Trying to pass one fish off for another, inevitably cheaper, species is not the only way seafood customers are being deliberately cheated.
Neither is the addition of water to frozen fish or shellfish. The latest malpractice concerns the deliberate misleading labelling of manufactured food products which could include seafood.
Food products manufactured in the UK often have the British flag prominently displayed on labels, or phrases such as ‘Baked in Wales’ in large letters. However, it has been revealed that such products often contain ingredients which have been imported from other countries and therefore not subjected to the same quality control or processing regulations.
Food manufacturers questioned about incorporating these ingredients protest they have done nothing illegal. Customers, on the other hand, said they have been led to believe that all the raw material used to make these products was sourced in the UK and were unhappy to find out this might not be the case.
It seems as though the lessons from the horse meat scandal have not been learnt.
Man-made ingredients
What would be even more damaging in customers’ opinions, if they ever found out about it, is that apparently natural ingredients used to manufacture all types of food products, are in fact man-made. The author of a book entitled ‘Swallow This: Serving Up The Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets’, which was published at the end of February, describes what she found at the Food Ingredients exhibition in Germany at the end of 2013.
Joanna Blythman used fake identification to get into the annual trade show, as exhibitors don’t want their wares to be seen by anyone outside the food manufacturing industry. She found few edible products on display and those which were being offered were not what they seemed on first sight.
Cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices were labelled ‘Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone’ – a ‘cyclic ester of gluconic acid’ which prolongs shelf-life. Small pieces of what appeared to be layers of sponge, fruit jelly, cream and chocolate in fact didn’t contain any eggs, butter and cream, but potato protein isolate. This provided ‘the volume, texture and mouthfeel associated with cakes baked with natural ingredients’, but of course at a fraction of the price.
A product called Butter Buds, described as ‘an enzyme-modified encapsulated butter flavour that has as much as 400 times the flavour intensity of butter’ summed up the nature of the exhibition: ‘When technology meets nature, you [the manufacturer] save’.
It may be thought that such ingredients are far removed from the seafood industry, but what about the increasing number of value-added products appearing on the market where the portion of fish or shellfish is combined with a sauce and/or has had a topping added? What ingredients are contained here?
Of course food products must have a list of ingredients on the labels of their packaging, but these labels have been ‘cleaned up’.
Says Joanna Blythman: “Over the past few years, the food industry has embarked on an operation it dubs ‘clean label’ with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives and replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign.”
Seafood customers can be cheated in more ways than one!
