How Science Fights Fake Food Scams

In 2023, Italian and Spanish law enforcement officials busted a counterfeiting ring

and seized tens of thousands of dollars in illegal goods.

But it wasn’t fine art or currency that the criminals were faking.

It was olive oil.

Officials seized over 260,000 liters of bogus extra virgin olive oil

and arrested 11 suspects for cutting it with olive-derived lamp oil.

And this is just one example of food fraud, which is a $40 billion industry that

generally involves replacing a food or ingredient on the label with an inferior one.

You might think you're enjoying a delicacy like, say, bluefin tuna,

when in reality you're eating a cheaper fish that’s been dyed with beet juice.

So, here are some of the world's most counterfeited foods,

and how science can detect the frauds and keep them off the shelves.

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Olive oil fakery is a pretty common practice … and old, too.

According to archaeological evidence, even some ancient Romans

dabbled in some olive oil forgery to turn a quick dollar, or a sestertius.

That’s a joke for all you ancient Roman currency-lovers.

The cardinal rule of food forgery is the product has to taste, feel and smell enough like

the real deal to fool consumers, so there's a process that goes into making counterfeit

olive oil taste like it's hot off the olive press on a sunny Mediterranean hillside.

With olive oil, it usually involves slapping an "Extra Virgin" sticker

on a bottle of inferior oil or cutting real olive oil

with other types of oil and altering its color with chlorophyll or beta carotene.

But not all olive oil heists are busted by a multinational sting operation.

Some use science to separate the real oil from the fake.

Although the olive oil police doesn't yet have an industry standard

for detecting fraudulent oil, a 2019 study compared a variety of different methods

and found DNA analysis is one of the most efficient method of detecting adulterated oil.

DNA-based techniques for sleuthing out olive oil fakes

involve extracting residual genetic material from the oil

and looking for unique molecular markers, or specific DNA sequences, found there.

This method is so specific, it can reliably tell us if the oil is cut with a different type of

vegetable oil, and even how many and which varieties of olive that oil was made from.

Moving on from oil to something that you might wanna cook in it: fish!

There are a lot of fish in the sea, and some of them are mislabeled at your local meat counter.

Fraudulent substitutions in the seafood market

usually involve passing a cheaper fish off as another, more expensive fish.

This can be a huge problem for people with food allergies,

or even those of us trying to watch our mercury intake.