The world’s corrupt food industry

Over the past few years, the food industry has been getting glamour and big numbers - the fashion of multi-star chefs, food seen as a sort of small masterpiece to satisfy the taste and eyes, and a billion-dollar market with a worldwide net of suppliers. A $1.118,52 billion business, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization-FAO 2013 data. However, behind the scene it is better not to ask too many questions, because often there are only bad answers. It is a matter of quality, origin and health hazards, under one great leading “philosophy”: to make profit at all costs with little care about people’s health. A strange and sad situation is becoming apparent to our eyes: on one side there is a steep increase of obesity, while on the other the world hunger is in a rising trend again after years of dwelling (according to the FAO). The rich side of the world eats too much, more and more low quality food, while another side of the world will fight wars for food and water. The complexity of the global trade has opened the doors to low ethics and to bad practices.

So today you can find black pepper with mouse feces in an elegant and shining showcase of a downtown grocery, or yogurt made by milk contaminated with melamine (trimer of cyanimide) in a top market megastore, chemical solvents in extra virgin olive oil, cabbage with formalin, tea with pesticides, fake halal meat, horsemeat with phenylbutazone (strictly prohibited in edible goods) sold as beef, just to quote a few typologies among many. This is not exactly the kind of global variety of quality that consumers longed to reach. It is not a negligible system mistake; we talk about tens, hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of tons of contaminated or spoiled food for each case.

We think that we live in hyper-controlled societies, thanks to anti-terrorism and anti-health hazards rules. We imagine that we are shielded against Ebola, botulin, pesticide and terrorist agents. Maybe it is just wishful thinking; people can check day-by-day watching news about main streets bombing and food scandals. Because we are living in open-interconnected societies with a global low-mid income middle class with a copycatting trend: same needs, same products, same big market and same apparent controls. Unfortunately, this business is dressed without any kind of ethics in the side of many suppliers, traders and sellers.

Everybody and everything is traveling across the world at a pace we couldn’t even imagine a few years ago. Control authorities in most of the cases know the problems as well as traders, but too many Byzantine rules (which means strict but outdated) make controls over a huge amount of goods almost impossible. Even the global economic crisis that spread after 2008 almost grounded business ethics in the food sector. Thousands of firms, companies and factories that before were ready to trade, produce or sell spoiled food for profit, now do it to survive. Easy to imagine the outcome. In the future, this immoral business behavior will produce more damages and deaths than terrorism. A huge burden to already overloaded national health care systems.

A good example is what happens in the European Union, where, by the books, regulations, restrictions and Kafkaesque laws are ruling over even the size, color and diameter of cucumber, zucchini, fennel and any kind of vegetable or edible products traded and sold within the EU. On the other hand, it is easy to change the origin of a bad product coming from high polluted, low control countries, with “triangulations”. According to revelations of a “Snowden of food industry,” Christophe Brusset says that the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, among others, are the EU countries with weaker controls, and new Eastern EU countries like Romania, are prone to frauds. That is a formula to deceit custom checks. Let bad food cross several boundaries inside the EU with different national rules and different languages; at any passage, the “rancid cabbage” will have a better smell, color and…weight. Weight? Yes, that is another scam linked to a lot of food items but mainly with fishery (glazed shrimps for example) and in the sausage products sector. Better cases see water injections-- of course the industry has no limits to creativity. If you see a glamourous label written “smoked” in the shelf of a department store, forget about smokehouses and long seasonings process. “Liquid smoke” and a needle inserted in a quarter of minced meat and offal will do the miracle in just few minutes. A better weight and an amazing flavor. Chemical taste will make another miracle if offal smell too bad.

Talking with some food sector chemists in Italy, I have learned that even a barrel of tomato concentrate with a thick layer of white worms, after a long travel with temperature from 30 to 40 degrees Celsius, could be revamped. Chemical “correctors” are the magic wand that make it possible to take the content of that barrel and put it in cans, send it to wholesalers and allowing that sauce to land on top of your wonderful spaghetti.

How is this possible? Well, food adulteration has existed since Roman Empire age. More recently, Friedrich Accum wrote a book about “culinary poisons” published in England in 1820. He revealed the scandal of “strychnine beer” among others. In the EU, as in other mature markets, the tsunami of Chinese products helped the quality downturn. The EU imported almost 5 billion euros worth of cheap food products in 2016, even after Brussels put a total embargo on Chinese livestock and fishery because of the use of prohibited antibiotics. The rule was avoided thanks to “friendly” companies based in countries far or close to Europe that relabeled the banned foods. But other times it is politics that plays the main role in weak controls on Chinese foods. As it seems to have happened in the case of “pesticide tea” stocked in several EU member states. The gunpowder tea was cleared for the market to avoid a commercial war with Beijing that would cost too much to the EU members for high-tech exports to China. Who cares about some thousands of citizens’ health?

Numbers can help understand why even Mafia and Camorra, notorious Italian criminal organizations, got involved in counterfeit food business. About 12.5 billion euros per year of business for Food’s Mafia (Eurispes source) of fake mozzarella, rotten tomato sauce, vegetables produced in high polluted areas, forged quality foods or really poisoned edible goods are the reasons for scams and money laundering. Criminals trade worldwide and produce directly; 20 percent of sized assets by the Italian anti-Mafia authority are agricultural lands, so even frauds to the EU provision system are on the mob’s agenda. In countries like Italy and France, where food is a like a “faith,” the food business accounts for over 10 percent of the national GDP. So beside the glittering images of Master Chefs and 3-star cooks, there is a world food industry with low ethics, so low that it could, in some cases, be overlapped with the Mafia mindset: zero care for people’s health safety. Do you think it is an exaggeration? French health authorities stated that food adulteration causes half million hospitalizations and several hundreds of deaths each year. More victims than terrorism! And the burden for health care systems for the future –even for the present – is huge. An example? The steep increase of diabetes and obesity (FAO data) thanks to the high presence of industrial sugar (like synthetic fructose) in all kinds of food. So additives, once intended for preservation (like salt), are now used greatly to mislead consumers. Gorgeous colors, nice shapes, flavor and attractive packaging are no longer linked to quality. The World Health Organization (WHO) encourages monitoring food additives use to avoid adulterations, but only an infinitesimal part of the world food traded or produced can be controlled. Although the EU has the best rules for food safety, it can do little against the great amount of imports from countries with low standards legislation and bad industry practices. It is a day by day war that is a near-loss game. The FAO and WHO Codex initiative issued a scorecard with quality standards and maximum content for contaminants, but it is on voluntary base (186 member states). Someone said that future medicine should be food, so food safety should be placed on top of any political agenda, unless we want to give a sit to mobs at our table and poison our kids.