$40 Billion Dollar Fake Food Industry

An Inflated Used-Car Style Click Grabber

I watch food videos on YouTube for two specific reasons. The first is to learn something. The second is to pick up on certain types of food misinformation that is being spread on the internet. If it's on YouTube, it's out there. One of the main ways a click-hungry YouTuber can mislead you about food products is to name a problem and then generalize.

If I say a certain product may be adulterated and I never bother to explore whether any one brand is actually adulterated, then I leave you with a vague fear that you cannot act on. And yet, you think I've done you a favor. One such 'fake food' video from CNBC uses a thumbnail with the following text: The secret $40 billion food fraud economy. What I talk about here will help you to recognize when what seems to be 'information' is not actually informative in any way.

Fake Food Video From CNBC

This video from CNBC is called How Americans Are Tricked into Buying Fake Food. A provocative quote is featured at the beginning:

I guarantee you that anytime a product can be passed off as something more expensive, it will be.

Extraordinary assertions require extraordinary proof. Assuming that it is true that we buy $40 billion worth of fake or adulterated food each year, the question is whether that number is large or small. Yes, of course, 40 billion dollars is a gargantuan amount of money. But the video, predictably, never compares it to the total amount of money we spend on food. In reality, this huge number is about 2% of our total food expenditure! You will never see a YouTube video telling you that 98% of the money we spend on food is used for non-fake food. No clicks.

When you think about food fraud, fake food, adulterated food, heavy metals in food, etc. I want you to repeat this mantra:

Science is about evidence.

Repeat it a couple of times. I'll wait. Now, that you're done, listen to what I have to tell you: A Lot of the food you buy is fake! It's adulterated! It's contaminated! Now, remember your mantra.

Someone vaguely proclaiming that your food is fake or that something is put into it that could poison you doesn't really help you, does it? Unless you think that making you afraid of vague and hard-to-spot 'bad things' is helpful or unless you just like to be angry about the food supply in a nonspecific way, which I think is 95% of what drives this.

And that's the theme of this entire post: Specific evidence. So, this video from CNBC got tons of attention, but in all of the fearful and seemingly informative talk of fake food and adulterated food, there was NO specific instance of food fraud nor any evidence to show it.

Fake Olive Oil

The video starts by vaguely insinuating that it is likely that the olive oil you buy is fake, adulterated, or inferior. There is a difference between an olive oil that fails to meet the criteria to be called Extra Virgin Olive Oil and fake olive oil. There is a difference between adulterated olive oil and outright fake olive. There is a difference between claiming that olive oil has a long history of adulteration and showing that the olive oil you buy is adulterated. The video makes no attempt to illuminate any of these nuances and, the fact is, there is no evidence that a lot of olive oil sold in the United States is adulterated or fake. This is, in fact, a myth based on misreported and outdated data from one study that was never replicated, and further research has failed to duplicate the results of this old olive oil data.

See more about Fake Olive Oil on Culinary Lore

CNBC published this video to YouTube only seven months ago and relied on outdated and grossly inaccurate information about fake olive oil, resulting in a report that is not only misleading, it's downright false.

Olive Oil 'Demonstration'

Our presenter holds up two unlabelled bottles of olive oil that she claims she purchased from the grocery store and states that one has much more information about where the olive oil came from than the other, yet the one with less information was much more expensive. Again, we see an effort to cast vague aspersions and cause general suspicion without any actual effort to provide evidence of adulteration. The amount of information on an olive oil bottle is no guarantee, whatsoever, of quality.

Fake Parmesan Cheese

Once the olive oil introduction is done, the report becomes mostly about repeating the terms food fraud, fraudulent, and mislabeled over and over again. Then the video mentions parmesan cheese, another favorite subject of click-hungry YouTubers talking about fake food. The parmesan cheese warnings rely on a false comparison between one type of parmesan cheese product and actual wedges or blocks of parmesan cheese. They compare shelf-stable grated parmesan found in cans to the parmesan you buy in the deli or dairy section of your grocery store.

Appearing on the screen, in the video, is an isolated warning about parmesan cheese, purportedly from the FDA, proclaiming “Your parmesan cheese products do not contain any parmesan cheese."

This sounds like a general warning put out by the FDA warning consumers that their parmesan cheese is fake. Instead, this statement was cherry-picked from a letter the FDA wrote to ONE company, Castle Cheese, Inc. based in Pennsylvania.

The FDA found that this company was selling 100% parmesan cheese in cans like the familiar Kraft parmesan cheese green cans and this canned parmesan cheese had no actual Parmesan in it. The cheese was actually made up of the "trimmings of various cheeses" like Swiss, mozzarella, and white cheddar. The products from this company were also adulterated with cellulose and starch to increase the weight. Cellulose is the main fibrous component of the cell walls of plants and it is safe to add to foods but it is not allowed in such high amounts in a cheese product.

Reports about this case often quote a cheese expert interviewed by Bloomberg who said that many other parmesan cheese products contain much more cellulose than they should. None of the reports, including the video we are examining, bother to mention that these are 'grated parmesan cheese' products like the aforementioned kind that Kraft sells in the green can. They are dried and shelf-stable grated cheese products that contain various fillers and anti-caking ingredients.

They have nothing to do with the block of fresh Parmesan you get from the cheese department or the deli, whether it was made in Wisconsin or in Italy. But the unwary consumer will be left to believe that ALL parmesan is suspect. Many of you reading this probably never buy shelf-stable grated parmesan in a can.

Next to pop up on the screen is Larry Olmsted, the author of Real Food/Fake Food. Larry is responsible for the quote shared above, saying “I guarantee you any time a product can be passed off as something more expensive, it will be. It's that simple." Remember your mantra. Evidence isn't about personal guarantees.

After the narrator repeats some trigger words such as counterfeit, mislabelled, food fraud, etc. comes another vague statement by Kristie Laurvick, Senior Manager of the Foods Program of U.S. Pharmacopeia: "We might not know the overall impact of food fraud, because so much of what fraudsters do is hidden from us and has been for centuries."

This is a grossly exaggerated comment. Our food supply is safer than it has ever been. To compare our food today to something out of the 1700s is ridiculous, especially in such an unhelpful fear-centered statement. You don't know how many spiders you are surrounded by right now. And you have never known. Useful information, or not?

After such loaded statements, the payoff, stated in the video is "food fraud affects one percent of the global food industry." All that hype for ONE percent! Yes, the cost of that one percent is high, but this is a reflection of the amount of food we go through which includes a lot of food waste.

Larry Olmstead then states that Grocery Manufacturers of America estimated that 10% of the commercially available food in the United States is adulterated. "That's one in ten," proclaims Olmstead. “If you're not on that 8 items or less checkout line, you've got something in your cart when you leave the supermarket that's probably bogus."

I'm no math wizard but I believe CNBC's chosen expert is even worse than I am. One in ten doesn't mean there will be one in every ten or even 10 in a group of 100. You could easily bypass all of the adulterated products in your grocery store even with a huge cartload of groceries.

It's easy to take random quotes to paint a certain vague picture but it doesn't leave us any more informed than when we started. It is later revealed that Olmstead believes that adulterated or bogus products include both illegally faked products as well as legal ones. What is a consumer to do when faced with such a statement? If every single food item is suspect, then, in effect, none is suspect. If everything is fake, then nothing is fake.

That's enough of a deep dive into this video to demonstrate my point. Not one piece of evidence was presented to show that any single food item was fake or adulterated. And when evidence-driven data was used, like the letter from the FDA, a single quote was taken out of context and misrepresented to appear to address a food product in general, parmesan cheese when it actually only addressed one food company and its adulterated products.

What's the point? Don't be taken in by vague warnings of fake food. Look for specific instances backed by actual evidence. The more you do this, the more you'll see that our food supply, while full of questionable products with food additives that may be less than healthful, is by and large based on real food. But what's legally adulteration and what is legal is often conflated in such information.

Those legal food additives, considered safe by the FDA (under GRAS), are often included as if they are part of the deceptive marketing of adulterated or fake food. In other words, not only are there unscrupulous companies out there selling fake food, but the FDA is part of a vast conspiracy that is enabling this fake food industry. At some point, in the selling of food fear, everything becomes suspect. Everything becomes fake. Again, if everything is fake, then what does being fake even mean?

Fake Sushi as An Example of Food Fraud

We are down the proverbial rabbit hole. You cannot act on a general fear of food. You can only act on specific and reliable information. Fear is paralyzing. Only knowledge arms us with something we can use to move to a decision.

You may have bought fake sushi. I'm sure you can find a YouTube video about fake sushi. Fake sushi means that a cheaper and less fresh fish is substituted for an expensive, fresh one. For sushi, less fresh can mean very dangerous.

So, I'm going to leave you with this vague and unhelpful information about Sushi and if you like sushi, I'll leave it to you to seek out further information. Otherwise, you may have no choice but to believe that all sushi is fake until proven otherwise. You will hesitate each and every time you buy it! Let me know what you find out in the comments!