Is that really honey or salmon or??????

There is a lot of media attention right now over a test result which shows that something like 40 percent of the honey samples tested using a specific test method are not the pure honey their labels claim.

This has raised publicly the whole issue of food fraud.

This is an issue  which the food industry has been working on for a long time but it is only when stories like this come along that the media dnpublic become very concerned.

Pigs anuses have been coated and sold as calamari, honey has been fiddled with, shark has been labelled as some other type of fish, champagne is called that when it should be called sparkling wine – these are all just examples of the food fraud that is going on across the world.

When people pay for a particular product they have the absolute right to expect that what is on the label is what is inside the container and is what they have paid for.

The problem is that a very small number of unscrupulous people and companies have realised that there is money to be made by selling something that looks like what is being paid for when it actually isn’t.

There are strong laws already in place to address this crime but the hassle is that the products need to be found and they need to be tested to show that they are not whet they seem.

There are international and nationally accredited and recognised testing methods for  confirming the content of foods. These tests are gtting more and more sensitive and can now not only test what species something is in a food but where all the ingredients came from. So it can now be easily shown the total chemical composition of a honey and, in fact, where the flowers grew that were involved in it.

This makes it much easier to identify if a food is not what the label claims, but that doesn’t solve the problem of food fraud. There are however still issues with the testing because there are still disagreements on the best testing methods.

Testing the food is only half the story, the key is in actually finding foods that may have been adulterated. Honey is a good example, if done right, an adulterated honey looks no different to a pure honey and to those who are not specialists in the taste of a specific type of honey, the flavour is not a good indication either.

So how can authorities find the food fraud and then find who is doing it? That is the big question and there are no simple answers.

Especially when countries are setting different laws which make identifying food fraud and then prosecuting it even more difficult in other countries. A good example of this is recently in China there has been a decision made that means that rainbow trout can be labelled as Salmon. This is all because of language issues in that country but it will make it very difficult in other countries if that type of fish is exported to them as Salmon when it is in fact Rainbow Trout.