ISSUE 03 | JULY 2016
Food Quality Magazine
The Food Fraud Combat Triumvirate: Vulnerability
Management, Market Intelligence, and Detection Methods
Bert Popping, Mérieux NutriSciences Corporation and Karen Everstine, United States Pharmacopeial Convention
Food fraud - the substitution of less
expensive ingredients to increase the
profit from food sales - is an age-old
problem. Frederick Accum wrote the
first known book about food adulteration in 1820. A few decades later,
Clarence Darrow, a famous American
advocate and leading member of
the American Civil Liberties Union,
coined the phrase “history repeats
itself, and that‘s one of the things
that‘s wrong with history.” Food
fraud has persisted throughout history. At the turn of the 20th century,
the New York Evening Post rhymed,
“Mary had a little lamb, and when
she saw it sicken, she shipped it off
to Packingtown and now it’s labeled
chicken.” This was in reference to
the publication of Upton Sinclair’s
novel The Jungle, which described
the disastrous situation in the U.S.
meatpacking industry. A little more
than a hundred years later, the notorious horsemeat scandal broke in Europe.
What is different from the days of
Frederick Accum? Looking at the United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) Food Fraud Database1 and
the European Commission report on
Food Fraud2 , the majority of food
products mentioned on the title
page of Accum’s book are the very
same ones prone to food fraud today, including olive oil, spices, wine,
and dairy products.
What has changed is the sophistication of many of the methods
fraudsters use to commit their crimes. The horsemeat incident in 2013
involved simple substitution. In the
case of infant formula and fruit juice
adulteration, fraudsters have devised adulteration strategies based on
Available at www.foodfraud.org
http://ec.europa.eu/food/safety/
docs/official-controls_food-fraud_
network-activity-report_2015.pdf
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2
Figure 1. Title page of Fredrick Accum’s A Treatise on Adulterations of Food
and Culinary Poisons (from http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/a-treatise-on-adulteration-of-food-and-culinary-poisons-1820/)
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