Swindled
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50 or more aphids, thrips and/or mites per 100 grams
or
2 or more 3mm or longer larvae and/or larval fragments or spinach worms (caterpillars) whose aggregate length exceeds 12 mm per 24 pounds
or
Leaf miners of any size average 8 or more per 100 grams or leaf miners 3 mm or longer average 4 or more per 100 grams.
It may take a strong stomach to read this, but none of it is really cause for concern. It has been estimated that most of us eat a pound of two of insects every year without our knowledge.58 They probably do us some good. Philip Nixon, an entomologist at the University of Illinois, has said that insects are “actually pretty healthy,” being high in protein and nutrients and low in fat.59 The unhealthy thing is our refusal to face the fact that we are insect eaters. Squeamishness about “aesthetic adulteration” has had a bad unintended consequence: the big increase in pesticide levels, potentially a much more damaging kind of adulteration than the odd fragment of insect. Pesticide usage increased ten times in the United States from 1954 to 1974.60
Opinion differs as to how serious a problem is posed by pesticide residues in our food. A survey done by the Food Standards Agency in 2004 found pesticide residues in 31 percent of the food samples tested, but the agency insists that these were mostly at a very low level and do not pose a great risk to health. The agency is keen to downplay the risks involved in consuming pesticide residues since “not eating any fruit and vegetables would be a much bigger risk to someone’s health than eating foods containing low levels of pesticide residues.” This may be good public health policy, but as individual consumers, we would rather that consuming fruit and vegetables did not put us at risk at all, especially since the efficacy of pesticides in controlling pests has been called into question.
Critics of pesticides point out that entire groups of them are poisonous “often because the mechanism by which they are effective against pests is equally effective against people.”61 They also point to the so-called cocktail effect whereby low levels of many different pesticides taken in conjunction over a long period of time may be more harmful to health than the safety limits for pesticides allow. Having secured your genuine Cox’s apple, you may find that it has been sprayed “18 times with many different chemicals,” according to the Soil Association, posing a far greater danger than the odd mite.62 The case against pesticides seems most worrying for infants. Safety levels for pesticides are set based on the bodyweight of an average adult. Relative to their body size, children consume more chemicals from pesticides than adults. In 2005, a study was done testing the urine of preschool children. “The urine of those fed conventional foods contained six times as many pesticide residues as were found in the urine of children who ate organics.”63
The answer seems obvious: go organic. Though it looks like a modern response to a modern problem, the organic doctrine is really centuries old: the reverie of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer who rejects the toxins of industry in favour of his own home-grown produce. It is the call of Virgil and Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson. It is a vision of removing oneself wholesale from the poisonous city. Organic food only looks modern because the backdrop has changed.
Advocates of organic food argue that as well as lacking the negative effects of pesticide residues, organic produce has positive benefits. A three-year Italian study, reported in 2002 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found higher levels of polyphenols, antioxidant chemicals that may reduce the risk of cancer, in organic peaches and pears than in conventionally grown fruit.64 A year later, another report in the same journal found 52 percent more vitamin C in organic corn, as against conventional corn, but higher levels still in “sustainable corn,” which had been raised by a mixture of organic and conventional methods. In 2006, fourteen British scientists wrote to the FSA calling their attention to a study showing higher levels of omega 3 fatty acids in organic milk, as against ordinary milk.65 Professor Marion Nestle has gone on the record saying that “I don’t think there is any question that as more research is done, it is going to become increasingly apparent that organic food is healthier.”66
Organic food is not without its problems, however. One is that the rise of organic food, almost always at a higher cost than conventionally farmed food, has perpetuated the idea that an unadulterated diet is something that concerns only the rich. This is not the fault of organic farming per se, though it is not helped by the fetishizing of organic tidbits in exorbitant food boutiques. As Derek Cooper has written, there are effectively now “two kinds of food”:
There is the cheap and nasty stuff—wretched sausages made with mechanically recovered gristle and slurry, nonnutritious packets and tins of highly coloured rubbish and snacks rich only in empty calories— and the expensive foods which attract the words real, natural, organic, traditional, pure, handmade. But shouldn’t all food be as safe and as pure and as fresh as possible? Why have cheap bad food at all?67
There is a danger that organic food becomes a rich person’s preserve, a means of protecting the privileged from the squalid realities of poverty. More good would be done by reducing pesticide use across the board—something that is starting to happen, encouragingly, in many sectors of agriculture—and switching wherever possible to sustainable and humane farming than by continuing to set “organics” apart from the rest of agriculture.
“Organic” has become a brand like any other, and as with all brands, it has the potential to mislead. It has become a label in which some food shoppers invest all their hopes, viewing it as a guarantee that the food in question is morally spotless, gastronomically perfect, and entirely, reassuringly safe. But there is no such thing as perfect food, and the drive to find it can make people slightly unhinged. A new condition has been diagnosed in affluent modern societies: orthorexia, or a fixation with righteous eating.68 Unlike anorexics, orthorexics do not particularly want to get thin; they only want to eat the healthiest, most ecologically sound food possible. The drive to do so, however, may push them to cut out first one food group and then another, until they are subsisting on an extremely limited and socially isolating diet.69 One former orthorexic described how his obsession with purity reached a point where it was not enough to have a diet consisting almost entirely of organic vegetables; they had to be organic vegetables that had not been out of the ground for more than fifteen minutes.70
Even among those of us who are not technically orthorexic, organic food can seem to mean “food that won’t poison me or my children if I throw enough money at the problem.” As with Hassall’s Pure Food Company, there is a tacit encouragement to abandon your senses and put all your faith in the purity of the brand. But as we have seen time and time again, abandoning your senses is about the worst thing you can do if you don’t want to be swindled. Much excellent food is organic; but it doesn’t follow that all organic food is excellent. There is plenty of organic food that just doesn’t taste very good by comparison with its conventional alternatives. There is also plenty of food made with real integrity and taste that is not technically “organic”: is a perfect jar of Scottish heather honey, unctuous and jellylike in its sweet richness, rendered inedible by the fact that it is not officially “organic”?
A more serious problem is that the organic standard can mean many different things. In Britain, organic food certified by the Soil Association has to meet stringent requirements for crop rotation, the kind of manure used to enrich the soil, the way chickens and pigs are housed, fed, and looked after, and so on. Organic food without the Soil Association logo may be less exactingly produced. If you buy an organic chicken or organic eggs on the understanding that the animals who produced them led happy free-ranging lives, you may be sorely mistaken. In America, animal rights activist Peter Singer uncovered eggs that were organic (because they had been fed organic feed) that came from hens leading only marginally less crowded and confined lives than conventional battery birds. Food writer Nina Planck, the leading advocate of farmer’s markets, has
complained that the U.S. rules on organic produce do not place enough emphasis on putting animals out to pasture: “it’s quite possible that the organic bacon or turkey burgers in your refrigerator came from animals that never left the barn.”71
There are fears that the organic sector is becoming a victim of its own success. Now that the big food companies have got in on the organic act—wanting a slice of the more than twelve-billion-dollar market—they have pushed to dilute the standards, lobbying to include some synthetic chemicals under the permitted definition of organic. Rising demand for organic food in Britain means that more and more if it is air-freighted in from abroad, lengthening the chain between consumer and producer and giving the lie to the ideal of organic food as wholesome and environmentally sound. Given these “food miles,” many food campaigners now believe it is better to buy local food—even if not technically “organic”—than it is to buy “organic” vegetables from halfway across the world. Closer to home, certain products—notably organic farmed salmon—have, in the view of many old-school organic farmers, made a mockery of what the organic standard was supposed to stand for.
Meanwhile, some food sold as organic or “free range” has been found to be entirely bogus. Like every other premium food in history, the organic market offers an irresistible temptation to swindlers. A December 2006 brought shaming news for Julie’s Restaurant, a celebrity hang-out in Holland Park, one of the posher bits of London, known to have been visited by Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Moss, among others. The restaurant’s menu had made great play of its organic meat: gourmet sausages, spice-crusted rack of lamb, and marinated organic chicken. But officers conducting a routine hygiene inspection found that not a single piece of organic meat had been delivered to the restaurant over a fifty-two-day period, saving the owners approximately £4,200. When the well-heeled customers ordered their dish of organic chicken, they were really being given a plateful of broiler. The restaurant’s managing partner, Johnny Eckerperigan, pleaded guilty, saying “it was purely a mistake.” He was fined £7,500.72 Similarly, in May 2006, a butcher in New Zealand was fined $10,000 (NZ) for selling meat as “certified organic” when it was not.73 There are probably far more scams of this kind than ever make it to court.
It is not just organic food that is susceptible to these fiddles, but “ethical” and “free range” food in general. In November 2006, British police were investigating claims that up to thirty million eggs had been illegally passed off as free range.74 Shoppers had been duped into paying double the normal price for caged eggs on the understanding that they were high-quality free-range eggs. Several egg farmers near Coventry were arrested on a conspiracy to defraud. It was a case not just of cheating but potentially of poisoning, since the fraudsters seem to have imported eggs from Spain—where one in eight boxes contains salmonella—and stamped them with the Lion Mark, a guarantee that eggs are salmonella-free. Once again, the fragility of the trust between consumers and producers was exposed; again, here was proof that labels alone are no guarantee of food quality.
Free-range organic eggs. These Waitrose eggs come from hens kept in free-range conditions, fed an organic diet. But there have been instances of ordinary eggs from caged hens being fraudulently sold as “free range.”
It is worth putting this free range fraud into perspective, though. However dishonest and low grade the eggs sold by these British swindlers, they are as nothing compared to the worst food piracy going on in modern China and Bangladesh. While Western consumers fret about the long-range dangers of carcinogens or the horrors of ingesting some nonorganic chicken, shoppers in the Far East and South East Asia are still often condemned to eat foods which are catastrophically falsified and poisoned, in ways which are not in the least hypothetical.
Fake Eggs and Poisoned Babies
It has been called the world’s most “unbelievable” invention. Certainly it is the oddest thing, by far, that I have come across while writing this book, as well as the most cruelly ingenious, if true. In 2005–6, it was widely reported that crooked entrepreneurs in China had devised a way of making entirely fake eggs, from scratch. On the outside, they looked just like ordinary eggs. On the inside, they were a medley of peculiar chemicals that can make those who eat them extremely ill. In 2005, an undercover reporter from East Week, a magazine based in Hong Kong, claimed to have succeeded in enrolling on a three-day course on how to make the counterfeit eggs.
The instructor, a young woman, taught the reporter how to construct each separate component of the eggs. First, she mixed together gelatine, benzoic acid, coagulating material, alum, and a further unknown powder to make the “white.” For the yolk, some lemon-yellow food colouring and possibly some seaweed was mixed with so-called magic water, a substance containing calcium chloride, which gives the yolk a thin outer membrane. Yolk and white were then shaped in special moulds—a round mould for the yolk and an oval for the white. Finally, a liquid containing paraffin wax was poured over the whole thing and left to set into a hard white shell. When cracked open, these human-made eggs could be cooked just like the real thing, though the shells were more fragile. When fried, they looked just like hen’s eggs, except that the white came out bubblier. East Week magazine reported that those who had tasted the fake eggs said they tasted similar to real ones. Their effects were not the same, though: the fakes contained no nutrients and apparently could cause stomachache, memory loss, and delirium.
The whole thing defies belief. If it weren’t so wicked, you could almost admire the audacity of the fraud, the futile surrealist gesture of constructing an egg. As an economic cheat, though, it is baffling. How could a process so laborious conceivably pay off, especially for a product as modest as an egg? As one Chinese blogger asked, “You have to wonder, was the profit margin of manufacturing fake eggs really that much greater than opening a chicken farm and selling the real article?”75 Well, yes, apparently. The wholesale price of the fake eggs was 0.15 yuan a piece (equivalent to around 3 U.S. cents), half the price of a real egg. Given the low margins in chicken farming, there was a high incentive for these grotesque fabrications (just as, in Accum’s day, there was economic incentive to go to absurd lengths to fabricate entirely fake tea). If the entrepreneurs could sell the fake eggs in sufficient volume, they could make a lot of money. The fakes seem to have been smuggled in high volume from China to Vietnam, where they were hard to detect at retail markets in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. In 2005, Dr. Tran Dang of Vietnam’s Food Safety and Hygiene Department announced its concerns. “There is no doubt that the fakes are dangerous to your health,” he commented.76
Since then, doubt has been cast on the whole story. An online academic article detailing the fraud—in the Internet Journal of Toxicology—has been taken down without explanation. An editor at Than Nien News, a Vietnamese newspaper that originally ran the story, tells me that they now believe the information was “wrong.”77 Perhaps the whole thing was a hoax. In this age of endless information, it is so hard to know what to believe. Either way, the fact that the fake-eggs story gained such wide credence is itself a symptom of the depths that adulteration has now reached in China.
Fake eggs would simply represent the crowning monstrosity in a Chinese economy teeming with fakes. In 2006, there was a thousandfold increase in the counterfeiting activities of Chinese businesses, according to Andes Lam, a strategic risk assessor.78 It is not just a question of pirated DVDs, bogus designer handbags, and fake electronic goods, though all of these are rife. Like Germany in the First World War, the big cities of modern China are places where ersatz is a way of life and where many people have come to expect the food on sale in markets to be phoney. Food fakes have become so normalized that swindlers now try to get away with ever bolder tricks, such as the “fried tofu cakes” sold in Shanghai, which turned out to be gypsum, paint, and starch, fried in an “oil” made from swill and intestines; or a recent case from December 2006 of a factory manager arrested for making “edible lard” from recycled sewage and industrial oil.7
9 In 2004, Zheng Xiaoyu, the head of China’s National Food and Medicine Inspection Bureau (equivalent to the FDA or the FSA; a body set up in China in 1998), launched a “Fear-Free Food Campaign.” On national state television, Zheng commented that “It’s hard to know what you can eat any more. I have exactly the same food-safety fears as ordinary citizens”—a statement that did not entirely instil confidence, since Zheng himself was the man responsible for making sure that the food eaten in China was safe. A year later, he was dismissed, on suspicion of having taken bribes worth around $850,000 from drugs companies, in exchange for allowing them to evade the drug approval standards.80 In 2007, Zheng was sentenced to death.81 Food and drugs in China are still the opposite of fear-free.
A malnourished Chinese baby and its mother. The baby had been fed on fake milk.
The head of the Chinese Academy of Environmental Law, Cai Shouqiu, puts the problem in blunt terms: “Making and selling food is so lucrative and so rampant that we don’t have the means to control it. Everyone just wants to make money.”82 Even if that means poisoning babies. Accum wrote in 1820, of the swindlers of London, that the “possible sacrifice of even a fellow creature’s life is a secondary consideration” to making money.83 Plus ça change. In April 2004, it came to light that at least thirteen babies died in central China and hundreds more became dangerously ill after being fed fake formula milk.84 In Anhui province, where the scandal broke, they called it “big head disease.” Parents couldn’t understand why their babies’ heads were ballooning, while the rest of them got thinner. Some even told themselves that the bloated face was a sign of good health.85 The true answer was that the babies were suffering from the worst malnourishment that doctors had seen in twenty years, thanks to drinking “milk” that really mainly consisted of sugar and starch, with only a tiny percentage of the necessary protein and other nutrients.