Food fraud, food fakery, and powdered meal replacements

It's hard to know which is worse. Or tell the difference.

There’s a thin line between food fraud and food fakery. The main difference is that one is a crime and the other perfectly legit.

Research published in June reveals that both fraud and fakery are on the rise. Food fraud is the one that makes the headlines, because the outcome can be immediate and dramatic.

Herbs and spices are prime targets for fraudsters, because they have complex supply chains that can make traceability difficult and adulteration easy. They also have high financial value and profitability, making them the go-to favourite of crooks.

In 2023 the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention became aware that large numbers of children had high blood levels of lead chromate. Lead is a heavy metal that can severely impact young, developing brains. Early symptoms include abdominal pain, nausea and fatigue. In the long term, lead poisoning can cause learning difficulties and developmental delays.

An investigation found the source of the problem to be lead contamination of the cinnamon added to three popular brands of applesauce products.

The investigation also exposed a weakness in the system: the cinnamon was purchased from an Ecuadorian supplier, but came originally from Sri Lanka. The Ecuadorian supplier was not legally required to test for toxic metals, so didn’t.

At the last count 468 affected people across 44 states had been identified.

The cost to industry of global food fraud is estimated to be between $10-40 billion per year. But we don’t even know the half of it, because only the worst incidents that do the most harm are routinely uncovered.

The situation is just as bad in Europe. The European Commission carried out an analysis of nearly 10,000 samples and estimated that 17% of pepper, 14% of cumin, 11% of saffron and a staggering 48% of oregano may be contaminated.

We don’t know what we’re eating. Even those of us who cook from scratch purchase herbs and spices that may or may not be the real thing.

For others, the entire meal could be a fabrication that only bears a passing resemblance to real food. That’s a reality that leaves us to ponder the profound: how do you define real food? Is plant-based meat, for example, really meat? Or just an industry ideology?

Even though the plant-based meat sector is failing miserably, there are some in the industry displaying grit and determination to make it happen.

Their products only have to look like meat, and taste a bit like meat, to identify as such.

One such company is Millow, in Sweden. Millow has produced what they call meat using just two components: mycelium and oats. How this alchemy works, and what degree of unfathomable processing takes place to achieve it, is a mystery couched in gobbledygook that I don’t comprehend, so I’ll quote directly from the company’s chair, Doctor Staffan Hillberg.

“We start by preparing oats and incorporating mycelium spores. Using our proprietary dry bioreactors, we ferment this blend for less than a day, resulting in a finished texturized mycelium filé with minimal processing involved.”

They almost had me with the filé. So sophistiqué, non?

Non. It’s only got two ingredients and I suspect it has even fewer nutrients.

Millow’s nextdoor neighbours in Norway may be able to help with that. Real meat is a top source of haem iron, and it just so happens that salmon blood from the farmed salmon industry is available and needs off-loading. At the moment, 36,000 tonnes of salmon blood is thrown away every year.

Norway is the world’s biggest supplier of farmed salmon and a company there has found a great way to dispose of salmon blood from the farmed salmon industry.

But first you get your PR team to reframe this opportunity as a solution to the global problem of anaemia, and produce lots of figures concerning the seriousness of the condition, such as there being as many as 800,000 anaemic women and children around the world. Then you propose your industrial waste, sorry, solution, in pill form.

Or you could just sell it to the fake meat industry to fortify the nutritional credientials of their products. (I hope they pay me for that brilliant idea.)

Also in June, and somewhat surprisingly, we learned that an industry survey found that 81% of people ‘attribute significant importance to purchasing clean food products’.

Am I alone in finding this terminology quite nauseating? Sterile products are clean, so real food must be dirty.

Anyway, I’d like to know who these 81% of people are, because in the UK, ultra-processed foods account for 56.8% of people’s total energy intake. In the US, that figure is almost identical at 58%.

I guess it all depends on people’s perception of ‘clean’ food. From what I can tell, it’s powder, because we are doing away with meals and replacing them with powders.

Well some misguided fools are. The plant-based powdered meal replacement market was valued at USD 13.79 billion in 2024, with men aged 35-64 accounting for the lion’s share. This trend is thought due to rising health consciousness and the growing popularity of plant-based & vegan meal replacement options.

Powdered meals are truly the last word in ultra-processed foods. (I may be wrong; God only knows what’s coming down the line). But they are being positioned as healthier than real food, because Plant-based meal replacement products also have fewer calories and saturated fat than traditional meals.

I’m sure they do.

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Henry Kissenger is credited with saying that ‘He who controls the food controls the people’. Whether it was really him that said that is a matter of dispute, but whoever it was, this pearl is spot on.

The quote refers to the global food supply chain, but it also applies to the way we are manipulated by the food industry and by our own governments who support it and involve their captains in drawing up nutrition policy and guidance.

So please don’t outsource your choices to the makers of fraud and fakery; keep your food real and dirty.