The authorities are required to show ‘soul deep’ concern to ameliorate the sufferings of people caused by food adulteration in the state, the J&K high court said on Saturday, even as the government submitted that it will soon set up technologically advanced laboratories in Srinagar and Jammu.
The authorities tasked with implementing the Food Safety and Standard Act of 2006 have “exhibited only skin-deep concern” towards the sufferings of the people and they need to show “soul-deep concern”, a bench of justices Muzaffar Hussain Attar and Ali Mohammad Magrey said while hearing suo-moto Public Interest Litigation.
“This is not the question of a small water body and encroachments on it which we can demolish. It concerns the health of all of us, rich and poor, ruler and the ruled. Everybody’s health is involved in this issue but there is sad state of affairs,” the bench said.
Last month, the court said the people of the state have been ‘left at the mercy of God’ as there are no laboratories and other paraphernalia available to check food adulteration in the state.
I like Tampa, and even more Sarasota and Anna Maria Island. Brisbane is equidistance from the equator as is Sarasota, and I enjoy going to the rink in flip-flops and shorts.
I also enjoyed that Tampa Bay beat Detroit (Amy’s team) in game 1 of the National Hockey League playoffs
And like Brisbane, there is great seafood, but a lot of it is bullshit.
Laura Reiley of Tampa Bay writes the restaurant’s chalkboard makes claims as you enter from the valet parking lot. At the hostess stand, a cheery board reads, “Welcome to local, farm-fresh Boca.”
Wait.
Amy and I were in Phoenix in 2007, and went to a Coyotes game, and I eventually had to turn to the asshole sitting behind us, going on about how he had this cougar in Boca and tell him to shut the fuck up.
But food fraud and hucksterism is a growth business.
Brown butcher paper tops tables and lettuces grow along a wooden wall. In a small market case, I see canned goods from here and produce from somewhere. Check the small print: blackberries from Mexico and blueberries from California.
With the tagline “Local, simple and honest,” Boca Kitchen Bar Market was among the first wave of farm-to-table restaurants in Tampa Bay to make the assertion “we use local products whenever possible.” I’ve reviewed the food. My own words are right there on their website: “local, thoughtful and, most importantly, delicious.”
But i’ve been had, from the snapper down to the beef.
It’s not just Boca. At Pelagia Trattoria at International Plaza, the “Florida blue crab” comes from the Indian Ocean.
Mermaid Tavern in Seminole Heights shouts “Death to Pretenders” on its menu, but pretends cheese curds are homemade and shrimp are from Florida.
At Maritana Grille at the Loews Don cesar, chefs claim to get pork from a farmer who doesn’t sell to them.
This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors – I grew up with Massey-Fergusons — scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.
More often than not, those things are fairy tales. A long list of Tampa Bay restaurants are willing to capitalize on our hunger for the story.
And it’s all 21st century snake oil.
PEOPLE WANT “LOCAL,” and they’re willing to pay. Local promises food that is fresher and tastes better; it means better food safety; it yields a smaller carbon footprint while preserving genetic diversity; it builds community.
If you eat food, you are being lied to every day.
The food supply chain is so vast and so complicated. It has yielded extra-virgin olive oil that is actually colored sunflower oil, Parmesan cheese bulked up with wood pulp, and a horsemeat scandal that, for a while, rendered Ikea outings Swedish meatball-free.
Everywhere you look, you see the claims: “sustainable,” “naturally raised,” “organic,” “non-GMO,” “fair trade,” “responsibly grown.” Restaurants have reached new levels of hyperbole.
What makes buying food different from other forms of commerce is this: It’s a trust-based system. How do you know the Dover sole on your plate is Dover sole? Only that the restaurateur said so.
And that’s why traceability and microbial food safety need to be marketed at retail. The technology is there.
Master Halal Meat butchers in Ayres Road, Old Trafford, was found guilty of two counts of food fraud at Trafford Magistrates Court April 1.
The discovery was made after Trafford Council’s Environmental Health Officers sampled produce from a number of food outlets across the borough in the wake of the UK horse meat scandal in 2015.
During the inspections, a sample lamb pattie taken from a bakery was found to contain just 50 per cent lamb. The owners insisted they were not responsible and pointed to their supplier, Master Halal Meat.
Two samples of ‘lamb’ mince were taken directly from the supplier in March 2015 and were found to contain 50 per cent beef and 30 per cent beef respectively.
When interviewed by officers, director of Master Halal Meat, Abdul Fadel, blamed the shop manager and said he had recently been sacked.
The officers returned to the shop two months later and took a further sample of ‘lamb’ mince.
The sample was again found to contain 50 per cent beef, leaving officers no choice but to prosecute Fadel.
Chinese authorities have arrested six people for making and selling fake infant formula as the popular US brand “Similac”, marketing the counterfeit product across seven provinces, a Shanghai government body said.
Abbott, maker of Similac, said separately on Tuesday that the case came to light in December and the fake goods had been traced and seized by the end of last year, according to a statement on its verified Chinese microblog.
The Shanghai Municipal Food and Drug Administration said it was also tracking Internet sales of the fake milk powder, according to its statement released Monday.
State media reports have previously said the gang sold more than 17,000 cans, earning nearly 2.0 million yuan ($309,000).
National authorities said the fake powder posed no safety risk. In a separate case, a Chinese court last month sentenced 10 people to jail for as long as 15 years for selling fake beef jerky, state media reported.
Herbs are about the only thing I can grow that aren’t eaten by birds, possums and skinks.
Except when the cats decide to self-bathe in the wonderful aroma of my herbs, when someone lets them out onto the piece of concrete substituting for a back yard.
Last year a study reported that 25% of dried oregano samples in the UK were adulterated. Concerned that Australian consumers might be affected by the same issue, CHOICE decided to carry out a spot check on the authenticity of oregano being sold here. We bought a selection of dried oregano products from supermarkets, grocers and delis in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth – 12 different brands in total – and had a single sample of each product analysed.
Shockingly, the results of a unique screening test for oregano adulteration showed that of the 12 samples, only five were 100% oregano. The other seven – from brands Master of Spices, Hoyt’s, Stonemill (Aldi), Spice & Co, Menora, Spencers and G Fresh – contained ingredients other than oregano, including olive leaves (in all seven samples) and sumac leaves (in two samples). Ingredients other than oregano made up between 50% and 90% of the adulterated samples.
It’s important to note that we tested just one sample of a single batch from each brand, so the results aren’t necessarily representative of each of those individual brands and companies’ whole range of oregano products.
Chris Elliott, the founder of the Institute for Global Food Security, a laboratory in Northern Ireland that tests food from all over the world in order to uncover fraud, told NPR’s Rachel Martin, “Many, many forms of food fraud manifest themselves in different parts of the world virtually every day of the week. … It’s absolutely cheating. But it goes beyond cheating — this is criminal activity, very well organized criminal activity, with people making a huge amount of money out of fraud in food systems.”
“The world trade in groceries is about $11 trillion. And the level of fraud is somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of that.”
“Quite often, the person who is caught is the retailer. And they aren’t always the fraudsters — often they have been cheated themselves. But what happens is whenever they are caught, the reputation that goes with that is quite enormous. And many, many companies that have been involved or implicated in food fraud have seen their profits drop dramatically.”
“It’s extremely difficult for consumers to decide what’s genuine and what’s fake — because I’ll tell you the fakes are very, very good. We as consumers are reliant on the government, and on the food industry to protect us from fraud.
“My advice to people is always buy your food from bonafide sources. If you buy your stuff from the back of vans and so forth, you can expect what you’ll get. And the second thing is if you buy something that’s too good to be true price-wise, it probably is.”
The Associated Press reports that sugar spiked with fertilizer, olives painted with copper, and fake alcoholic beverages are all among the more than 10,000 tons of counterfeit and illicit foods that have been seized over the last several months in a massive initiative by Interpol and Europol, reports.
The seizures even had a special name: Operation Opson V, which spanned November 2015 to February 2016 and resulted in a number of arrests around the world as police and other regulatory bodies carried out investigations.
“Among the aims of the operation is to identify and disrupt the organized crime networks behind the trafficking in fake goods,” a release from Interpol said. The investigations were carried out in 57 countries, including the UK, Greece, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Aside from the aforementioned fake liquor, tainted sugar, and painted olives, some of the stranger confiscated items included monkey meat, illegal buffalo meat, 11 kilos of locusts and 20 kilos of caterpillars, peanuts that were repackaged and relabeled as pricier pine nuts — obviously a major concern for those with dangerous food allergies — and chicken intestines preserved in formalin.
Concerns over fake or tainted products are ongoing as investigations into fake labels, tainted goods, and organized crime rings continue to make headlines. A recent episode of 60 Minutes exposed the Italian epidemic that is olive oil fraud, and scientists are working on ways to detect counterfeit coffee beans. Meanwhile, many restaurants in the U.S. have been busted subbing cheap fish for lobster.
Peter Oakley discovered the syringe in an easter egg his mother had purchased from the Canterbury Garden Woolworths in Kilsyth.
“Keep your eyes out before giving choc rabbits to friends or kids. Hopefully the d*ckhead that did this did it only once as a joke,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
“Will be reporting this tomorrow.”
In a comment on his Facebook post, which has been shared over 4960 times, Oakley said it “looks like someone peeled back the foil and jammed it inside and then put the foil back in place”.
“The loose bit of chocolate was still inside,” he said.
However, Facebook users have taken to Woolworths’ official page claiming the story is fake.
“Woolies i sniff a fake trying to get money out of you so becarful.. This is like a new low,” Lisa Bingochicky posted.
It comes just a days after a Woolworths customer complained that they had found a dead cockroach in an easter egg box.
The Economic Times writes that nearly 70% of the milk in India is adulterated. This, simply, is not acceptable. The government has said that a new scanner has been developed for quick detection of adulteration, and is now working towards developing a portable test kit based on this technology.
While this development will help improve detection, addressing the problem of adulteration of this essential food item will require changes in the regulatory and legal framework and the manner in which the food safety administration discharges its duties.
The only way to tackle adulteration of essential food items like milk is to increase the cost of violation. Failure to do so will mean continuing to expose the millions of Indians, particularly children, to a public health time bomb.
The assessment identifies a wide range of vulnerabilities and risks across the food industry but found little to suggest that organized crime groups have so far made substantial in-roads into UK food supply chains. However, with the UK food and drink sector representing 11% of the UK economy and chances of detection relatively low, the report suggests there remains a significant risk to consumers and legitimate businesses from serious fraud.
Andy Morling, Head of the NFCU, said, ‘The NFCU was established in the wake of the horsemeat incident. That incident came at a huge cost to the UK food industry, not just financially but also in terms of reputation. It illustrated why it is vital for the food industry, law enforcement agencies and regulators to work together to combat the threat of food crime.
Food and drink is a £200 billion industry in the UK and like any major industry, it’s vulnerable to a wide range of criminal activity. Unlike many industries, the crimes are often undetected or unreported. Consumers may not be aware they are victims of food crime, while businesses can worry that reporting a crime will damage their reputation or profits. Nonetheless, reported or otherwise, the impact of food crime can be extremely harmful to individuals, the economy and the UK’s reputation.
For the purposes of this report we define food crime as dishonesty in food production or supply, which is either complex or results in serious harm to consumers, businesses or the public interest. We’ve worked hard to gain insight into this diverse, complex and nuanced area of criminal activity.
As well as exploring what current intelligence and reporting can tell us about food crime, our initial assessment also highlights what we don’t know, and why this might be the case. Estimating the scale and impact of food crime can be challenging. Fraud is by definition a hidden activity and the parties involved may be skilled at cloaking their criminality. This challenge has been magnified by a lack of available intelligence and crime reporting relating to this area.
The authorities tasked with implementing the Food Safety and Standard Act of 2006 have “exhibited only skin-deep concern” towards the sufferings of the people and they need to show “soul-deep concern”, a bench of justices Muzaffar Hussain Attar and Ali Mohammad Magrey said while hearing suo-moto Public Interest Litigation.
