Food Frauds

[Briar Lee]

I grew up on a dairy farm in Southwest Missouri where my father, and all of his friends who owned dairies, were fanatical about quality control and the taste and santitaton of the product.

I would assume that even today if your milk reads bottled in Springfield Missouri there’s none better on earth.

But it intrigues me to read that food fraud today is common among imported milk, pepper, vanilla, honey, and olive oil.

5 Food Frauds to Watch For

Some of which you've probably experienced before

www.esquire.com

Buying local honey and milk is easy.

Pepper and vanilla and olive oil are about all foreign imports.

The only way to know you’re getting the real deal is to trust the brand that sells it.

I knew Chinese honey is a problem because it might be cut with corn syrup or the bees fed corn syrup or it’s so filtered to disguise its origin there’s no pollen in it.

But who’d think black pepper is faked or adulterated?

 

[OzPiper]

If there is money in it ………..

 

[Sigmund]

There is a netflix special about garbage coming from china in the way of women’s cosmetics. Some women had to go to the ER to have their lips unglued because someone put construction adhesive or some super glue in the lipstick. People are sick and just dont care as long as they make a buck. Some fakes are just fakes. Some are outright dangerous.

 

[Briar Lee]

The tenant in the home I grew up in has a couple of bee hives.

My grandfather kept bees, and nothing had really changed about it in over a century. Earlier this spring he harvested the honey from one hive, and bottled about five gallons, in twenty quart mason jars. He gets $20 a jar, or $400.

He must really like to keep bees.

My Amish pasture renter stopped by and watched me buy a quart of honey from my house renter and said he had bought a five gallon jug of honey already at Fair Play, at the Farmer’s Market.

He paid $100 for five gallons.

There’s no chance real honey costs $20 a gallon. The best that could be is corn syrup fed inside a barn in China to bees.

It might only be half corn syrup honey and the other half corn syrup.

We opened my honey and we all tasted it and my Amish renter said it was a whole lot sweeter than his from the five gallon jug.

Honey can come from about anyplace on earth so long as it’s real honey, gathered by bees from flowering plants.

But we will lose our domestic honey industry if we can’t stop fake corn syrup honey coming in from China.

 

[huntertrw]

The fraud perpetrated by the CCP is not limited to food products. The lead that they produce has repeatedly been purported to be contaminated with harmful toys!

 

[warren]

"Caveat Emptor" are still words to live by. Do the work! Especially if you are buying from third world countries and companies you've never heard of. Some products built in the "third world" under strict supervision by Americaqn, British and so forth companies will pass the muster.

 

[HawkeyeLinus]

The wife has that milk thing covered.

 

[FLDRD]

Many of our home-grown corporations are as bad as well, with the amount of chemicals in fast food, packaged food, and most all processed "food" in general, many people are not eating food - they're eating food-imitation products. (And exporting these ideas too.)

And if you look at the size and health statistics of "average" Americans, it's disgusting.

Over-fed, undernourished, etc.

There was a time when people were taught to count calories.
Wrong approach.
Instead they need to count chemicals.
Real food almost never makes you fat or unhealthy.

Best start: skip out on the items that have an ingredients "list" and we're on a better path.

 

[lraisch]

Now we hear about apple sauce pouches sold for children have been found to contain up to 2000 times the acceptable limit for lead. Apparently this was due to contaminated cinnamon. Both the applesauce and the cinnamon were from Ecuador.
At least 65 cases of lead poisoning have been discovered.

 

[bullet08]

Eat American food. Sounds simple. But not really. Some people have to have avocado. Some people have to have some other not so readily grown in US. You know, cow intestines, and tongues are readily available. So does chicken liver, wheat, peanut.. Let all the hippies and vegans eat what they want. I'm fine with domestic food sources.

 

[Briar Lee]

Once a year Foremost and Highland diaries in Springfield courted the local school boards, trying to win the annual contract for milk, cottage cheese and ice cream for the year, in the late sixties.

They brought dairy products to the schools in containers that were blank white, so they could be blind taste tested by the children.

One year, somebody from another provider came with all milk substitute products made from soy milk.

All of us kids liked the fake dairy products better,,,,much better,,,,than the real ones.

I can remember those old dairy farmers on the board sampling all those fake dairy products and realizing their livelihoods were in danger.

My father was the school board President, and he vetoed the fake dairy products.


He made a little speech about how real milk couldn’t have added corn sweeteners.

Adults could choose to buy that, but not captive little kids in a school cafeteria.

 

[FurCoat]

Now we hear about apple sauce pouches sold for children have been found to contain up to 2000 times the acceptable limit for lead. Apparently this was due to contaminated cinnamon. Both the applesauce and the cinnamon were from Ecuador.
At least 65 cases of lead poisoning have been discovered.

The FDA is now reporting that the lead was added during processing. The thought is that it was added to increase the weight and therefore put less product in the pouch.

 

[HeavyLeadBelly]

I’m fortunate to live in a city that has a robust farmers market scene where I can get quality local food. But a lot of the time I have to go to the grocery store where it can be a challenge to skip ultra processed stuff. Shop local if you can!

In the same vein I outright quit shopping on Amazon. I’ve had issues with how they treat their employees, both corporate and warehouse, but my god has the shopping experience there dropped immensely. So much cheap shit and you never know if any of it is real or fake.

 

[El Capitán]

I live far enough in the country in the US that I'm able to get fresh honey and milk (unpasteurized) from neighbors. I raise my own chickens for eggs and meat and milk my goats for goat milk. We make cheese and butter as well. There is a farm that sells us beef and pork at wholesale. Both are free range.

 

[K.E. Powell]

I grew up on a dairy farm in Southwest Missouri where my father, and all of his friends who owned dairies, were fanatical about quality control and the taste and sanitation of the product. . . . But who’d think black pepper is faked or adulterated?

I will say, that black pepper is one of those simple luxuries that people grossly underestimate in terms of how it is harvested and the costs necessary to bring it to market. The last few decades have been very hard on black pepper farmers for a variety of reasons, and in more fortunate places of the world, pepper is treated almost the same as salt, i.e., it is assumed to be cheaply available everywhere at all times. As such, demand for it is monstrously high. We're talking a crop that takes several years to fruit, after all. It is little surprise that black pepper and many other popular spices are being increasingly adulterated.

That aside, what you said about your family and neighbors being fanatical about QC rings true and made me reflect. In small local markets, the margins for profit (and error) are much tighter, and reputation matters greatly. In a small rural community in particular, being perceived as being a man who weighs his scales dishonestly can be all it takes to dismantle his entire enterprise. In large scale industry, especially where markets are effectively cornered by a handful of large corporate conglomerates, such considerations are at best secondary to those of so-called "efficiency" and logistics.

One of the cruel ironies of American life in the 21st century is that rampant skepticism and distrust in everything has made the average American a rather jaded and cynical creature. Such a person thinks their skepticism is a bulwark against shysters and swindlers, but the reality is that their skepticism is effectively weaponized against them, thus making them perfect marks. Politicians appeal to the distrust of politics and government to get elected; businesses appeal to xenophobia and jingoism while offshoring labor to other countries; and the motives of profit poison all relationships, so much so that most Americans don't even trust their doctors or teachers or other people who would have been considered pillars of any community even a few decades ago.

Since there is no trust in any of the necessary mechanisms to make the public commons function, much less any trust in each other, we rob ourselves of the means to actually address any of the problems we claim to care about. We are prisoners of our faithlessness.

 

[Briar Lee]

I will say, that black pepper is one of those simple luxuries that people grossly underestimate in terms of how it is harvested and the costs necessary to bring it to market. The last few decades have been very hard on black pepper farmers for a variety of reasons, and in more fortunate places of the world, pepper is treated almost the same as salt, i.e., it is assumed to be cheaply available everywhere at all times. As such, demand for it is monstrously high. We're talking a crop that takes several years to fruit, after all. It is little surprise that black pepper and many other popular spices are being increasingly adulterated.

That aside, what you said about your family and neighbors being fanatical about QC rings true and made me reflect. In small local markets, the margins for profit (and error) are much tighter, and reputation matters greatly. In a small rural community in particular, being perceived as being a man who weighs his scales dishonestly can be all it takes to dismantle his entire enterprise. In large scale industry, especially where markets are effectively cornered by a handful of large corporate conglomerates, such considerations are at best secondary to those of so-called "efficiency" and logistics.

One of the cruel ironies of American life in the 21st century is that rampant skepticism and distrust in everything has made the average American a rather jaded and cynical creature. Such a person thinks their skepticism is a bulwark against shysters and swindlers, but the reality is that their skepticism is effectively weaponized against them, thus making them perfect marks. Politicians appeal to the distrust of politics and government to get elected; businesses appeal to xenophobia and jingoism while offshoring labor to other countries; and the motives of profit poison all relationships, so much so that most Americans don't even trust their doctors or teachers or other people who would have been considered pillars of any community even a few decades ago.

Since there is no trust in any of the necessary mechanisms to make the public commons function, much less any trust in each other, we rob ourselves of the means to actually address any of the problems we claim to care about. We are prisoners of our faithlessness.

He’s been gone now, for 52 Christmas eves, but my father’s Grade A milk barn is exactly as he left it in September 1971.

The paint was a special lead free dairy parlor product that under the dust is as white and flake free as it ever was then.

To make Grade A and sell children’s school lunch fluid milk meant so many square feet of windows all with screens and other details in the blueprints I still have stored out there where he last left them.

His cows were gentler than any pet dog I’ve ever owned. He kept 25 milking, 2 at a time, then that hind cow came struggling up the south ramp to be milked while the other milker was soaking in scalding hot water up front.

If he sold one drop unpasteurized and raw they’d have shut him down and never again allowed any dairy to buy from his dairy.

He gave the poor family with 15 children down the road several gallons a week, but never got caught.

There was a day, that all was normal dairy practice.

And people had enough milk, then too.