Tag: Larry Olmsted

Is It Or Isn’t It? What Are You Eating?

What Can Blockchain Tech Do For Food Tracking?

I found this in my in box.  Foreign shrimp being raised in dubious conditions.  I am being kind.

Here’s the link about it and why it is so very important to know, I mean to KNOW, where your food comes from.  I have long avoided non-American shrimp and this is not any reason to stop my own personal embargo.

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Factory fishing?

Isn’t that a quaint picture?  When you think of the fishing industry, is that close to the idea in your head?  Yeah, me too.  Commercial fishing is bigger than that.

Commercial Fish Processing
Commercial Fish Processing

In the aftermath of the theater of the absurd, AKA, the State Of The Union speech-more for rhetoric than facts, and that’s for all SOTU speeches-a tempest of confusion, slight of fin, and plain deception forges ahead at full pace. That trickery is the fake fish industry.  Let me remove confusion before it starts.  Not every commercial operation is fake and there are many good people in many good companies doing good work.  But, there are some bad actors, too, and it is they we need to guard against.

In the Foodnavigator-usa.com, Elizabeth Crawford writes an article, dateline January 31, 2018, about how molecular biology, and DNA scanning, will be the next of several efforts to curb fake fish by tracking the real fish from boat to store.

A recent post on this blog discussed the possible use of blockchain technology to track country of origin in foods, including fish.

In the media

USA Today writer Elizabeth Weise has written about the fish supply, stating in her February 23, 2009 article “Something Fishy? Counterfeit Foods Enter The U.S. Market!!” “Fish is the most frequently faked food Americans buy,” as well as here.

In Larry Olmstead’s recent book, Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You Are Eating and What You Can Do About It, he writes a chapter of fake fish, including the fakery in the sushi industry. “How terrible is it? A study for New York City seafood done by scientists at a nonprofit marine conservation group Oceana found fraud in 58 percent of retail outlets and 39 percent of restaurants. The one especially scary finding . . . was that every sushi restaurant from which samples were collected—100 percent of them—served fake fish.”

There are ways to manage the problem. Fraud in fish may never be eliminated but measures can be taken to make significant impacts in the practice. Curiously, not one of these measures comes from the government. All are private enterprise, seeking innovative methods to solve a problem. The worst thing that can happen is the government to step in and with no expertise in the field, tell private business they have to stop or, maybe worse, impose a stifling amount of fees.

Read more about Olmstead’s suggestions as well as what he found in all manner of food fakery as well as food wholesomeness.

These are links to Amazon, for whom I am an affiliate seller. When you purchase from Amazon through these links, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. The first is for Olmstead’s book, the second for a well reviewed expose on olive oil.


 

 

Real Food/Fake Food

Real From Fake: Is There Really Any Harm?

 

 

 

Red snapper in an ice bin.
Red Snapper in an ice bin. Is it really red snapper? Hard to tell without seeing the tail.

Buying fish was one of my most favorite jobs. Cutting that fish was the second. I find cutting fish a zen place to be and can disappear for hours and never move my feet. We ordered our fish skin on and often whole so we could see what we were buying. Whole fish I knew, but a filet of something white, well, even the fishmonger might find that a challenge.

Olmsted does an excellent job of making a heady and bothersome topic, faking our food sometimes at the risk of our health or life, easy to read and understand.

A mound of shrimp.
A mound of fresh caught (maybe) shrimp. But, is it safe? Where did it come from?

You don’t need to be a chef or a food purchasing manager for a restaurant to be affected by the choices of someone else somewhere else. What you don’t know can hurt you and there is little better armament for guarding one’s health than knowledge.

Shrimp, nearly everyone’s favorite, might be less wholesome than you prefer.  A sushi fan are you?  There are about even odds that fish you are eating isn’t what you were told it is.  So, what is it?

More than meets the eye

There is more fake food than we know.  Fake doesn’t always mean inedible (but sometimes it does), but fake in that it isn’t what it claims to be.  Champagne can only come from Champagne, France.  Port only from Portugal.  Yet, you can go to your local mega grocery store and buy California Port and Champagne and get nothing like their namesakes suggest.  Fake.  It’s a big problem and one that Congress has been none too eager to help fix, even to go as far as help perpetuate the problem.

Perhaps the most vexing part of the problem, even more so that borrowing names for things that aren’t, the stealing of your money for inferior products at high prices, trusting that the box reads right about what’s in there is that the FDA has apparently little interest in doing what they are supposed to do and there is little we can do to solve that problem.

Is there any way to fix this?

Olmsted’s purpose seems to show the problems with for reals fake food and the only mislabeled or misidentified.  Sometimes those problems lead to real health issues, sometimes just lightening your wallet.

A libertarian solution is the disband the FDA which seems content to do as little as possible and employ 3rd party systems of verification, much like those mentioned in the book who sleuthed out the fish and sushi problem.

Between then and now, those two things almost never happening, being informed, which Olmstead does very well, and attending carefully to what you buy, grow your own, and be vigilant, the fake food in your house can give way to the real stuff and the market pressure to make the good goods will at least exert some pressure in the right places. Complaints might be that the market works too slowly: have you seen the speed of Congress?