is often counterfeited.
But yeah, that was rough. Before it was legal, pot smokers inhaled a lot worse than oregano, I bet.
Yeah, it was definitely not the high I was looking for. I smelled great, though.
My friend smelled great, though. Yeah, when I was in college, let's just say my friend purchased what was most likely a bag of white paint chips and it burned.
Yeah, so did the oregano from what I heard. Man, the trials of experimental youth and prohibition.
But it's a really good analogy for counterfeit foods. We're expecting something real.
We pay for that authenticity. But if our senses don't catch the fraud, like the burning sensation from that oregano, we might never know.
And someone is pocketing a few extra bucks. Absolutely.
So how did we end up in this mess where our food is so easily manipulated? It's all about our global food supply chain. It's enormous and opaque, which makes it a playground for fraudsters.
They can operate in this vast market without much chance of detection. Plus, high-value products are prime targets for counterfeiting.
And the higher the value of the product, the more tempting it is for fraudsters to get involved. Okay, so basically the bigger the market and the more valuable the product is, the more likely it is to be faked.
It's unsettling to think that so much of our food might be compromised by greed, but hashtag capitalism, I suppose. So who's involved in this dark trade? It's a range of players.
If you can exploit gaps in food regulations and oversight, then you can manipulate the food market to your advantage at any scale. So we're talking everyone from individual criminals like your friend's oregano dealer to large corporations, organized crime groups, and even entire mafia networks.
Okay, you got my attention. Mafia networks.
Now it's getting interesting. How did the mafia even get their hands into our food? I thought they were kind of in the drug trafficking business or something a little more serious sounding.
Yeah, it's actually a thing called agro mafia, and it's a $16 billion year industry. So food and agriculture are ripe for mafia infiltration because those sectors are less technologically advanced and often involve small scalescale competition, which makes them vulnerable.
Agro-mafia. Sounds like something out of Goodfellas.
I never thought that pasta and racketeering were a combination. Yeah.
I mean, a lot of those scenes were in a restaurant, right? Like, the mafia has infiltrated the entire food chain from farms to restaurants. They buy up the cheap farmland, livestock, markets, and even restaurants laundering money through what's become a leading industry in Italy.
So this starts at the farms and goes all the way to the plates. Exactly.
The agro-mafia's reach extends from production to packaging, transport, and distribution. So the value of this criminal enterprise has almost doubled in recent years from 12.5 billion being reported in 2011 to over 22 billion by 2018.
And it now represents about 15 percent of total mafia turnover. So this is so bizarre.
So let me get this straight. While we're enjoying our Chianti or olive oil, the mafia, the actual real life Italian mafias, they're just raking in

profits from the very food that we are eating. Yeah, that's right.
It's a highly profitable

venture with profit margins as high as 2000 percent. So compared to drug running or robberies,

what we think of as the mafia, this is way less dangerous and it's more lucrative.

So the mafia, this is way less dangerous and it's more lucrative. So the mafia's involvement is all about exploiting vulnerabilities.
Drugs and food, they ship well together and restaurants provide a perfect front for laundering money and conducting criminal business. So our food is deeply entwined with crime,

but it's easy to overlook when we're just hungry.

Is it that widespread?

This isn't just a bunch of shady characters sneaking into farmers' markets?

It's actually worse than you might think.

Mafia syndicates have turned food fraud

into a massive profitable enterprise.

And according to the Observatory of Crime in Agriculture and the Food Chain, that's a real Italian commission battling food crime. That's ridiculous, but OK.
It probably sounds nicer in Italian. The mafia has infiltrated the entire food supply chain.
OK, I'm going to sound like a jerk, but it sounds like an Italian problem that they have to just deal with. Right, that's what it sounds like.
But all of Italy's major crime syndicates have rooted themselves so deeply in every part of the food chain. It affects the path that our food takes around the world.
And this web of crime leads to other things. So according to Professor Umberto Santino, who's a mafia historian from Palermo.
The mob's interests in the agriculture industry extend to, quote, human trafficking, money laundering, extortion, loan sharking, illegal breeding, backstreet butchering and baking. There's burial of toxic waste on farmland.
It's an integrated cycle, a full package of systemic interactions. And the fraud can start anywhere in the world.
So when crops are destroyed somewhere, organized crime steps in to fill the gap. And that's when counterfeit products start flooding the market.
What do you mean when crops are destroyed? What do you mean by that? Crops are destroyed. Organized criminal activity flourishes when farms face bad weather and hurricane comes or a drought, whatever it is.
I got it. So literally when crops are destroyed by the weather, there's just a shortage of stuff.
So they fill the gap. Is that the idea? Absolutely.
Like this year's heat wave in California destroyed Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. So I can guarantee everybody that counterfeit Cabernet Sauvignon will be on the rise.
So it's not this is so weird. It's not some Scorsese movie plot.
It's happening right now, possibly even in California. Is it just specific crops or is it products like olives and grapes? Because those are the ones I've heard about.
Yeah. Olive oil fraud is rampant.
That's where it all begins. And many

consumers have lost their virginity, figuratively speaking, when it comes to genuine Italian olive

oil. Cheap oils are blended with a splash of real extra virgin olive oil.
And then a high-end label

is slapped on the bottle. So this is being battled constantly.
Take Operation Yellow Gold,

for example. Yeah, yeah, perfect.
In Puglia, traffickers were caught producing counterfeit

olive oil. They were using rapeseed oil and selling it as extra virgin.
The operation was

so advanced, it infiltrated international markets,

including restaurants in Switzerland and Germany,

and they made millions of dollars off the scam.

Millions.

So this is like a heist movie,

but way more boring because it's olive oil.

It's a real bummer for anybody

trying to buy genuine Italian olive oil,

and you see that and it's expensive.

How do we tell if we're even getting the real deal? I don't know how to test olive oil. Yeah, unfortunately, it's tough.
Most olive oil that claims to be, quote unquote, from Italy, it could have been imported to Italy, re-exported and imported back. So there's ways to get around these weird labeling laws.
And it's just nearly impossible to tell without testing. So the best you can do is visit the Italian countryside and stock up directly if you're up for being the olive oil connoisseur weirdo with a cellar.
Yeah, it sounds like a good excuse for a trip to Italy. But what about other products? I'm guessing it's not just olive oil that's being counterfeited because it seems like such easy money.

Surely there's other factors.

Yeah, I mean, olive oil is a big issue.

The mafia's influence definitely spans beyond that, though.

So there's a big counterfeit cheese market.

Why is that?

You know what?

It sounds like an episode of Paw Patrol.

That's why it's funny.

I've heard you can think you're getting a fine cheese, but it's like plastic or cornstarch or whatever mixed in there. Is that true? I mean, in fairness with the plastic stuff, it's yes and no.
A plastic is simply any material that can be molded into a desired shape. And processed cheese does fit that definition.
but no one I can find is like grinding up plastic bottles and slapping cheese labels on them. What happens is cheeses are melted, they're blended, and they're reshaped and then often mislabeled.
So there was a major scandal in 2016 that revealed many Parmesan cheeses labeled as 100% pure contain significant amounts of cellulose, which is a wood product. Okay, so wood chips in my cheese.
That's like saying this burger is 100% beef and finding out it's a beef-flavored tree branch. Yeah, it was a real eye-opener.
It's disgusting. So for years, though, consumers were being duped by these domestic imitations of Italy's famous Parmesan.
And instead of the real deal, which only has salt, rennet, and pure hormone-free milk from cows fed a natural diet, many of these Parmesan products were using lower quality milk additives, and sometimes, Jordan, up to 20 percent wood. Oh, there's a joke in there somewhere.
I got to add that to my Tinder profile. So consumers were basically getting sawdust with their spaghetti.
To be fair, the brand we're probably talking about, that stuff does look like sawdust. If we already know about this fraud, why is it still going on? You'd think that somebody would put a stop to wood in my cheese.
Yeah, it's the mafia and their operations are incredibly sophisticated. So the fraudsters use advanced methods to avoid detection.
And there's just a need for better international cooperation. So countries have to work together and share information to tackle this effectively.
But there's just so many products to track. There's honey, maple syrup, cinnamon, wine.
They're all really frequently counterfeited. I've got all those in my kitchen.
Just like everyone listening to this right now, honey, maple syrup, cinnamon, wine. And yes, I've heard about wine fraud.
We actually did an episode on that. I kind of want to do more because that is a huge and deep topic.

I mean, yeah, it's never ending. Wine fraud is a multibillion dollar industry.
And experts say that around 5 percent of wines sold are fake, which is a lot considering how much wine we drink. And often it involves passing off just average wine as a prestigious label or selling lesser vintages as high end ones to fetch high prices.
Yeah, this seems almost inevitable, especially when all these blind taste tests, they show that even all you see those where the experts are like, oh, this is so great. And it's always the cheap stuff and they can't tell.
They really can't tell the difference. It's all nonsense.
Yeah, and neither can we, because I'm sure that we've probably celebrated something with a bogus wine, but we still got the requisite buzz. So unless you're a serious wine collector and you're stocking your cellar with like back vintage Chateau Lafitte, this isn't likely to be a problem you actually care about.
We get ripped off on a $15 glass of wine, whatever. But if your $2,000 bottle is bogus...
Yeah, so if you are a collector, maybe make sure you know how many teas are in Lafitte. Yeah, right.
Stuff like that gets missed by average consumers. And it's just so easy to be fooled, especially with how accessible just fake labels are these days.
And it's not just wine. Counterfeit alcohol in general is a huge problem.
I'm sure I've bought some watered down drinks in my day. Yeah, right.
But this problem goes like way beyond a disappointing cocktail. The bourbon community is especially up in arms.
And it's a competitive world with thousands of people vying for just a few barrels. So there's even a push for like anti-tampering measures to combat bourbon counterfeiting.
But the sad truth is the counterfeits are out there. And if the bottle is sealed and it looks legit, consumers are not going to notice probably.
So it's like counterfeit art or wine. If nobody's the wiser, counterfeiters just laugh all the way to the bank, and they might just never get caught, because who's even pulling the alarm on this? Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
And the consumer, too. If they don't know, and if they get enjoyment...
And I mean, when these high-end luxury collectors of fine foods and libations get scammed, I know I'm an a-hole, but it's a little hard to have empathy sometimes. I guess it's subjective.
There's a famous story where four Wall Street, I imagine, douchey businessmen were served an $18 bottle of wine when they had ordered a $2,000 bottle of wine. And like a young couple at the table near them got the $2,000 bottle.
So it was switched. And the young couple was just like, yeah, our wine's okay.
And the businessmen were raving about how great their wine was. And it's just a classic case of tasting with our wallets.
I mean, it was an embarrassing accident, of course, but it speaks to your point about empathy. If those businessmen had ordered that bottle from eBay as collectors, would you feel more bad for them?

Okay, first of all, people are buying wine on eBay.

I guess that makes sense.

Yeah, it can be legitimate.

And you can buy anything on eBay.

Yeah, that's true.

So that's when having empathy gets a little more complicated

when regular products are faked,

like counterfeit balsamic vinegar.

Wait, why bother counterfeiting balsamic vinegar? This is one of those discussion threads that leads to me realizing I've never actually had real balsamic vinegar. So my balsamic vinegar that I get with my Greek salad or whatever, that's not real.
That's so dumb somehow. I know.
I know. It's so much work.
Yeah. I mean, it might not be real.
Those same counterfeiting practices used with wine and bourbon, they're used with balsamic vinegars. So we trust with our eyes.
And if we see that label and that seal intact and there's a dark liquid inside, we trust it's balsamic. But traditional balsamic vinegar is aged for years and must meet strict standards.
With so many balsamic products on the market, it's really easy to get duped. So you look for, quote unquote, grape must in the ingredients or the designation Aceto Balsamico Tradicionale.
If it's just labeled Modena, it might be a cheaper diluted product. Clearly you're fluent in Italian.
So again, but this really sounds like an Italian problem, but this isn't just rooted in Italian products, is it? Or should we, can we blame the Italians for everything? Can we get away with that? I can get behind that strategy. Yeah, we could blame the Italians, but it's everywhere.
And we can thank the Italians for giving it a head start. The Andrangheta, a powerful Italian mafia group dating back to the 1800s, they've made food counterfeiting a global racket.
And they've been active in the United States since the 1950s, initially with those mislabeled olive oils. But they've also made a name for themselves in the fruit and vegetable industries in South America, Asia, and Australia, using food as a front for drug trafficking.

So they're reported to be operating in most of Europe, the Americas, Australia, West Africa, and Asia. Okay, so the whole world, basically.
Yes. You left out Antarctica, fine, whatever.
Yeah, you can eat a good diet there. But the stories are endless of fraud, and the stories where our food is used as a front just go on and on.
In 2008, there was the infamous canned tomato bust, and it still holds the title. The biggest ecstasy bust ever.
There were 15 million tablets of ecstasy worth half a billion dollars found stashed in cans of tomatoes. So were the tomatoes real? That's the important question here.
Yeah, the tomatoes were legit, but they were definitely tossed out with the pills. Bummer.
This case just shows how sophisticated these guys are and how entrenched they are in our food. And it's hard to fight.
So countries have to share intel and beef up enforcement if they want to keep up. Italy's got entire units just trying to protect their precious food heritage from these crooks, especially the enrangheta.
The deliciousness involved with the ecstasy tomatoes. Can you admit, like, this pasta is so good.
This is the most amazing tomato sauce I've ever had in my life. Feel my hair.
Yeah, yeah, just high off of your face on MDMA. Okay, but the scale and sophistication of this whole operation, it really is nuts.
They move from phony olive oil labels to ecstasy-laced tomatoes. How do you stop something like this? Because it seems like it starts from the source, or it's getting adulterated at the source, right? It's not just like somebody opens up the tomato cans and shove these things in here.
I mean, that's the thing. Food fraud is so complex and widespread and it can be dangerous.
Mislabeled products can pose serious ethical dilemmas. The ecstasy in the tomato, if they didn't catch that and then who knows what could have happened with the tainted tomatoes.
But a lot of times pig meat is found in beef products. And this is problematic for people with dietary restrictions or religious beliefs.
Yeah, I suppose it's heartbreaking for anybody living a kosher or halal lifestyle. I'd be pretty pissed to get to the pearly gates and find out that global food corporations or the mafia scam me out of heaven that surely God must make exceptions.
But I know. I'll say if anyone understands counterfeits, I would think it'd be God.
Yeah. You know what's actually fit for human consumption? The fine products and services that support this show.
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Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. Okay, so it's not just about the taste.
It's about ethics, although that's a distant second for me. I'm, yeah, fine.
Sorry you got pig meat in your beef thing, but I'm more pissed that I didn't get MDMA tomato sauce. Right, but it's also about health issues.
So honey is a particularly sneaky product because counterfeit honey can be cut with harmful substances like corn syrup. There's a lot of chemicals that are hard to pronounce that can be in there, and that can affect people with allergies or diabetes.
So about 10 years ago, there was a case where cheap honey from China was relabeled as premium honey, and the way they were shipping it, it contaminated honey, and then that was sold at a discount to unsuspecting buyers. And our Homeland Security, they even ran an operation called Project Honeygate.
Yeah. Yeah.
So this operation addressed the honey issue. And they had someone pose as an employee at a honey supplier to get inside the beehive.
Oh, man. So the honey in my team might be more gate than honey.
That's funny, though. They had an undercover agent working at a honey company.
That just seems like your tax dollars at work right there, I guess. It's amazing.
But for a whole year, they infiltrated a company called Honey Holding, which is one of the biggest honey suppliers in the U.S. I know.
Yeah. Food companies don't really have great originality.
And then so they were investigating the counterfeiting and the testing that they revealed one container was contaminated with chloramphenicol, which is an antibiotic that the United States has banned. Chloramphenicol.
Sounds scary. It even sounds scary.
Yeah, it sounds terrible. And this led to the Al Capone of honey laundering being busted in 2011 for allegedly smuggling cheap honey with this antibiotic in it from China and then relabeling it as expensive white Korean honey.
So it's just another example of how deeply organized crime can penetrate legitimate industries. So white honey is priced high because it's raw, right? It comes right from the beehive.
I'm surprised people can't tell, but I guess if you've never seen real honey. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are chewing on fresh honeycomb and like developing these palates to distinguish between honey and corn syrup.
Americans do consume more honey than anyone else in the world, which they it's nearly like 400 million pounds a year. But about half of that is used by the big food companies in cereals, breads, cookies, lots of our processed food.
So we don't consume a lot of it raw. And after U.S.
beekeepers accused these Chinese companies of selling their honey at artificially low prices, the government imposed taxes, import duties, which tripled the price of Chinese honey. So since we're no longer importing so much of it, it's just opened the market to counterfeit that specific kind of honey.
Ah, the teddy bear bottles look so cute, though. I know, but take a really close look at them.
Look at their beady little eyes, those smug upturned noses. Right.
That bear's hiding something, Jordan. And in fact, there's countless reported cases of honey that's just sucrose or beet sugar or just straight up high fructose corn syrup, which is, again, dangerous if you have allergies or diabetes.
I was at first was chuckling like a harmful substances like corn syrup, which is in everything. So whatever.
But you're right. Allergic reactions must be a huge problem.
I didn't really think about that. All right.
I love a good seafood dish. I know a lot of people have allergies to shellfish and other seafood, and they have to be careful to stay away from that stuff.
I know that some sushi is also more expensive than others, but I can't really tell what's what once it's on my plate. So is there counterfeit fish I've got to worry about too? Oh, of course there is.
Seafood fraud is a major concern. So often cheaper fish is labeled as more expensive varieties.
Chilean sea bass was called Patagonian toothfish until the 1970s when, just like your reaction, the industry changed the name to make it sound more appetizing. I'm never ordering toothfish.
That sounds dangerous and disgusting. Yes.
But the thing is, it never is bass. It's cod.
And it's hard to find any that actually come from Chilean waters. So what we're buying here in the States is usually just cod caught in the Arctic, but they list it on menus in a pretty font.
And we pay a lot for the idea of this Chilean sea bass. If they just called it Arctic cod, I'd still buy it.
But I guess you're right, Chilean sea bass does sound fancy. This also makes me wonder if I've ever eaten real bass.
Maybe not, but there's also a problem with escolar, which is a fish that is often passed off as white tuna. Escalar is particularly bad because it contains histamines and that can cause like serious digestive issues.
Think really unpleasant side effects. Okay.
Get graphic here because I just ate that maybe yesterday. Oh no.
A lot of the research I have read uses the phrase anal leakage. Oh God.
Okay. So how are you feeling? I was going to say my stomach hurts a little bit, but I've yet to experience any leakage from anything.
More real fish than you think. Maybe.
Oh my gosh. Escalar is flat out banned in Japan and Italy because of those health risks.
Yeah. Like a horror movie villain.
What do I think I'm eating when I eat Escalar and get oily poops? Most likely they're passing it off for tuna. Okay.
Tuna is the most frequently counterfeited seafood. And because there's a demand for raw tuna, the health risks, they're dire.
In 2015, an investigation uncovered that some tuna is often injected with nitrates to make it appear fresher. I've heard of nitrates.
What does injecting nitrates do in fish? Nitrates are preservatives and they turn brown or gray meat bright red. Ew, gross.
Yeah, it's a trick of the tuna trade to make old tuna look new. Or any meat you buy that you want it to look really red, they inject it.
You just can't tell because I use my senses to see as this fresh, as this good, and they're just tricking me. Yuck.
It works. Yes, it does.
It's so gross, but we taste with our eyes first and we want our tuna and ham and tar, whatever, to be bright red. So when brown tuna loins go through a machine that injects nitrates, the meat oxidizes to regain its color.
And now the recolored tuna can be sold as fresh. Brown tuna loins.
That sounds like a Reddit username. It's an Instagram handle.
Gross. Probably is.
But this practice can cause allergic reactions, even food poisoning, the dreaded anal leakage. In 2017 in Europe, there were over 400 cases of poisoning due to nitrate spiked tuna, leading to a major crackdown.
So Europol, which is like their CIA, their European crime fighting organization. It's not an intelligence agency, really.
It's like an international police force. You know, they're not assassinating spies.
Right. Yeah.
But they mobilized 11 different countries and they worked together. And in 2018, they seized a record 131 tons of counterfeit tuna.
Eighty people were arrested in connection to the tuna tampering. Man, TunaGate.
What a huge waste of food, though, unless it's not supposed to be eaten. But 131 tons of fish and they obviously they just threw it out.
I know it's senseless. And they caught that operation.
But unfortunately, these injections are continuing somewhere because tuna is seized on a regular basis. And there's other seafood practices that hurt your wallet more than your health because often fish are gorged with water to increase their weight, and that makes them more expensive.
So does not red sushi grade fish have more integrity? Like I could just maybe stick to yellowtail or something. And you're not going to like this.
I don't like any of this, by the way. For the record, this whole episode is disgusting.
Never eating again. In a study conducted between 2010 and 2012, the Ocean Conservation Organization called Oceana, it found that of the 1,200 samples taken, every single sushi restaurant in New York City that they tested carried mislabeled fish.
Every single one. So not only does this mean the customer overpays, but the fish on the plate is one you might have never ordered.
Like Snapper is up there with tuna being counterfeited. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, they used DNA barcoding to analyze samples of Red Snapper from restaurants, seafood markets, and grocery stores across North Carolina.
And over 90 percent of the grocery store samples were mislabeled. And the mislabeling rate for restaurants and seafood markets was 100 percent.
Wow. So 100 percent.
So you're OK. No sushi, no tuna, no snapper, even if you want it because you can't get it.
Yeah. And no scallops or whatever they're passing off as scallops.
Scallops, they actually could be anything. Rays, skate, shark, a lot of times, like any variety of fish that's been sectioned up by a cookie cutter.
So the moral of the story must be to buy the whole fish and then read the labels and cut it yourself, which I am not doing. Yeah.
We could just leave the ocean alone for a while. I don't know.
Don't be ridiculous. Just learn where your food really comes from.
If you're trying to choose between Colombian or Peruvian coffee grounds, you're fooling yourself. You're just wasting time in the grocery store aisle.
Is that a metaphor or are you trying to mess with my coffee, Jessica? Because people can't function without it. We buy it, we brew it, we drink it.
I'm not ready to give up coffee over here, even if it is wood chips or whatever you're about to tell me. Yeah, hot brown water.
Ground coffee can be mixed with all sorts of brown powders. Like often it's coffee husks, but it can be roasted corn, twigs, even ground up toasted parchment paper.
How is that not more expensive than coffee? Come on. The little stickers on our fruit, they have to be edible, according to the FDA.
And so does the parchment a lot of foods wrapped in in case we ingest it. So the companies are like, I have all this parchment paper.
I guess we'll just it's a cheap way to bulk up the product. This is why buying whole beans and grinding them yourself is the best way to avoid a lot of coffee crimes.
OK, that's good to know. Whole beans it is.
I've been grinding my own stuff for a while. It's insane that they put toasted paper in there.
But I guess we're talking about the mafia or some affiliated group, right? So they don't care. Yeah, it's delicious toasted paper.
It tastes fine. Screw it.
There's currently a crackdown, though, on fake Starbucks coffee beans. This is happening in Chinese markets.
And horrifically, a fake soluble coffee bean product recently made its way to some small retailers in Germany. And it contains dangerous amounts of glass and plastic shards.
There's not a lot of information. This is a really

new investigation into these specific beings. This is really wild.
Coffee criminals, man. They need to be drinking prison coffee.
Glass shards. That just is horrifying.
Why? Why would you do that? Prison is really uncommon for these kind of crimes, though. Like the biggest caviar con artist was actually busted after 23 years of the authorities trying to catch him.
This was a couple of years ago, but the judge declared it a victimless crime because no one got sick. So he didn't do any time.
So it seems the caviar he was selling was still pretty good. But like any rare, covetable food, counterfeit caviar is rampant.
And just a side note I want you to know that I learned while writing this is that some of the best and real caviar is actually coming out of Kentucky. Kentucky caviar? Yes.
Okay, first of all, that sounds like a euphemism for something else. Like Rocky Mountain oysters, which I think testicles deep fried bull testicles caviar coming from kentucky first of all gross but i'm sure i've eaten that and thought it was scallops or whatever caviar coming from kentucky is like finding out your favorite french wine is from cleveland yeah but apparently if you're into caviar you're missing out the caviar from the ohio river in in Kentucky, it's known as bluegrass caviar.
It's sourced mostly from paddlefish and it's different. It's not like expensive caviar, which has large, big beads that pop in your mouth.
The bluegrass caviar is delicate and creamy and it doesn't really have a hard pop, but it's still real caviar. Counterfeit or not, caviar is not really my thing at all.
I guess I'm a caveman. I think it's gross.

Maybe I need to expand my palate. I know you think milk is gross and I love it.
And a majority of

people consume it every day. Can we trust that the milk is real or we? No, not really.

Oh, Jordan, milk might be your drink of choice. But again, it's just a prime candidate for food

fraud. So I don't know if you remember this, but there was the great Chinese infant formula debacle

Thank you. drink of choice, but again, it's just a prime candidate for food fraud.
So I don't know if you remember this, but there was the great Chinese infant formula debacle of 2008. Yeah.
They put a chemical in there, right? Or something. Yeah.
Melamine and over 50,000 infants were known to be sickened from it. And like really tragically, six infants died from the milk tainted with melamine.
What is melamine again? It's the type of plastic that's used to fake higher protein content. And yeah, since that disaster, I mean, you'd think the milk would be made safer, right? But there's actually been more reports of melamine in milk.
So it's like trying to fix a problem, but we're just adding more of the same problem. And unfortunately, the melamine is not the only thing showing up in milk.
We've seen cases of milk contaminated with detergent and hydrogen peroxide because it makes it that bright white that we look for. So if you're going to drink milk, buying from a local farmer is the best and safest thing to do.
Yikes. I drink so much milk.
I'm probably like 10% plastic by now. Plus I feed it to my kids.
Maybe more juice for the kids then. I don't know.
Maybe, but here we go. Why did we choose to do this episode? Everyone hates us right now.
I hate myself for doing this episode. Ignorance is bliss.
Yeah, I know, right? I'm still going to drink it. That was the thing.
But the liquid that's supposed to be this refreshing juice is often a bottle of mystery. So I don't think you'll be surprised to find that the food fraud database, which is also a real thing.

Okay.

Don't look it up. You'll be more upset upset, shows most juices are blended with other juices.
I can live with that. Yeah, but sometimes it's, again, it's a money thing.
Like a lot of times when pomegranate juice is tested, it has zero traces of pomegranate. And grape juice, it's just like the wild, wild west of labeling.
So grape juice is the main culprit because once a dark liquid is in that sexy bottle, it's kind of anyone's guess what it is. I just got to take care of some mild anal leakage.
We'll be right back. Thank you for listening to and supporting the show.
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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. It doesn't have to look expensive though to make me question what I'm buying.
Meat is just covered in plastic on a tray at the store, and I guess I sometimes wonder what I'm really looking at. Yeah, meat is a whole other can of worms.
Oh, you had to phrase it that way. It's a can of mystery meat.
School lunches have prepared us all for this, but in the real world, anything meat fraud sounds pretty alarming. By the way, I don't think we can say fake meat.
That's a successfully marketed multi-billion dollar product now, and some vegans love it. You know, what are they made out of, like plant seed stuff? Chemicals.
That's a whole different skeptical Sunday, by the way, I think we have to do. What kind of meat fraud are we talking about here? Yeah, so the stuff from school cafeterias has caused many nightmares, but in real life, mystery meat is way scarier than your high school stew or whatever.
Meat fraud includes all sorts of industry sins, and the most prevalent seem to be horse meat masquerading as ground beef and fox meat that pretends to be lamb. Thankfully, most, and I would say most, not all, most of this happens

outside the United States, but it's still really unsettling. The threat of fox meat makes me wish I had a close relationship with a butcher.
And horse meat as beef sounds a little bit like something out of a dystopian novel. Yeah, it doesn't.
The horse meat discovery exploded in late 2012 when horse DNA was first detected in beef in Ireland. But then they realized it wasn't just a local issue.
So everybody was just eating horse. Chowing down on it.
And authorities at first, they thought it was this isolated discovery. But beef prices started to drop around the world, and it quickly expanded into a global scandal.

So it turned out that horse meat was being sold as beef and put in products like burgers, lasagnas, raviolis.

And the horse meat labeled as beef affected products sold from Singapore to the Caribbean to all over Europe. It sounds like food fraud is so widespread.
This is practically a punchline. There's that show Bob's Burgers, that cartoon.
They have a whole episode about serving horse meat. And it's really interesting, actually, to see how it happens and it makes things cheaper.
But it's just become such a common issue. It's entered pop culture.
How was there not widespread panic or is eating horse just not really that bad? Did some cultures do it and they don't care? I think there was a huge outcry. It just wasn't happening in the States at the time.
But the scale was enormous. So Tesco, which is the large UK supermarket chain, they reported sales of beef fell 50 percent after the discovery was reported.
And investigations trace the problem to a complex network involving Dutch and Belgian traders who were manipulating meat labels to disguise the horse meat as beef. So it was like a massive international game of hide and seek with labels.
And it was all orchestrated by someone named Yan Fen. One guy did this.
Yeah, one guy, Yan Fen. He set up this elaborate system for handling and distributing fake meat products.
So he had warehouses full of frozen horse meat, multiple businesses, and just hired teams that changed labels daily. And he made an estimated $2 million a year profit.
That is high stakes horse steak. It's just that easy to transform horse meat into beef by the magic of a label maker.
This is kind of ridiculous. There's no safeguards at all.
It's wild. And then this mislabeled horse meat, it's sold to manufacturers who think they're buying beef.
And then they distribute millions of ready-made meals like Stouffer's frozen meals and stuff to hundreds of supermarkets all over the world. It's unreal how so much counterfeit food crosses borders.
There's almost a near certainty that I've eaten horse lasagna then or something like that. It's possible.
Don't think about it. But globalization has made it easier for food products to cross borders.
And that complicates tracking and regulations. So in 2019, there was a scandal in France.
So this was just like six years after the horse meat scandal. 1,500 tons of minced meat, which was meant for charities, was found to contain horse, pig, and other like meat byproducts, but zero beef.
It was another supply chain mess across Europe. And this one tied back to counterfeiting happening in Poland.
And because of this, since 2020, the Polish veterinary authorities have gotten involved and they work with the Polish government to eliminate this practice. So we're putting a lot of trust in countries whose regulations we don't know and hoping that they enforce them.
It's just the point is we're such trusting eaters. Yeah, exactly.
And even if you're skeptical, unless you have a chromatography set in your kitchen, how can you be sure of what you're eating? Yeah. Chromatography sounds like something from a spy movie right on theme here.
Right. It's just a chemistry lab test.
But it would be helpful because unfortunately, the public is not given the full picture. So products get recalled, but many people have no idea what they've consumed.
I hear products are recalled and I don't know, I don't think about it when I go to the grocery store. No, unless it's something I have in my fridge or my pantry.
OK, fine, I'll bring it back. But if it's like, hey, you've been eating this for years.
Hey, by the way, this was horse the whole time. OK, what should I do about that now? What do I do now? It's like living in a modern day Upton Sinclair novel.
Yeah, absolutely. And for consumers, it's about immediate health concerns and losing trust in the food system.
But honestly, our relationship with food is insane. Like I see people buying blue Dorito dusted cupcakes at the supermarket.
And I just wonder what people are paying attention to when they eat. Yes.
That same person is complaining about binders and their vitamins or something. It's like you just bought blue dyed Dorito dusted cupcakes that have been frozen and whatever.
And you're just don't worry about binders, homeboy. But it says fat free.
Yes, they they're fat free it's amazing how easily we can be fooled even when we're paying attention we're just buying counterfeit products it just seems a bit hopeless if even the it's down to the juice yeah i know and it's really affects our wallets without us realizing it so like saffron it's the world's most expensive spice and what does sa saffron taste like, Jordan? No clue. Look, I grew up middle class.
Why would I know that? I don't even know what it looks like. Right.
That's my point. It comes as those fine little red threads.
Sometimes they're in those old school photo bags for some reason. I don't know, make it look extra fancy.
But if it seeps out a little red into whatever we're cooking or our tea or whatever, then we're satisfied. But real saffron is made from the stigma of the saffron crocus, and it costs upwards of $2,000 a pound.
But it's expensive for a reason. It takes 150 flowers to make a single gram of saffron.
But if you're a food fraudster, it only takes an onion and some orange dye to make the powder sitting on the clearance shelf. I've always been a little sussed of a lot of those spices like saffron.
Vanilla too is another one. That's another big one, right? Yeah, for sure.
Vanilla is the second most expensive spice, which makes it ripe for the faking. If vanillin is listed, it's synthetic.
It's fake. Same with any like added sugars like the high fructose and corn syrups.
That's a red flag. And don't even get me started on cinnamon.
Like most cinnamon sold in the United States is actually cassia, which is it's another wood product. It's made from bark of evergreen trees and it's not true cinnamon.
So cassia is easy to confuse with real cinnamon, even like the whole barks and stuff, but especially once it's ground. So sometimes you think it's cinnamon, it's often the cassia or like other fillers.
So we can find food fraud all over the spice rack. Why does it say sugar here? Unless it's a thousand percent like picked from your garden and ground, everything on your spice rack probably has sugar as an ingredient.
We just don't notice it. It's like we're living in a spice-themed sci-fi novel.
These spices are deceptive. Like black pepper, another hotbed for fraud.
So it's often mixed with papaya seeds, juniper berries or other fillers. So going whole peppercorn, always better to try and avoid the issues.
So it's a constant battle between the counterfeiters and those trying to stop them. How do we even handle such an overwhelming problem? You just have to grow your own food.
I'm not doing that. Who has the space? It's tough.
There are efforts to enforce stricter regulations. There's a call for more robust testing and verification procedures like manufacturers.
They do perform thousands of self-checks each year, but transparency is definitely lacking and only the most dangerous frauds are reported to authorities. So many other issues remain hidden, relying on the goodwill of manufacturers.
Authorities and whistleblowers play a crucial role in tackling these fraudulent practices, but what a tough job. And we can't really rely on that.
I mean, you got to go undercover at the honey factory. And it takes courage on any level to be a whistleblower.
They're usually brave factory workers or journalists and prosecutors who work hard to bring these issues to light. But it requires stringent regulatory measures.
And honestly, with how the food supply chain works, there has to be better communication between all the borders for stronger enforcement. And consumers, we just sit tight over here.
Yeah, I wish I had better news. But at the end of the day, we should be reading the ingredients and looking out for words like aroma or essence, added sugars and sneaky ingredients like vanillin.
They're common tricks. So just buying whole foods is a safer bet.
After all, how can you just fake an orange? Yeah, that's a topic for another show, I suppose. The system that we have is clearly struggling to keep up with the scale and sophistication of fraudsters.
But for the industry, counterfeiting busts, that's got to disrupt the market. And there's got to be big financial implications when you're throwing out 120 tons of tuna or whatever.
Oh, my God, totally. And counterfeiting leads to big economic losses.
It harms brand reputations. But here's the catch, like the counterfeiting, it has to be discovered and publicized.
So the profit margin from fake foods, it often outweighs the losses for the companies and food fraud. It'll undermine the trust in the food system.
So sometimes that's why it's not reported, but it can pose serious health risks. So it is like this weird balance.
It damages the reputation of genuine products and raises broader issues of transparency and regulatory enforcement. So Italy likes to pride itself on being at the forefront of the fight against fraud.
They have a special unit that they created called the National Gastronomic Heritage.

That's one of those. It's another thing that must sound better in Italian.

Yes. Its efforts are focused on olive oil developing a unique surveillance system that allows the controllers to follow in real time all the producers of extra virgin olive oil down to each delivery.
This meticulous control is equivalent to putting the entire production of Italian olive oil under administrative supervision. But it's having dismal results because in May 2021, the consumer protection magazine Salvagente tested 15 bottles of oil from major brands and none were 100 percent extra virgin.
Jeez, I'm just giving up on extra virginity, regular virginity from here out for this guy. So can we expect things to improve? As technology advances.
So do the methods. So do the methods Yes, exactly.
God damn it. Advances in food packaging will tackle the problems in some ways because there'll be better detection power.
However, even though increased awareness, better technology for detection and more stringent regulations are steps in the right direction. Fraudsters are known for staying a few steps ahead.
The mafia is smart. And so it's a continuous effort.
And while the outcome's uncertain, I do think a little bit of progress is being made. It almost seems like encouragement for criminals, given the scale and the complexity of counterfeit food.
Is it really all we can do to just read the labels and hope that the label is accurate? Because I can read the ingredients, but if the mafia printed the label, OK, back to square one. Exactly.
I think we just have to surrender to the lie. I'm kidding.
But eating more whole foods, there's just no trick. It just comes down to being informed.
So buy your meat from a reputable supplier. Find a butcher you trust.
Check labels carefully. Be skeptical of vague or misleading information.
Trust your senses. If food looks or smells off, don't eat it.
That's a big one. So if it's too red, it's brown, it's real.
But then it's probably bad. So, yeah, that's where we're at now.

Yeah. We just have to support the transparency, which means getting behind the rigorous tracking and verification systems.
So we have to research and favor brands and suppliers that provide simple information about their sourcing and production practices. It's on us.
We have to discipline ourselves to have discriminating food shopping practices. And it's just so difficult because we can only buy what is sold.
Thanks, Jessica, for serving up the facts about counterfeit foods. Really disgusting.
Gonna head out for some sushi, followed by a full afternoon of anal leakage. Thanks, everyone, for listening.
Topic suggestions for future episodes to me, Jordan, at jordanharbinger.com. Show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
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