Recently Choice magazine in Australia exposed many case of adulterated oregano on sale in various supermarkets. Food fraud is as old as the hills. I would not say it is rampant but certainly happens on an on going basis.Recently, Parmesan cheese sold at Walmart that was mixed with sawdust . In the 1970s there was scandal about meat substitution rackets in Australia. Fish is frequently mislabeled. What is sold as olive oil is not always 100% olive oil. The entire food business is complex and confusing to understand. It is not just a case of supply and demand, although there is an element of this. In 2009 in the UK, a buyer for Sainsbury's supermarket was caught taking bribes. The fact he was caught was news but what he was doing was not news, it goes on all the time. To be successful in retail catering, you have to be a picky buyer of both ingredients and equipment. Every caterer constantly has company reps trying to fob off rip of products. I cannot think of any aspect of anthology where there is more intellectual dishonesty than dietary fat. Because margarine is far more lucrative on a volume basis than butter, far more money can be spent on promotion than can be done with butter that is made and sold on fairly slim margins. The promotion of low fat diets has more to do with the US Government having 600,000 tons of skimmed milk powder in storage that they do not know what to do with. They buy up skimmed milk powder as a back door subsidy to dairy farmers as there is votes in doing do.
What really gets to me is some of the world's seafood supply is caught by slaves - a lot of it ends up in pet food but some ends up in supermarkets and then on your table. I dont touch seafood anymore unless i know for a fact it is locally sourced. And even with locally sourced you have to find out if it is farm raised (swimming in their own dirty shit water) or wild caught. Plus the radiation from the nuclear reactors in japan is a real danger to the world's seafood supply . Yech. I read an article yesterday about how wal mart brand ice cream sandwiches dont melt after hours in the sun.
i don't know why anyone expects any better from off the wall mart. how else do they suppose they keep their prices down and still make millions selling to poor people? they're trying to start paying people who work for them in the u.s. a little better, but they're not going to care about how their suppliers keep their prices down to them. international corporations are the main reason there even still is slave labor in this age. same thing goes for tainted food. not all of the adulteration is bad for you. the non-meat, up to 49%, in fast food hamburgers, is something called tex-pro, which is short for textured vegetable protein, which is soy flour. as population increases the conflict between food demand and food producing resources increases also, the result being increased prices, increased adulteration, deceptive looking packaging, and the like. climate change is also already affecting supply in a negative way, and likely far more so in the forseeable future. so while it is annoying and legitimately offensive and potentially health threatening, the one thing it is not, is in any way surprising.
