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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Stories about fake food seem to be everywhere at the moment. China is the source of the most stomach-churning ones ("gutter oil" being my personal favourite - don't Google it if you're planning to eat any time soon).

But there are plenty from the USA and Europe too. Fake olive oil and truffle oil, mislabelled meat and seafood, the horse meat scandal in the UK.

If we can't rely on governments to protect us, I'm beginning to think there's a start-up opportunity for home food testing kits. Is such a thing technically possible? I guess for meat/seafood being misrepresented as a different species a DNA test would be required. But presumably there are chemical tests that can check for contaminants?

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The tainted milk / baby formula incident is the one that most readily comes to my mind [0]. That and the soy sauce made from human hair.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

I was speaking to some chemists recently that claimed some U.S. nutritional supplements have human hair as an ingredient. They went on to mention that the hair is often sourced from China and lately has tested for higher levels of heavy metals.

I can not verify the above claim from an internet search. But does anyone know why the protein in hair might be more beneficial as a supplement than other forms of protein ?

That's a pretty common myth spread by articles like this one[0]. Wikipedia's article on Cysteine debunks it[1]:

The majority of L-cysteine is obtained industrially by hydrolysis of animal materials, such as poultry feathers or hog hair. Despite widespread belief otherwise, there is little evidence that human hair is used as a source material and its use is explicitly banned in the European Union.

Makes sense too, since ~50 billion chickens are slaughtered per year, the amount of poultry feathers available for processing probably dwarfs the amount of human available.

[0] http://www.naturalnews.com/032718_L-cysteine_commercial_brea...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cysteine

> poultry feathers or hog hair

Yum! I'm not sure the truth is all that much less disgusting than the myth.

There is a Dutch television programme that does research on ingredients of common food products, to check where the ingredients come from. Sometimes based of speculation, but they tend to back it up with scientific research.

Here is the episode about l-cysteine (in Dutch, parts are in English, not sure if watchable from outside NL): http://keuringsdienstvanwaarde.kro.nl/seizoenen/2014/30-1187...

One of the suppliers actually confirms that human hair is being used in production, and being sold to bakeries around the world. While European bakeries claim to only use the l-cystein from animal sources, this video tends to show otherwise.

I suspect you will need really inexpensive gas chromatographs to make it widespread. These are really neat tools, and I wish their acquisition and maintenance was more in reach (a used Agilent is $3K USD and goes up rapidly from there, with a more common low-end price in the $5-7K USD range).

A used HP 5890 might be 3k usd but realistically you are looking at 40k for a refurbished unit. That's what I paid for mine. You can never turn off a GC without an elaborate shutdown procedure. They consume a lot of power and require AC to be running. You need to keep a low level of gas flowing all the time.

It's about as far from accessible as one can get. I can't even imagine sample prep and...well, it's just not a viable solution. As a manufacturing principle QC should be performed in process and at the least processed state.

That's a great idea for a start up. You don't even need everyone to test things. Just getting a sample by brand, location etc would be enough.

If we can't rely on governments to protect us, I'm beginning to think there's a start-up opportunity for home food testing kits.

Or a publicly funded group.

("gutter oil" being my personal favourite - don't Google it if you're planning to eat any time soon).

I'm not at all surprised that people are trying to recycle oil; the real problem here being that it's not been reprocessed sufficiently to actually be usable as new oil.

I can only say one thing about "gutter oil": WTF.

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