Swindled
Page 35
Terrifyingly, the fake milk was not the product of just one renegade swindler, but constituted an entire mini industry. An initial state inquiry revealed that forty-five different types of substandard powder were on sale in Anhui, manufactured by more than 141 factories across China.86 The fake brands all sold at a cheaper price than the premium infant formula sold by Nestlé. Given the deprivation of the Anhui region—where the average rural income is around a dollar a day—low-cost milk was the only kind that most families could afford. It came at a terrible price. Effectively, the fraudsters were profiting from the poverty of their customers.
A journalist from the New York Times spoke to Zhang Linwei, a father who in 2003 was earning around sixty dollars a month making bricks.87 When his wife, Liu Li, gave birth to a daughter, she was unable to produce enough breast milk to feed her baby. Mr. Zhang decided, understandably, to buy a low-cost infant formula recommended by a friend. Even this low-cost brand took eleven dollars a month out of the family budget—more than a sixth of the total income. Mr. Zhang’s daughter got through a container of the milk every two or three days, but she put on no weight. At five months, she died. The doctors in the hospital where she was treated said her tiny body was so underdeveloped they could not find a single usable vein for a transfusion. They told her parents that the baby’s death was the result of drinking fake milk. Liu Li collapsed in shock, having had no idea that the formula she lovingly fed her daughter had been bad. “These babies are really innocent,” said a heartbroken Mr. Zhang. “Whatever you give them to eat and drink, they will take it.”
After the baby milk scandal broke, the Chinese government promised stern action. More than 100,000 bags of the fake formula were seized. The premier, Wen Jiabao, announced a nationwide investigation. There were multiple arrests. In Anhui province, forty-seven suspects were detained and paraded in yellow waistcoats at a public shaming ceremony; of these, at least forty were formally charged. The authorities promised they would be dealt with “according to the law.” The first person to be tried was Li Xindao, a shopkeeper in Anhui who had sold some of the fake milk; he was told he should have known the milk was fake because of the low price, and he was sentenced to eight years in prison, plus a fine of 1,000 yuan.88 Ninety-seven local Communist party officials were also punished for “not discovering or fully investigating” the case of the fake milk.
Chinese police searching a supermarket for fake baby milk.
However harsh these retributions, though, they could not disguise the fact that the fake milk scandal was a deep failure of politics. This is the sort of fraud that flourishes when an unbridled market economy of food coincides with the wrong kind of government. It happened with the laissez-faire government of industrial Britain in the 1820s; it happened in New York in the 1860s, when corrupt Tammany Hall officials allowed swill milk to be produced under their very noses; and it is happening now in twenty-first-century China, where the state only effectively intervenes to stop food piracy only when babies start dying. One British journalist in China has written that the problem of counterfeited food is itself “a consequence of China’s economic policy, which has encouraged local provinces to pursue growth at all costs.”89 A blind eye will be turned to pirateers, so long as they pay their taxes and generate profits. A professor at People’s University, Huang Guoxiong, was quoted as saying that “there is an outdated belief among local officials that they can only kickstart development in their areas by fostering low-price industries producing fakes.”90 However much the Chinese government lamented the dead babies, it was partly responsible for their deaths. The scandal brought to the surface the feeble regulatory powers of the Food and Medicine Inspection Bureau. In March 2003, state news media reported that of 106,000 food companies in China, only 17,900 were licensed. A survey of the nation’s food from 2003 found that almost a fifth of food products did not meet national health standards.91 In this context, horrors such as the fake milk affair are only to be expected. And so it goes on. The latest scandal, in 2006, was lard made from recycled sewage.
A similar situation prevails in Bangladesh, which enjoys the unenviable reputation of having the most adulterated food in Southeast Asia, and therefore, probably, the world. A conference at Kathmandu, Nepal, in March 2004 compared the adulteration rates of different Asian countries. According to a study conducted by two NGOs, India had a rate of 10 percent, Nepal 15 to 18 percent, and Sri Lanka a more worrying 20 to 30 percent. Bangladesh easily beat them all, however, with an adulteration rate of 45 to 50 percent.
Since swindling is a covert activity, such figures are by their very nature almost impossible to verify; but there are plenty of indications that Bangladesh does suffer an unusually adulterated food supply, thanks to an ineffective legal framework and administration for dealing with it. In 2002, the Institute of Public Health, which analyses foods for sale, found that out of 426 samples of sweetmeats, 423 were adulterated, as were 28 out of 33 samples of ghee, 19 out of 19 samples of butter oil, and 8 out of 8 samples of condensed milk.92 Judging from this, the estimate of 45 to 50 percent adulteration in Bangladesh starts to look rather low.
In 2003, a Dhaka newspaper reported that “an organized gang of adulterators” was carrying out its business “with impunity” in the metropolis and elsewhere in the country.93 The Dhaka City Corporation (DCC), which delegated a committee to police the situation, was not unaware of the problem but lacked the tools to deal with it. During the first ten months of 2004, the DCC collected 700 samples of food from the open market that were suspected to have been adulterated. During the same period, 650 shops and other commercial establishments were prosecuted with selling unfit or adulterated food. The trouble was that once found guilty of adulteration, under the lax and antiquated Bangladeshi food law of 1959, a person had the choice of three months in jail or a fine of Tk 200, the equivalent of a paltry 3 U.S. dollars. Any self-respecting swindler would choose the latter, freeing him up to go back to his nefarious activities.
In 2004, an official at DCC stated: “We have almost stopped filing cases against food adulterators. Now we are trying to motivate people not to buy adulterated food.” This is easier said than done when, often, there is no alternative to the adulterated produce. From brick dust in chilli powder to illegal fertilizers in rice, from yoghurt watered down with contaminated water to rotten coconuts sold as fresh, from bread made with burnt lubricant to sweetmeats made with toxic colouring intended for use as fabric dye, adulteration in Bangladesh is everywhere. It is hard, too, to warn people off adulterated food when so much of it is designed to look more attractive. Unscrupulous farmers have used vast quantities of toxic hormones and chemicals artificially to ripen green fruits such as mangoes, melons, papayas, guavas, and bananas. To the shopper, this fruit looks unusually luscious. To eat it, though, may be to suffer kidney and liver problems. In the long term, it is carcinogenic. In 2004, the DCC filed twenty-two cases against criminals who had mixed carbide powder—one of the ripeners—with fruit. Needless to say, all of the twenty-two swindlers took the option of paying their three-dollar fine and going free.
In theory, at least, the situation in Bangladesh has since improved. In 2005, politicians finally responded to the shocking state of the nation’s food supply. Magistrates in special mobile courts were empowered to prosecute offenders. Between May and September these mobile courts (321 of them) succeeded in lodging 2,885 cases against adulterators. Then in September, the Bangladesh parliament passed an amendment to the Pure Food Act, setting up a food safety advisory body and giving enforcers more power. Under the new law, adulteration could be punished with six months to three years in jail and a hefty fine of 5,000 to 50,000 Tk. Repeated offenders would be required to forfeit their premises and equipment. At last, here was a food law with the teeth to deter the crime.
Initial optimism has already faded, however. In February 2006, a journalist on the Daily Star expressed scepticism about the new food safety amendment: “There is doubt about whether these tough provisions wi
ll succeed in improving the situation because no matter how sophisticated the laws are, proper implementation is always absent in Bangladesh.”94 Sure enough, insiders serving on the mobile courts reported that the courts failed to function properly much of the time because team members simply could not coordinate themselves. Meanwhile, despite the threat of greater punishments, the gangs of adulterators continued their activities. In July 2006, the Bangladesh Observer reported the widespread sale of adulterated produce in the markets of the Rajbari district: edible oil mixed with machine oil, rotten bread mixed into biscuit dough, toxic dyes in ice creams.95 Most strikingly of all, many of these adulterations happened publicly, without much sense of shame. Local administrators were reported as shirking their duties, failing to do anything to stop it.
At the time of writing, Bangladesh would seem to have all the components that, as we have seen in the course of this book, encourage swindling to flourish: long chains between producer and consumer coupled with a lack of mutual trust, incoherent food laws, a wild undisciplined market economy, a politics that is by turns apathetic and corrupt, and a culture in which consumers feel powerless to complain. One commentator has attributed the endemic adulteration in the country to the complete lack of “consumer rights” there: people feel they have no redress against dandruff shampoo which makes their hair fall out, CDs with half the tracks missing, and mouldy halva.96 “Violation of consumer rights and lack of business ethics has become such a common practice that even people with education are failing to protect their rights.” And, in a vicious circle, because people do not complain at the shoddy way they are treated, they continue to be treated shoddily.
Whether Bangladesh is condemned to carry on eating the most adulterated food in Southeast Asia is another matter. This is not the 1820s. Bangladesh has one great asset on its side, which is belonging to an information age that can transmit knowledge with greater speed than ever in the past. Though its food is much more falsified than that of the West, its journalism is of just as high a standard as that of Europe and America. While the swindlers operate in darkness, journalists have exposed their activities online with lightning speed, shaming both swindlers and politicians. This welter of information enables the world to learn about Bangladesh; it also gives Bangladesh access to the latest information on ways to combat food fraud. Will information eventually win out against the forces of deception? You would hope so. But history suggests that all victories in this struggle are the presage of further battles to come.
Epilogue
ADULTERATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
If some humans adulterate food, other humans can stop them.
—The London Food Commission (1988)
Adulteration, like poverty, seems to be always with us. The motive to swindle—greed—is a constant in human history. On the other hand, both the incentives and the opportunities for swindling have varied hugely over time. The incentives are mainly determined by economics, and the opportunities by politics and science. Swindling is not created by abstract entities such as “free trade” or “globalization.” It is caused by the working of these and other forces on individual human beings, who have other qualities of character than the mere impulse to defraud their fellow citizens. It is not too far-fetched to imagine a society where the right economic policies and the right politics could more or less eliminate food swindling, just as Jeffrey Sachs has argued that an “end to poverty” is not impossible given the political will.1
What, though, is the right way of fighting the swindlers? In the course of this story, we have seen plenty of alternatives, and none of them is perfect or sufficient in itself. The most basic response of all is to remove oneself altogether from the causes of swindling and retire to a pastoral idyll of some kind or other and attempt to eat what Sylvester Graham called an “Edenic” diet. If adulteration is caused by industrialization, then why not act as though the industrial revolution had never happened, and lead a life of quiet simplicity and self-sufficiency in the country, where you can trust all your food to be good because you grew or raised it yourself? For individuals fortunate enough to do it, this undoubtedly works. If you live like this, good luck to you. Elements of this idyll are undoubtedly useful, too, in the fight against adulteration in general. The excessive use of pesticides in modern agriculture has been rightly lobbied against by organic campaigners; and as a result, chemical pesticide limits are controlled more tightly than they were before. The ideal of self-sufficiency is also a useful corrective to affluent societies in which consumers often feel powerless to control what they eat. As applied to an entire society, however, the pastoral idyll is both utopian and retrograde. For better or worse, most of us live in mass commercial societies. A solution that depends on removal from this reality is no solution at all.
Most food legislation from 1860 onwards has adopted a more modern and realistic approach: fighting the swindlers under the great banner of Safety. The virtue of this strategy has been that it addresses the worst consequences of adulteration. A society with robust food safety laws, and expert officials to administer them, is not going to suffer the horrors of present-day Bangladesh. On the other hand, an excessive preoccupation with safety can make good food worse, as well as leading to unnecessary panics. As we saw in the last chapter, the filth clause in U.S. food legislation has led to overuse of pesticides. Equally, we are all familiar with stories of delicious unpasteurized cheeses being condemned as a threat to “health and safety.” And “food safety” can also neglect the moral dimension in adulteration: while strong on poisoning, it is often weak on cheating. There is plenty of fake and substitute food that is technically safe to eat—at least so far as we are aware at the present time—but that does not make it good or honest food, nor does it mean that the people supplying it are not trying to defraud us.
Therefore, many campaigners, as we have seen, have latched on to the ideal of Purity rather than mere Safety. Arthur Hill Hassall in Britain and Harvey Washington Wiley in the United States held up “Pure Food” as the model to aim for. This enabled them to achieve many great things. By setting the bar so high, they were able to restore some integrity to the process of buying and selling food. Hassall and Wiley addressed cheating as well as poisoning, adopting a zero-tolerance attitude toward trickery. It was not acceptable to sell “pure mustard” that was not pure, or “honey” that was really glucose, or “sweet corn” that was sweet only on account of the saccharine that had been added. The down side of “Pure Food,” though, is that there is ultimately no such thing; both Hassall and Wiley ended up in futile quests for absolute nutritional purity, which set them ever further apart from the ordinary consumer. The promise of Pure Food can ultimately lead to a disengagement of the senses. Consumers are encouraged to surrender their judgement over whether food is good or bad to experts. In the process, the simple pleasures of good food may be forgotten.
A more consumer-led approach has been to counter adulteration with information in the form of publicity and labelling. The press has always played a role in exposing food fraud, which has been heightened at various times through the work of muckrakers, from Upton Sinclair to Ralph Nader. In addition, we now have whole dictionaries of information about food at our disposal in the form of labelling. The right kind of publicity has been extremely effective in curbing the swindlers. After The Jungle, the meatpackers did clean up their act (though not to the extent that Sinclair wished). Mandatory food information on labels has eliminated whole swathes of swindling. Publicity is a double-edged sword, though. If there is muckraking, there is also advertising. Moreover, as we have seen, there is a fine line between useful science-based exposure of fraud and scaremongering. When swindling is exposed in the wrong way, it can lead not to firm action but to apathy or hysteria, neither of which helps us to eat better. By the same token, trusting too much to the label can be counterproductive. In and of itself, labelling is not enough to enable people to choose food wisely and well.
For this, we need knowledge of f
ood—real trustworthy knowledge, rather than empty information. Of all the approaches to fighting swindling we have seen, the best has been that which fights fake food with a sound appreciation of the real thing, because in most cases this gives the swindler nowhere to hide. In some ways, this is a very old approach—we saw it in the medieval guilds, and their modern-day equivalents, the AOC and PDO systems, which start with a knowledge of what a particular food should be like and then do everything they can to protect it. But real knowledge of food is not backward-looking, because it deepens as our knowledge of science deepens.
Another version of this approach has been adopted by cutting-edge scientists who use the latest scientific techniques to expose food fraud—whether Accum with his chemistry sets in 1820 or Mark Woolfe with his DNA tests today. However sophisticated their science, Accum and Woolfe both started from a simple enjoyment of food, and a desire to stop people ruining that pleasure. There are many virtues in fighting adulteration with knowledge of good food. It works not just for agrarian societies but for the modern industrial democracies that most of us now live in. It reengages the consumer with food, thus counteracting the problem of the long chain between producer and eater. Unlike so many of the other ways of fighting the swindlers, it does not stifle pleasure, or unduly heighten fear. It lessens the incentive to swindle, since the more people understand the difference between what is fake and what is real, the harder it will be to pass one off as the other, and to make money out of the difference.
The only significant problem I can see with fighting adulteration with real knowledge about food is that many of us don’t have it. If a whole society was serious about eliminating food fraud, it would embark on a vast overhaul of the education system, making cooking and a wide practical knowledge of food an essential part of learning for all ages. We would need to be taught what most medieval eaters knew instinctively: what bread tastes like when it is made from nothing but flour, water, salt, and leavening; what ham tastes like when it hasn’t been injected with excess water; how Basmati rice smells and how it differs from standard long-grain rice. Children in schools should be taught how vegetables are grown—without pesticides— and how they can be cooked—without additives; and how different kinds of apples taste; in the kind of classroom activities pioneered in Berkeley by Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard. Consumers generally would need to be taught the difference between the fake and the real: between the packaged pineapple pie of 100 000 000 Guinea Pigs and a real one made from fresh fruit, butter and flour. It would take a brave government to embark on teaching consumers such things; for however much we are lectured about fat, sugar, and obesity, few governments (if any) have ever wanted to teach us about food to the extent of antagonising the food industry, as Marion Nestle’s work has shown.2 We would also need to be educated about the true cost of food, so that the next time we are presented with a luxury food that is implausibly cheap, we know enough to question whether all is as it seems.