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Disturbing food stories of 2011: Fake olive oil
It’s one of the few fats that is actually good for you. Chefs and foodies rave about it. It is extra virgin olive oil.
It is also probably either fake or spoiled.
A University of California study bought bottles of commercially available extra virgin olive oil from different grocery stores in the state and tested them. The results were frankly scary. 83% of the brands tested were not genuine extra virgin olive oil. The vast majority of the brands tested failed the tests, which included both chemical analysis and taste testing by experienced olive oil experts. In some cases, it simply failed the taste tests, indicating that the oil was basically spoiled for one reason or another. In other cases, the oil was actually conterfit, produced from a mixture of cheap oils such as canola, and flavorings and colorings.
Even many of the big name ‘trusted’ brands failed the testing, and were either not real extra virgin olive oil, or spoiled.
The Canadian food inspection agency in recent testings discovered that 20% of the oil on the shelves in grocery stores were outright fakes, made up largely of non-olive oils such as sunflower or canola, and at least ten distributors were fined. It made little difference. Independent testing by CBC News showed that many of the faked brands were still on the shelves.
In Europe, it is just as bad, if not worse. The Italian government is struggling to get the problem of fake and conterfit olive oil under control, but without much success. And the problem is only going to get worse as demand for olive oil continues to rise.
Interestingly enough, oils of California origin did the best in the testing, it seems. Whether this is because California has more strict regulations or some other reason, it seems that the only way you can be sure that what you are getting is real extra virgin olive oil is to stick with the Caifornia brands unless you are very sure of where that fancy bottle of Italian or Greek oil came from.
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Disturbing food stories from 2011. Fake honey.
Testing revealed that virtually all of the mass market honey being sold in grocery stores and other retail outlets does not meet the FDA definition of the term “honey”. In order to meet government requirements, honey must contain the natural pollen grains that are normally found in honey. (Note: Pasteurization has no effect on the pollen content, it merely kills potentially harmful bacteria.)
But virtually all of the honey on the shelves at grocery stores and other food outlets contains little or no pollen at all, meaning that technically it is not honey. Why no pollen? Because the public has been trained to believe that real honey is a thick, crystal clear, amber colored liquid, so virtually all of the honey manufacturers put the honey through an ultra-filtration process that removes literally everything from honey, leaving a perfectly clear liquid that is basically little more than sugar syrup.
To make things even more disturbing, an significant number of products tested never came from bees at all, made up primarily of corn syrup and a variety of colorings and flavorings.
The only honey samples that tested as ‘real’ honey, meeting the FDA specifications for pollen and other criteria, were those being sold by the smaller producers.
