Detect Food Adulteration with Easy Home Tests
eatrightindia.gov.in
eatrightindia.gov.in
There are an awful lot of possible adulterants out there too.
Therefore, testing is a bit of a losing game. Instead, developed nations like the US require record keeping (ie. you need to keep a list of suppliers for each batch, and sometimes samples of each batch), and the court system allows someone to sue for a lot of money after the fact if a poisonous adulterant was found.
The risk of being sued is what keeps most food safe.
Is there a specific law that specifies damages? Because if not, it probably falls into the same civil framework as everything else where the amount of money sought has to be proven as proportional to damages. Unless it severely sickened you, it'd be difficult to quantifiably prove the damage that sawdust caused you.
And a good prosecution would be able to prove that while a small amount of lead didn't cause noticeable symptoms to anyone, there is plenty of evidence that across populations lead causes higher criminality, lower IQ, lower earnings, etc. And therefore, as a class, these people have been harmed by an actual dollar amount.
On the other hand, it is a good reminder of the simple things we take for granted. And I, for sure, am very grateful of the luck I have to be living in a part of the world with "strong" consumer protection.
People always tend to complain about regulations, but this is an excellent case in point of why they are needed in the first place.
No, my tea will not have metal shavings. And my milk will not be adulterated with detergents. Or my spices laced with lead for color..
(Not that I am under any illusion that some of the products sold here do not contain chemicals known by manufacturers to be unsafe..)
But yeah, I was also thinking "if people really have to do these tests themselves, something is going seriously wrong".
> Of the 320 batches of honey tested by the Joint Research Centre, the Commission's official laboratory, 147 were found to be fraudulent
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2023/03/24/nea...
In a documentary they were interviewing a honey fraud specialist from the French authorities, and he was basically explaining that the laboratories they were using in China to counterfeit their honeys were more advanced than the labs they had at their disposal, which themselves were not far from state-of-the art.
Initially they started looking at water content. Then, once the Chinese had adapted, they looked at water and sugar content. When that was not enough, they had to start analyzing the sugar compositions. The next step was to add pollen by weight, then by type. And now they had to analyze the honeys with mass spectrometers which was extremely costly.
After all, it has the correct amount of water and sugar, the correct sugar composition, the correct pollen, and it all has to be cheaper than real bees otherwise they wouldn't bother.
There’s also the nutritional side. Food makes you happy but it also keeps you healthy and honey is a nutriments bomb. Not sure about the industrial ersatz.
Because they operate in an unregulated environment (which is often a matter of pride, “small business” and all that good stuff) it is difficult for the government to step in.
For a country that is insanely rich, it’s sad to see poor and middle class being screwed over at every turn of their lives. Pharma , healthcare, crony capitalism, bank crisis , false flag wars … the list goes on.
The reality is that poor countries have to cut corners due to lack of resources and people turn their blind eye because “something is better than nothing”.
Also, ie in case of turmeric, imagine you eat at restaurant food that you may not even realize has some in the gravy via using a premade spice blend with it, which is using turmeric imported in bulk box from Netherlands, which has been repackaged 'from various sources' if they even bother to mention that.
And how often do you think the test are made? Every box, every batch, every month, every factory/farm etc? 'Strong consumer protection' is rather 'some protection', but there ain't power on Earth currently able to fully protect you even from these basic things. And then as you mention we can go into dodgy but still legal chemicals that will be banned in next decade or two, ie these days literally everything is contaminated by some form of PFAS everywhere. Ignorance is sometimes a true bliss
The only thing you can be sure of is that your milk and produce aren't adulterated.
Honey is also problematic, with China exporting about 1.5 time more honey than what they actually produce..
Sometimes a dutch trader also mislabels Romanian horse meat as beef.
I didn't mean that lower smoke point is a show-stopper, just that all else being equal a higher one is objectively better, as is a lower price.
But I also cook a lot of Indian style food, which doesn't really want or benefit from the flavour, and occasionally deep fry - which does call for a higher smoke point.
Or it's the opposite - if you can put £1 worth of oil in a bottle selling for £10, you've made a huge amount of profit. On the other hand how much can you really save on a bottle selling for £2? Yeah economies of scale and all that, but at the end of the day it's probably worth targetting the more expensive product(there's a reason why watch fakers make fake Omegas and Rolexes, and not fake casios(although I'm sure those exist too)).
This is why "Kraft singles" and "Velveeta" isn't called cheese, or "I can't believe it's not butter" and margerine isn't butter, or "Miracle whip" isn't mayonaise.
If it's honest on the packaging though - like over here we have "olive oil blends" for cooking - then it's fine.
Also also, olive oil is a fruit juice, technically, :p.
"pasteurized process cheese spread" is fake cheese.
Velveeta is "pasteurized prepared cheese spread", which is made-up term with no definition, used for fake "pasteurized process cheese spread".
That said this was in a common US grocery store. It may not apply to really high end artesenal type olive oil generally bought by people who it wouldn't be worth to adulterate.
Also, it's worth noting that there a lot of places along the supply chain where things can be adulterated, and the incentives aren't all the same for every actor along the chain.
The reason we don’t hear much about it is because of the near absence of preventive care for middle class/poor people.
So things only get caught when they have escalated to serious issues not traceable to the thousand paper cuts contributing to it.
Is there any drawback with iodised salt? This is the only test that use “differentiation” instead of “detection”, not sure if that’s related
Also love the simplicity of “detection of iron filling in tea leaves”: use a magnet!
Some fancy salts, like Himalayan rock salt, are not usually available iodised.
To quote Ron Swanson, isn't skimmed milk just water that's lying about being milk anyway?