Swindled
Page 31
Do such swindles matter? There are certainly worse things than fleecing a little extra money out of the very rich, who buy Beluga only as a status symbol anyway, caring little for the taste as they flush it down their gullets. But the swindlers are doing more than just puncturing the pretension of those with more money than sense. They are attacking the integrity of the food itself, which makes more widespread swindling easier to achieve. They are presuming—often rightly—on the ignorance of the consumer; and in so doing, they are perpetuating that ignorance.
Such is undoubtedly the case with another luxury item, saffron. Saffron adulteration is one of the oldest tricks in the book, because the real thing is so labour-intensive to produce. To make a pound of spice, you need as many as 200,000 little saffron threads, stigmas from a certain breed of crocus. Having always been prized and expensive, it has always been falsified. In the fourteenth century, in Nuremberg, saffron adulteration became so widespread that the city passed a special saffron law, the Safranschou, governing the inspection of saffron. Those who broke this law were thrown into the Loch, the deepest hole at the bottom of the dungeon in Nuremberg gaol.20 Yet still the deceptions went on. Merchants would mix in a few orangey-gold marigold petals, or soak the saffron in honey to increase the weight.
From what we can tell, saffron swindles are just as common today. Many is the tourist who has bought a wonderfully cheap packet of “saffron” on their travels to Marrakesh or Istanbul, only to bring it home and find that it is a mixture of turmeric and food colouring. There is an easy test you can do to verify if your saffron is genuine. You need no scientific skill. Drop a pinch of it into a glass of warm water. If it takes a few minutes for the colour to diffuse, darkly, out of the strands, then it is the real thing. But if it colours the water yellow straight away, you know it is fake and you have been duped. Sadly, by the time you do the test, it is probably too late, because you are a plane-ride away from the person who sold it to you.
More strikingly, saffron swindling still goes on in grand restaurants, even though you are face to face with the swindler and could potentially confront him or her. Mark Leatham tells me a story about taking his saffron producer out to lunch one day at one of the poshest Moroccan restaurants in London. They ordered two saffron dishes. Neither of them came with saffron; both were the bright crude colour of turmeric. They sent the food back to the chef, who apologized profusely and sent out new versions of the dishes, this time covered with so much genuine saffron that they were barely edible.
Restaurateurs only get away with this because they know so many diners would not recognize the authentic taste of saffron—pungent and ethereal at the same time—or would be too embarrassed to complain, even if they spot the mistake. Buying fancy food gives everyone an incentive to pretend that things are just what they should be; no one wants to look as if they are out of their depth. Of course, not everyone likes genuine saffron; I prefer my paella white, untouched by the stuff, and would rather eat raisin toast than saffron bread any day. But if saffron is what you are paying for, then saffron is what you should get.
There are many gourmet foods whose rarity seems to offer an irresistible invitation to swindlers. Périgord truffles are known as “black diamonds” on account of their value and scarcity. To connoisseurs, they have a glorious aroma, fungal and rich. Only around 120 tonnes of genuine Périgord truffles are now produced annually, fetching prices of up to 3,500 euros per kilo. Yet as many as 300 tonnes of “Périgord truffles” will be sold each year. Many of them are actually inferior black truffles from China, whose true market price is a mere 25 dollars per kilo. These seem to be especially common in the tourist restaurants of the region; the swindle wouldn’t work on the locals.
Compared to the genuine article, Chinese truffles have a rubbery, unrewarding taste, with a bitter edge. To the old truffle hunters of Périgord, these counterfeit truffles constitute a fraud not just on the consumers who buy them, but on the producers of genuine truffles. Their real fear comes from the thought that the ignorant consumers won’t complain; instead, the worst that could happen is that one taste of a Chinese truffle might be enough to put diners off real French truffles for life.21
Such fears have propelled the recent proliferation in Europe of “protected origin” foods. The French system of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or AOC, makes it illegal to sell one of the protected products unless it complies with strict rules of geography and quality. AOC began in 1919 when France passed a law for the Protection of Place of Origin. At first, the AOC status was mainly granted for wines (as we saw in chapter 2), in order that the essential terroir of a Rhône wine, say, should not be diluted by unwanted imitators. Increasingly, though, it has been applied to cheeses, too. Roquefort was granted AOC status as long ago as 1925, but most AOC cheeses have been more recent: Crottin de Chavignol (1976); Brie de Meaux (1980); Camembert (1984); Époisses (1991); Banon (2003). More recently still, the AOC label has been granted to many of the other foods of France, products that have a special relationship between place and taste: the honey of Corsica; the chicken of Bresse; Bayonne ham; sweet onions from Cévesses; chestnuts from the Ardèche; real black olives from Nyons; nuts from Grenoble. This protected status sets rigorous standards for the method of production and makes it harder for counterfeiters to cheapen the food.
Despite its modern genesis, the AOC system is at heart the same kind of scheme as the medieval guild networks. Like the food guilds, it starts from the position of wanting to defend the quality of one particular food against those who might debase it. Knowledge is mainly held by the producers rather than the consumers, and it takes the form of local expertise. Information overload is kept to a minimum. All the consumer needs to know is that a food with a genuine AOC label will never fall below a certain quality, because the producers know what they are doing. Like the guilds, AOC can seem rigid and arbitrary in the way it dictates what can and cannot pass the test. Critics would say that food producers manage the system, complacently, to their own advantage and are resistant to newcomers. Where is the room for culinary innovation? On the other hand, AOC really works.
Ossau-Iraty cheese bearing the AOC mark—one of a growing number of traditional European foods to be given protected status.
The AOC system makes it harder for sellers to use place names for food as if they were generic, as if place of origin had no bearing on taste. In the early 1990s, there were often “Puy lentils” for sale that came from Canada. These were perfectly nice, green lentils, the size of small pills. They were usually labelled perfectly clearly as from Canada. No deception, perhaps, was intended. But true lentilles de Puy they were not. Lentils have been grown in the Puy region in the Auvergne for two thousand years. They have a slate-blue colour and a nutty, mineral taste that is all their own. They seem to retain their shape and texture better than most other lentils. In 1996, they became the first legume to be awarded an AOC mark, and since then more consumers have become aware of their special qualities. This is a good thing. Canadian green lentils are still for sale, but they can no longer be called “Puy” (though some of them are now labelled “Du Puy,” in an all-too-familiar sleight of hand).
The success of the AOC system in protecting food quality has inspired imitators. Italy has a system of Denominazione di origine controllata; Spain has Denominación de Origen. More broadly, the European Union has a system of Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) that covers hundreds of special foods. To read the lists of protected fruits and vegetables is to recover a sense of the poetry of particular foods from particular places, far away from the standardized cotton-wool apples lamented by George Orwell: the red radicchio of Treviso; melon from Quercy; Calasparra rice; Calanda peaches; Jersey Royal potatoes; Jumilla pears; asparagus from the Landes; Agen prunes; pink garlic from Lautrec; Aegean pistachios; gherkins from Spreewald; Sicilian blood oranges; Marille (a kind of apricot) from Wachau; Portuguese chestnuts from Padrela; San Marzano tomatoes; Sorrento lemons; Roman artichokes from the Lazio. Such f
oods deserve protecting; they embody the qualities that make food a pleasure and an art, rather than mere sustenance. Swindling flourishes when people are ignorant of what a given food should really taste like. The PDO system spreads knowledge of the variety of food. It teaches that Prosciutto di Parma is not just any cured ham, but a particular ham with a melting rosy texture made from pigs fed the whey left over from Parmesan cheese; it is not the same as Serrano ham or San Daniele ham, though these too are protected.
In some cases, the protection of particular foods against fraudsters has been taken to extremes. In Corsica, there has long been a problem with swindlers copying the famous charcuterie of the island. Corsican pigs are the main reason that Corsican hams and dried sausages taste so wonderful. The pigs, who live for a good two years, feed on hardy herbs, such as lavender, rosemary and thyme, and on chestnuts and acorns. This diet gives their flesh an herbal depth, a savoury nuttiness, making the local charcuterie sublime. The pigs are carefully restrained from feeding on olives or beech acorns, which would make their flesh greasier. Inevitably, the tourists who flock to rugged Corsica are keen to sample the authentic charcuterie of the region. What many of them end up buying is actually mass-produced pork flown in from China. In 2003, Paul Deminati, a promoter for Corsican charcuterie, commented that “Our charcuterie is known all around the world. When a product is so well known, it always attracts people who make counterfeits. The taste is not the same, but the price is.”22 The response of the Corsican pork industry has been to start a campaign to identify the true race of Corsican pig, tracing the bloodline of each pig back for three generations. The personal history and pedigree of each pig will be stored on a computer. The idea is that only pure-blood, certified Corsican pigs with the right genes will be allowed into Corsican sausage, making it easier to prosecute swindlers.
Despite the use of computer technology, this tracing of bloodlines is no more than another medieval bulwark against counterfeit modern food. The Corsican pig farmers are trying to assert the case that breeding and terroir count for more than bland nutritional information. What they are doing is conservative and backward-looking; and rightly so, since the Corsican pigs lead happier lives and taste better than the Chinese interlopers. Elsewhere, however, DNA testers are trying to bring the art of food detection into the twenty-first century.
The DNA of Basmati Rice
Dr. Mark Woolfe is an Arthur Hill Hassall for our times. He leads the Authenticity Unit at the British Food Standards Agency (FSA) in Holborn, which is the main body scrutinizing the activities of food fraudsters in Britain. One of thirty-odd programmes at the agency (which was set up in 2000, in the wake of the BSE crisis), the Authenticity Unit deals not with toxins, additives, or contamination but with cases of deception, misdescription, and mislabelling—cheating, not poisoning, in other words. Authenticity is the term all scientists now use when talking about food that is not adulterated. Authentic food in this sense does not mean ravioli cooked exactly as a Sicilian peasant would make it. It means food that does not cheat anyone.
Woolfe is a tall, imposing man but with the gentle, quiet manner of a true scientist. He shares Hassall’s hatred of cheats, and his reverence for scientific method above all else. He could happily talk all day about the minute points of DNA testing and often does. His office has a whiteboard on the wall, where he scribbles formulas. There is an African violet on his desk. Woolfe, who has been at the FSA since it was set up in 2000, is proud of his coffee, which he makes for himself in the office using a small cafetière and freshly ground beans. Like Arthur Hassall, he takes a keen interest in the purity of coffee. Back in 1994, when the Authenticity Unit was part of the Ministry of Food and Farming, Woolfe worked on a survey of the quality of instant coffees for sale in Britain. He found that 15 percent of the samples, mainly the cheapest coffees, turned out to have suspiciously high levels of sugars (xylose, glucose, and fructose), indicating that they had been adulterated, perhaps with coffee plant husks or with maltodextrins.23 Most of the big-name brands of instant coffee were found to be OK. But Woolfe is taking no risks, sticking to the real stuff. He prefers the taste, anyway.
Woolfe’s job involves both surveillance and research. His working party undertakes surveys on different foods, using the latest scientific research to uncover whether given foods on the market are “authentic”—in other words, if they are what they say they are, and of a standard that consumers would expect. These surveys are time consuming, and only a handful are conducted each year. The process can be painfully slow. Woolfe says that his team has to prioritize carefully which foods to survey. The decision reflects consumer concern but also the value of a given market; they are more likely to look at meat products, where potential fraud is worth “billions of pounds,” than honey, a market that is relatively small. “We’re a hidden force,” he tells me. “It’s all to do with consumer confidence. People should have confidence that when people buy something it is what it says it is.” It could be Arthur Hill Hassall speaking.24
Like Hassall, Woolfe sees the importance of revealing when fraud has not taken place as well as when it has. Hassall demolished the myth of the grocer who put sand in his sugar. Woolfe has busted a few myths of his own. In several cases, the Authenticity Unit has shown that consumer fears about adulteration were unfounded. There have long been rumours in Britain about donkey meat and horsemeat finding their way into salamis and other cured meats from the Continent. These fears were partly xenophobic, based on the notion that foreigners eat suspicious things. As Woolfe himself comments, “anecdotally, people thought things coming in from central Europe had all sorts of nasties in them.” In 2003, the Authenticity Unit did a survey of 158 salamis and “salami-like products,” looking for undeclared horsemeat and donkey meat. They discovered that this kind of fraud is practically nonexistent. There was only one trace of horse-meat in a single sample of chorizo.25 It is not in fact as if horsemeat or donkey meat salamis are necessarily bad things: “They are very low fat meats,” as Woolfe rightly observes. The point, though, was that consumers believed, wrongly as it turned out, that they were being tricked into eating these meats in place of pork or beef. Such feelings of unease around food are bad for everyone—producers and consumers alike—because they erode trust.
In other cases, Woolfe’s Authenticity team has shown consumer fears to be right, and in so doing, addressed those fears. It is a commonplace that modern meat and fish is pumped full of water, deceiving us into paying more for it, weight for weight, than we should. Sometimes “added water” is declared on the label, but even so, the suspicion remains that the wool is somehow being pulled over our eyes. You suspect that you are being cheated, but there is little you can do about it. Sure enough, an FSA survey of frozen chicken breasts from 2001 uncovered a major problem of excessive added water—water that remained in the chicken even after it had been thawed and cooked, because it was held in by the use of hydrolysed proteins of pork and beef. Most of this “injected” chicken was produced in Europe and was destined for the restaurant trade. This was a scandal, and a twist on the ages-old swindle of padding food with water, because of the presence of pork protein. Some of this porky water had been injected into chicken labelled “Halal”—a particularly unkind deception, which turned cheating into poisoning for Muslims who ate the affected chicken. Equally startling was Woolfe’s survey of 2002 of added water in raw scallops and scampi. A scandalous 86 percent of the “ice-glazed” peeled scampi consisted of more than 10 percent added water. Of the samples of scallops, 48 percent contained more than 10 percent added water; in the most extreme case, there was 54 percent added water, more water than scallop, a truly audacious piece of fraud; if there had been any less scallop, it would have been little more than an ice cube, all sold at a premium price as finest “king scallop.”
There is no doubt that these surveys have done good. The most blatant cases of cheating have been prosecuted by the relevant local authorities. Meanwhile, the food industry in general has started to c
lean up its act in response to these reports, usually cooperating with the government’s requests for more stringent codes of practice. It is hardly something to boast of, to be named and shamed as the manufacturer of the wateriest frozen scallop in Britain (that particular honour belonged in 2002 to Colncrest, a wholesaler in London, though Ice Pak International in Leeds ran a close second). From Woolfe’s point of view, the success of this kind of surveillance is entirely dependent on having a “robust scientific method” to start with. As with Hassall and his microscope in the 1850s, Woolfe needs to be sure that his method is sound enough to offer the most accurate information to consumers, as well as to forestall legal action from manufacturers.
The battle is still the same. The two sides, the goodies and the baddies, still progress at roughly the same rate as regards what science can either conceal or reveal in food. The swindlers still have roughly the same kind of expertise to draw on—legal and scientific—as the antiswindlers. The burden of proof on the antiswindlers thus remains extremely high.