How we're scammed into eating phony food | Hacker News Reader

How we're scammed into eating phony food

nypost.com

439 pointsapsec112458 comments

My family raises grass-fed beef and sadly, this article is spot-on when it comes to the lack of consistency with that product.

We know of farmers who go to cattle auctions and buy the cheapest steers they can find -- often sick and/or emaciated ones coming from farms in financial distress -- then fatten them up on grain while giving them pasture to forage, and sell it as grass-fed at farmer's markets. Just install a pretty girl in a tank top and a Realtree baseball cap at your booth and it all goes off without a hitch.

A good rule of thumb is that 1 acre of grass supports 1 head of herd. When you go to the farmer's market, ask the people selling you beef what their herd size is and how many acres they have under pasture. They should know these numbers cold. They should be ready to talk your ear off about how much of a pain in the ass haying is. They should know how calving is going and how many calves they've lost this year.

It is very possible, easy in fact, to raise animals (or vegetables) in toxic conditions and turn around and sell into farmers' markets. If you want clean food the answer is simple; buy into CSAs with farms run by people you trust. They should be willing to let you come to the farm, walk around, ask questions. Many of the best farms are not certified organic because they smartly use stuff like potash that is cheaper, makes better vegetables, and ecologically way better than organic equivalents when used in the right amounts.

I find it interesting that much of the discussion on this thread has centered on enforced standards. There has never been good enforcement of governmentally-sanctioned standards pertaining to high quality farm produce in the US. Certain private organizations are OK but the people administering them tend to be assholes so that results in a lot of farms (including ours) doing things the right way and selling to people who trust us, without getting formal certification.

> There has never been good enforcement of governmentally-sanctioned standards pertaining to high quality farm produce in the US.

I'm not sure what your intended meaning was here, but don't make the common american mistake of assuming

    if ($americanThing === TERRIBLE) {
        $anywhereThing = TERRIBLE;
    }

Not sure if English is your first language, but the meaning of the sentence you quoted is straightforward, so I'm not sure why you're extrapolating American chauvinism from what I wrote. The scope of my comments is explicitly limited to the US.

FWIW, European enforcement is supposed to be much better but that's outside of my firsthand domain knowledge.

English is indeed my first language, but I don't know where you're from, and many claims along the lines of "X doesn't work" from an American view point, are in my experience, intended as "X doesn't work anywhere" - the scope of the author's experience/knowledge is irrelevant (see: health care, gun control, government in general, banking/finance regulation, etc)

OK, that's all fine and true, but it has nothing to do with what I wrote.

I think you're seeing something you want to see rather than actually seeing what he wrote. None of that has anything to do with what he said.

But the line you quoted includes "in the US". How is it possible to be any more clear? It doesn't even say the standards don't work, it says there aren't any standards in the US.

I don't see where the OP extrapolated anything to outside of the US? Even the sentence you quoted ends with "in the US".

I only buy grass fed beef from Australia, and lamb from New Zealand.

Aussie/NZ meat and dairy is super high quality. Solid choice -- but please do support your local farmer when you can :)

The best steak I've ever had in my life was at Rockpool in Melbourne. It has ruined me. I can't really order steak and enjoy it anywhere else anymore.

Hah, I will have to try it. They carry Wagyu steaks from a notable local Victorian farmer, right?

I dont know actually. Just go and get the grain fed. You wont regret it. Also their mac and cheese is pretty amazing. Really everything is.

I think that you make some really great points around standards here. This whole notion of organic is nice, but the methods deemed "organic" is not always going to produce the best yields or quality of product. I appreciate the awareness that the organic movement has brought to the mainstream but it is not the panacea. Farmers who use environmentally sounds methods that are not "organic" are becoming more of the norm and I am seeing more "clean" food being promoted because I think the organic movement has swung too far to the other side of the pendulum. The answer will be somewhere in the middle.

I grew up on a farm and my dad produced the best beef I've ever eaten year in and year out. Nothing I can buy from my grocery store or even my local butcher can compare. While we were never certified organic we used sensible methods of raising our animals. We knew the farmers we bought our corn from that we use to make the feed. We bailed our own hay, chopped fresh grass, and yes - fed them grain. None of it certified organic but all very clean. Organic standards are such a mess that it doesn't mean a whole lot anyway as many of the food labels in the US.

Anyway, long rant, sorry. Great post. I really hope somebody steps up and can bring a movement forward that lets transparency back into our food markets again. That will do more for the quality of our food that most of the techniques since the worst offenders will be forced to change or go out of business to have the gaps filled with better providers. Keeping the costs down will be the big hurdle.

Not a farmer - but the wife does a fair bit of reading on animal welfare and organic produce.

We've quite often thought of sourcing our meat & poultry from the neighborhood farm as opposed to the stock "organic" that you get at the supermarkets. This article and several I read probably just helps me make that decision faster. I generally use whole foods today - level 4 rating on the chicken & 100% grass fed on my meat.

The farm, while being more expensive, invites you to see how they treat and feed the animals. This is as opposed to hidden practices in the organic & dairy industry where they are so tied to not giving the animals antibiotics that they will rather kill the animals as opposed to treating them for fear of losing their "organic" status.

To your point, my neighborhood farm does not have "organic" certification. They don't want to go through the paperwork. They treat their animals humanely and invite you to view their operation if you so wish. I believe eatwild.com has a list of farms as well.

One major drawback of (if you wish to call it that) is the meat is typically seasonal (as it should be). In the sense - there are specific harvest times when you need to order. You can't just walk in and get a steak or chicken for the evening. That means you need to plan 6 months to an year ahead and invest in a freezer with battery backup.

Eatwild is a great resource, we know them well.

You absolutely need a deep freezer if you want to buy local meat. Most producers, us included, sell frozen cuts only -- managing inventory of non-frozen meat would be way too hectic.

Deep freezers are only like 200 bucks at Costco. Assuming you have space for one in your home, they're also great for making sauces and whatnot in bulk. Also highly recommend a cryovac kit. Cryovac'ed frozen veggies keep more or less forever, and you can also prepare foods (eg, meatballs) at scale on a Sunday afternoon and then just defrost stuff for the rest of the week.

> Assuming you have space for one in your home

When my wife and I were first married we lived in an impossibly small efficiency and still made room for a chest freezer because of the tremendous efficiencies in food storage it provided for - it was something like $200 on sale at Costco. We still have it, 15 years later doing good service for us and payed for itself many times over.

The answer is simple but establishing a relationship and trying to determine trust is way out of reach for most people.

We're trying to end this.

Open Food Facts is an open, collaborative effort to try to make more sense of food and food packagings. A bit like Wikipedia, but for food. Using smartphones, you can scan any food item and get detailed and structured data about what you're about to buy/eat.

If the item is not yet in the database, you can help by taking a picture, so that next time there will be detailed facts.

You can peruse it at http://world.openfoodfacts.org

We have Apps for Android (http://android.openfoodfacts.org) iPhone (http://ios.openfoodfacts.org) Windows Phone (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/openfoodfacts/9nb...)

It's Open Data, so feel free to use the API in your apps and let your users contribute to end this (OdBL licence)

Also, we're looking for volunteer contributors and developers from all over the world to: - translate it to more languages - add food from your fridge - enhance the apps and web version

This is an awesome idea and I have just signed up & contributed already.

Unfortunately, if you care about food, you will be buying almost everything unpackaged, so no barcode to scan.

But indeed, it's a good initiative.

Wait, how does your website take care of this problem? I clicked on a few items, and it just seemed to list the ingredients and nutritional information.

We list labels and claims, and enable calculations like calorie average on a food category, nutritional score calculations, and many other things.

We try to make it easier to read, decypher and compare food info.

Was there a feature you were expecting ?

How does this address the issue of, say, one type of fish being sold as another?

This sounds cool. I'll be in touch.

If I try to use your site to find out which "extra virgin" olive oils are cutting their oil with cheaper canola oil -- the only "packaged" product this article talks about -- I can find no such information.

So how does this site help "end this" practice?

Not quite the same, but earlier this year I was working in Italy for a few months. I went back to the UK last week and it really surprised me how poor the quality of food is there. I don't mean in restaurants, but the actual ingredients you get in supermarkets.

In Italy you can go into even the cheapest supermarkets and get tomatoes that smell like actual tomatoes, where as in the UK they just have no smell. Even tomatoes supposedly grown in Italy were the same (I guess they keep the good ones for themselves).

I went to Italy once and it opened my eyes on how I should have higher standards on what I eat, when I come back home

Edit: english

Eating out in the UK is all about the location. if a restaurant is trendy people will go.

In Spain people go for the food. There are often queues outside restaurants in which the surrounding look terrible (chairs that look like they are taken from a school 40 years ago). Spanish people understand food in a way that most Brits don't.

yes I always look for restaurants that look a bit crappy but full of people. You know the food must be worth it.

Same situation in NYC. Great location, trendy expensive interior decor? Prepare to be disappointed unless the cost is $300pp.

Speaking of Italy, I was a little surprised the article mentioned olive oil, but not basalmic vinegar

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/09/balsamic-vinegar-fr...

On the other hand, the bland stuff doesn't poison you as much with lead.

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/lead-in-vine...

The problem with tomatoes and many other vegetables and fruits is, that they don't grow in the UK so they have to be imported. If they would be imported only when they were as ripe and tasty as the ones you saw in Italy, they would be rotten by the time they arrived in your supermarket in the UK. So, they are harvested when they are not quite ripe. They will ripen a bit more during transport but they will never have the same quality and freshness as the food in Italy.

TL;DR; if you want to have really fresh vegetables, stick to local and seasonal products.

> The problem with tomatoes and many other vegetables and fruits is, that they don't grow in the UK so they have to be imported.

Tomatoes do grow in the UK (my Dad has lots of them in his garden) but only for a short season.

> but only for a short season.

I think that was the point being made, that for the majority of the year (if there are even any tomato farms), all are imported.

They could also come from greenhouses, where they are typically grown on something that resembles cotton balls and nutrients, no ground involved. When I see tomatoes grown like that, I always think of them as tomatoes on life support. Also there are different tomatoes species, I could certainly see one using faster and more water-holding tomatoes.

I quite liked the Dutch tomatoes that we got in Germany. I understand they are grown in greenhouses?

It used to be that germans called Dutch tomatoes 'Wasserbombe'. Although nowadays they are starting to breed for taste over looks again.

You're not the only one: http://www.hortidaily.com/article/20364/Germany-Only-Dutch-t...

Ha, I was about to mention Spanish tomatoes being worse, but decided against it.

Tomatoes are something of a passion of mine.

The problems are exactly what you describe, with ensuring that transport will not ruin the fruit. Another facet is not only that the tomatoes are picked unripe, but also that the varieties that are grown are ones which optimize for being able to withstand long transport times as well as for uniformity. Consumers as a group like uniform, smooth, red-colored tomatoes, and they like them year round. Flavor, aroma, and texture are sacrificed.

I can pick unripe tomatoes from my vine just as they are turning light green. They will ripen in the sun and will have a lot of flavor (although maybe less sweetness). Picking them green is not 100% of the picture. The types of tomatoes grown plays a big part.

If you have a chance, buy some heirloom varieties from a local food market or a farmer.

I don't seem to remember having a great choice in the UK. Either tomatoes or beefsteak tomatoes. Here in Spain you usually have at least 4 varieties in the supermarkets, often many more.

Amber, rosso, beefsteak, plum, cherry, orange rapture, San Marzano, Cheribelle, piccolo, sugardrop, temptation.

Hopefully that's enough for anyone!

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/grocery-categories/Tomatoes_i...

What I'm wondering about is when the tomatoes are picked, can't we artificially let the tomato think it is still on the plant? E.g., by applying nutrients through the stem, and using artificial lighting?

Or why don't we ship the whole plant? :)

> Or why don't we ship the whole plant? :)

Unfortunately all the tomatoes don't come out at the same time.

> Or why don't we ship the whole plant? :)

Ship the whole plant...and then send it back to grow more tomatoes? I'm not sure about production-scale tomato farming, but in my garden, the same tomato plant will continue to grow fruit, and you don't want to uproot it just for the fruit currently on it.

Okay I didn't know that.

But surely, there will be some customers willing to pay for ripe "Italian" tomatoes, I suppose (?)

I suppose so. The next question is economics: Are there enough customers that a company could import the plants and be able to offer them for a price the customers want to pay and that gives them enough profit to make it worthwhile? If no one's doing that and there's a sufficient market, that sounds like a good new business to look into.

Heirloom varieties have unique characteristics which vary widely, and are definitely more difficult to grow than the mainstream hybrids (as well as often lower yielding per square meter). People who grow good ones should be rewarded, they're worth seeking out.

What is this sun you speak of? /UK

As someone who came from Poland to the UK, I was amazed by the quality of the ingredients in the UK. Tomatoes that smell like actual tomatoes, beautiful, tasty, sweet and crunchy carrots, onions, wealth and abundance of any fruit you can imagine. Cherries and watermelon in January?! What's this madness?!

My point is - it all depends on your perspective. To me, quality and variety of ingredients available in the UK is just stunning. To you, it's poorer than italy. Depends how you look at it.

You must have bought your vegetables in a big supermarket. Much better quality off small grocers and open air markets.

Another scam is extra virgin olive oil. Almost all of the ev-olive oils that you buy at supermarkets in the US are fake [0]. It's basically lower-grade olive or vegetable oil with some added green chlorophyl for color. UK supermarkets aren't faring much better [1]. It's all due to mafia control of the oil markets in Italy. 60 Minutes did a report on it recently and they even tested oils for fakes [2]. It's extremely difficult to tell if your ev-olive oil is fake without chromatography/spectroscopy equipment but some people try [3].

[0] http://time.com/money/4326354/fake-olive-oil-food-fraud/

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/11988...

[2] http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/mafia-olive-oi...

[3] http://www.foodrenegade.com/how-tell-if-your-olive-oil-fake/

What's the cheapest way to get guaranteed-real EV olive oil? Are there known-good brands (perhaps ones produced entirely outside of Italy?)

Or, if you cared about "authentic Italian" olive oil, perhaps for personal or restaurant use (i.e. not for resale): how much would it cost (in the US) to just buy bulk Italian olives, and then press them yourself?

I buy Greek olive oil. I didn't do any serious research, but it tastes much better than Italian or Spanish counterparts bought locally. I've been to Greece and what I tasted there, wasn't much different from what I buy back home, so I suppose it's a real deal.

EDIT: I live in Europe, so it might be different in USA.

Greece grows a lot of olives, but lacks the infrastructure to process and bottle it into oil (on a large scale)[1]. They end up selling much of it to Italy. Maybe Italy uses different techniques than Greece does? I've tried to check the bottles of Italian olive oil and have had a hard time figuring out where exactly the olives were sourced.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/07/16/423605233/greeces-lost-olive-o...

I know this is crazy, but you can taste it :-) Of course, most people don't know what olive oil should taste like, but it really has a wide flavour range. Buy a selection of small bottles and simply taste them (possibly with some nice bread and a little salt if you don't like drinking oil straight up).

I highly recommend trying olive oil from other countries as well. It's really an eye opener. Once you get some experience it's pretty easy to spot good olive oil. It's a bit like beer. Some people love American lite beer (and more power to them), but if you compare an all malt lager with a single variety noble hop to a light beer with 30% rice/corn and a mishmash of 8 nondescript hops (or isomerised hop extract) it doesn't require a discerning palette to detect the difference.

Interestingly, I have been wondering for about 10 years now about how ridiculously cheap balsamic vinegar has shown up in the super market. Buy a bottle of 30 year old balsamico and compare it to the cheap stuff and I suspect you will wonder (like me), "Is this really balsamic vinegar???"

Yeah it's like going to Greece and eat a ripe cucumber. Even in italy they sell watery, acidic stuff that would never comare to the real thing. I've never eaten one again anywhere else in the world.

To be fair, most contries have good cucumbers, if you buy them in season. The last part is the important part.

It isn't. It's a sugary contraption that makes your salad sweet and brownish, which is attractive to the eye.

Get a locally produced oil marked extra virgin. My family produces EVOO in small batches and the difference betwee imported and fresh is marked.

Nobody would ever need specialised equipment to tell them apart, it would be like eating butter instead of margarine.

In the U.S., Californian olive oils are your best bet. Otherwise, Costco Kirkland Signature olive oil (which is now Greek oil [1]) is another good choice.

Outside of Italy, it's difficult to find Italian olive oils that are not blended. The 2014 and 2015 harvest seasons have been terrible due a bacterial blight [2] that crippled many olive farms in Southern Italy.

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/business/retail/costco-embraces-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylella_fastidiosa

https://www.cooc.com

Go Spanish, they are usually cheaper as they aren't as famous as the Italian, but the quality is the same or even better, as they don't have the strange shenanigans the Italians have with the Mafia. An awful lot of the Italian oil sold outside of Italy is from Spain, anyway [1].

[1]http://www.economist.com/news/business/21600996-government-f....

If you're in California, try the olive oil (I prefer the italian style) from Ranch Olivos, literally grown in Los Olivos :) Amazing, product, and if you go there yourself you can buy it from the owner, standing under a canopy on his ranch, next to the olive trees. http://www.ranchoolivos.com

Try spanish olive oil. I'm spanish, so I probably have a bias. You can have pretty decent olive oil for less than 4 euros / litre here so olive oil is the only oil I use.

If you buy oil bottled in Spain look for the "extra virgin olive oil" label: Aceite de oliva virgen extra. We are pretty serious with labeling around here, so you won't be fooled.

There are varieties like picual, hojiblanca, arbequina or cornicabra which are different in color and taste, and are named after the olives they are made from.

4 euros per liter is crazy. In the US, even the cheapest crappy olive oil is $20/liter

In Spain 20 euros buys you a liter of the best specialty extra virgin olive oil. This is why good olive oil poured over a toast covered with pureed tomatoes is such a popular breakfast.

Trader Joe's has it for $6.99-9.99, though after reading this article, I'd like to hear some confirmation on its quality.

Check out Costco. Their brand is not only cheap, but one of the few that are real. The price went up since 2010, but it is still around $10/l.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/5-things-you-should-buy-at-costc...

The articles I've read (your's included) explicitly pointed out Costco's Organic olive oil. Costco also sells a non-Organic version that's cheaper but I haven't seen anyone say either way if it's actually EVOO.

FWIW, having bought a bottle of the non-organic EVOO at Costco today, I can say it is labeled as if it is real.

Get local oil.

I know that here in New Zealand, NZ produced olive oil is actually made from olives. I could even drive up to the olive farm (plantation? orchard?) and have a look myself to make sure.

So I guess getting New Zealand oil would work in the USA as well, if you could find any. It's a bit of a cottage industry here, so I don't think much makes its way overseas.

Try Australian olive oil. There was a tax scam some years ago here which resulted in stacks of olive oil plantations, so now australian olive oil should be a good price over there I'd imagine.

Costco?

>It's difficult to tell if your ev-olive oil is fake without chromatography/spectroscopy equipment but some people try

Sorry if I'm asking something obvious, but if it's that difficult to tell, what is the downside of using a fake?

Probably the higher "extra virgin" prices?

>. It's basically lower-grade olive or vegetable oil with some added green chlorophyl for color.

could have totally different nutrition contents than you think you are getting. you could think you are getting nice healthy fats from a natural source. instead you're getting crappy vegetable oil and coloring.

Surely that would show up in chromatography tests.

Yes, but most oils are not subject to that level of testing.

> Surely that would show up in chromatography tests.

Sure, the upthread comment is that it is hard to detect short of chromatography or similar lab testing, not that it is hard to detect with chromatography.

Contrary to that article, and having had some very nice Texas and California EV olive oils that I assume are "the real thing"... I think there is a very definitive taste difference between extra virgin olive oil and straight regular olive oil (there's a fruity / grassy note that is missing from the later).

I would buy that it might be difficult to detect a product that is only somewhat cut. I also buy that perhaps some people just can't taste the difference at all. (One personal note: I can detect the difference between genuine maple syrup and the corn syrup variety... but my wife cannot.)

For some applications, I doubt that these extra notes are worth it. Sometimes you don't really need the expensive stuff. One example: Most "balsamic vinegar" is not Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale. But the later would be pretty wasteful as a salad dressing.

Does anyone have any idea how this situation is in the EU?

Much better. You get what you buy.

Really?

An article from 2015 (Switzerland, German)[0]: It is said that a litre of good extra vergine olive oil has to cost Fr. 20 a litre or more to have a chance to get real extra vergine. I stopped buying olive oil and switched to Swiss canola oil.

[0]: http://www.nzz.ch/nzzas/nzz-am-sonntag/ein-schmieriges-gesch...

This is true and well documented on the website Truth in Olive Oil, run by Tom Mueller who also wrote a well respected book debunking olive oil production.

There's a great guide to buy olive oil on the site here: http://www.truthinoliveoil.com/great-oil/how-to-buy-great-ol...

Sigona's Market at Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, CA has an olive oil bar. They offer the best, pure varieties harvested from different regions around the world including California. California oils are harvested and pressed in the fall, so I think they become available in spring-summer. In the fall and winter you can get southern hemisphere oils that are fresher. Sigona's keeps the olive oil in barrels and only bottles at the last minute so it's as fresh as possible.

The Olive Press at Jacuzzi Vineyards in Sonoma is the one place I know that is pressing their own oil and you can bottle it right when it's freshest. http://www.jacuzziwines.com/theolivepress

I got these two places from the Truth in Olive Oil, so for others in US you should be able to check on the site to see what places near you have high quality olive oil.

I had the same effect, moving to japan. It's insane how much better the food is here, compared to Australia.

what food is better in Japan (part form sushi)? curious ozzy.

As a pizza wannabe-snob, I thought their Neapolitan pizza was outstanding (ingredients, dough, charring) pretty much everywhere I went. (Similar to fancy pizza in the US).

Also their croissants were fabulous (almost on par to the ones I got in Paris) and compared to the mostly crap (unless you go to a passionate bakery) you get in the US.

Sorry I've been busy, havnt had a chance to respond.

In general I find it much easier to access fresh, healthy food here (711 has fresh sandwiches and onigiri every day, as do all convenience stores).

I find the culture is more to healthy food, we will go out and more often than not eat thinks like claybpot or shabushabu (both have lots of vegetables, and very few additives or flavour enhancers).

Soft drink isn't as popular, ill more often see someone drinking brown or green tea fr a vending machine, than a coke or other sugary drink.

As for specific foods. . . I wouldn't know where to start, aside from a certain fermented bean(sorry the name escapes me at the moment), I'm in love with everything food wise here.

The summer festivals have some amazing noodles, chicken skewers and more.

I find as an ex chef the flavours are a lot more subtle(when it comes to overpowering the natural flavour of the ingredient), so the focus there is a nice surprise for me.

I was shocked by the food in UK supermarkets. Pricey and poor quality. But in the country greengrocers had great fresh produce much cheaper than the supermarkets. Bewildering.

Issue of scaling - if you pick completely green tomatoes, you can transport and abuse them how you want - they are hard and unlikely to be damaged. Somebody has to pay off all the managers too, the transport costs etc. The market is pretty locked down too - in some countries you have market stalls that sell produce - usually those are very good at driving the quality up - but usually highly restricted/regulated :(

It's funny if you think if it. Economy of scale used to be delivering better product for cheaper.

Now it delivers worse product for more money, but in such fashion that you can't escape.

It seems that here, some regulations should put an end to their fairy tale.

During the 45 weeks of the year in which fresh tomatos taste like water I actually very much prefer canned, Italian tomatos (Pelati), which taste much better than out of season tomatos and can be had for a song.

About 10 years ago I was in Italy. Stopped for a quick meal at a kiosk set up in the middle of the airport. The caprese sandwich I got was totally amazing. The flavors! From a kiosk in an airport! Such a simple thing but so, so good. The other meals I had over the week were also very good. There's something to be said for food purity laws: when you can't add all sorts of crap you have to focus on the quality of what you have, and it makes a huge difference.

According to https://www.teekampagne.de/en/tea/darjeeling-tea/only-accept... the Tea Board of India estimates that about 40000 tons of Darjeeling are sold all over the world.

But only 10000 tons of tea are produced in Darjeeling.

I am not certain about this, but I think Sri Lanka is one of the largest exporters of Darjeeling Tea.

It cannot be, that's the point.

If Sri Lanka exports tea as "Darjeeling", it's automatically fake.

Indeed, it has a GI tag meaning it has to be grown in a specific location to be called Darjeeling. Like Champagne, Parma ham, etc.

Surely, it is just the name that is different. If we can call the tea leaves by their botanical name, would that make it more correct?

It is, indeed, just the name. But it's also only the name that means I know what Pepsi is.

You can find products sold in European supermarkets labelled, for example, as "Stilton-style blue cheese". Or "Cola drink".

Or any other generic name, like sparkling wine vs. Champegne.

Sure, just like how maize grown outside of the Americas is 'fake' and all of those tomatoes that posters upthread have been raving about are 'fake'. There is a difference between a varietal which a region was initially known for (and which early trading used as a tag for that varietal) and something which can at least make a minor claim regarding the region producing some flavour component which makes it unique.

Are all French wines 'fake' since the rootstock all came over from the US? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight]

It's not fake tea, it's fake darjeeling as darjeeling, just like champagne denotes an area where the crops were grown, not where the crops originated.

Darjeeling is a region in India. So darjeeling tea is like champagne in that if it isn't from that region it isn't actually Darjeeling.

But is tea distinguished by its terroir (like wine), or is it just a matter of cultivars (like bananas)? I.e. is Sri Lankan "Darjeeling" blind-taste-test-equivalent to Darjeeling from Darjeeling?

I can support a concept of "growing regions" for foods where the growing region matters; but otherwise, it's just bald monopolism.

It's brand, simply. If you produce Coca Cola in a pepsi factory, does it matter ?

The fact is, for many of these products, formal brand recognition did not exist back when the production tradition started. Therefore, when you buy Gouda, or Roquefort, or Bordeaux wine, you buy with the understanding that you're buying the real deal, but there's no brand per se. With the development of mass consumption and international trade, Europe has started protecting these products with protected origin recognition.

On the other hand, the US has much more brand protection on their strong exports, because they emerged much later. And consequently, they have laws very protective of brands, but don't recognize Europe's protected goods. You see it as natural because you were raised in that culture, but for many european people, US food practices would be considered similar to accepting fake iphones, mcD's or Coca-Cola.

Within the framework of international trade agreements, this becomes a source of problems, ofc ; because accepting one side's or the other's definition would mean culling the opposite industry.

Brands and growing regions are both "natural kinds", insofar as they're both things you would expect to evolve from many businesses selling a (complex) commodity from the same region, sometimes competing, sometimes colluding. They both make sense, and can both be used together. But they shouldn't be conflated.

Brands are organizational signifiers. They speak of privately-held organizational knowledge and experience brought-to-bear.

A growing region, meanwhile, is a signifier for natural local factors of the region that defy replication. Anyone operating an organization in that region will reap some of the benefits of that region; even Starbucks coffee beans, if grown in Brazil, would contain some Brazilian terroir.

IP rights protect brands, because brands are inherently rivalrous things that can be bought and protected at the organizational level, like other IP rights. IP rights do not protect growing regions, because growing regions are not inherently rivalrous; anyone can "sneak into" the appropriate region (buying up land previously used for non-growing purposes, etc.) and found a new organization with a claim to the growing region.

But sometimes, "growing regions" are also (secretly) the results of colluding organizations of humans, rather than natural factors. Champagne isn't bubbly because of anything the Champagne area of France does to it. It's a long-standing agreement between the organizations that operate in the region to make it that way.

And that is a brand. But it's a brand that exists on the "wrong level", so to speak; it's a brand held in a sort of commons that any organization is free to enter. Nobody has stewardship over such a brand.

It makes perfect sense for Champagne to be a brand—but it makes no sense for Champagne the growing region to be the brand. It would be much more sensible to have the brand exist at the human level: to call together all the organizations that are currently dubbed "Champagne growers", and tell them that they now own equity stakes in a trust that in turn owns the IP rights to the trademark "champagne."

---

> US food practices would be considered similar to accepting fake iphones, mcD's or Coca-Cola

Ah, but I would accept those things! If, and only if, they were structurally identical to the real ones.

"Ghost shift" products[1] are indistinguishable from the real thing—because they are the real thing. They're produced in the same factories, by the same people, with the same raw inputs. It's just that they're not being produced toward the revenue of the contracted client who submitted the production spec. So they're "knock-offs." But they're structurally identical.

I think most people, if told that they could either buy an iPhone; or buy a "myPhone" that's made of all the same components in the same layout with the same tolerances as a real iPhonee (and, as such, runs iOS just fine), but for $200 less... would leap to buy the "myPhone." Everyone who wasn't, in fact, paying a premium for the Veblen-good nature of an expensive-product-as-status-symbol, would take the myPhone.

"Knock-off" has a negative connotation because many things can't be knocked off perfectly. But many other things can. The whole issue with media piracy is the fact that digital media can be knocked off perfectly. Many inorganic products (Coca-Cola) can be spectroscopically picked apart and cloned (though likely using an original, white-box-engineered process) to tolerances where nobody can discern the two. And organic products often have enough intra-batch variation that even with identical cultivars, differences in terroir between two crops grown half-way across the world from one-another can't be picked out from the noise of the inherent peculiarities of each individual specimen.

Growing regions are important precisely in the cases where knock-offs of things from that region won't have the qualities that the "authentic" things from that region have. That's the situation where knowing the growing region of the thing gives you useful information to influence your purchase. Otherwise, growing regions are just misbehaving, wrong-level brands—and leaky abstractions, as can be seen in the Italian olive-oil example.

[1] http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...

---

And one more thought:

Growing regions are becoming outmoded, displaced by brands. Have you tried to buy an apple lately? There are now[2] a thousand "varieties" of apple, different at every store—because those "varieties" are now simply the brands of apple-growers, instead of cultivars of apple or even growing regions for apples.

[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episo...

> And that is a brand. But it's a brand that exists on the "wrong level", so to speak; it's a brand held in a sort of commons that any organization is free to enter. Nobody has stewardship over such a brand.

How is that a "wrong level" ? You're creating a replicability issue to strip part of the products of their rights to brand recognition.

> I think most people, if told that they could either buy an iPhone; or buy a "myPhone"

That would be a new brand, though. The question is whether this new myPhone producer be able to market his products under the brand iPhones. Because that's what you're advocating if you're offering to let people produce "champagne" everywhere, for instance. As a matter of fact, when you say :

> Brands and growing regions are both "natural kinds", insofar as they're both things you would expect to evolve from many businesses selling a (complex) commodity from the same region

I feel you're misled. Growing region recognition is mostly about grandfathering older products, which emerged in an environment where branding was irrelevant, into modern business practices. You don't see it as much now, because everyone brands their products nowadays (e.g. you don't see Silicon Valley software, or Rust Belt autos).

I'd say, with no evidence to back me up whatsoever, that yes, tea is distinguished by its terroir.

Basically any agricultural product, especially more delicate products, have a terroir. Hops are a very good example. NZ cascade is completely different from American cascade, despite being literally the same cultivar.

I don't know how much tea flavor is from terroir. With wine, studies have debunked that concept, much to the chagrin of the French. However, naming food and drink after the region from which it originates is not monopolism, but proper labeling.

Calling sparkling wine from California Champagne is false advertising, as is calling tea from Sri Lanka Darjeeling. The name is describes where the product came from. No one is saying you can not make an identical product elsewhere, but don't claim it comes from the place it does not come from.

What if people in Romania started producing "California Zinfandel", the Chinese were selling "Texas Black Angus", or a poplar brand of "Milwaukee Cheddar" was made in southern Mexico. I think it would be at best plain weird, and at worst grossly misleading.

Yes, it is. Ignore these other people. Darjeeling in particular has a subtle sweet white grape flavor that you will taste if it is real. Not all teas have a distinct terroir but Darjeeling in particular definitely does.

> but otherwise, it's just bald monopolism.

Since when does a "mark" create a monopoly? Who would stop Sri Lanka from selling the same species of tea?

Pretty much only the EU has this attitude toward food names, and only selectively.

That's why EU people are protesting against TTIP. We're worried that the lower standards that are common in USA, will prevail, and any resistance will be trampled in private arbitrage courts.

Sorry, but that doesn't make sense to me, why would the quality of food there decrease?

Because in the EU there are laws that say that if something is labeled as virgin olive oil, it has to be olive oil and nothing else. Greek Yoghurt has to be made in Greece and nowhere else. Lobster meat has to be lobster meat, and Kobe beef absolutely has to be Kobe beef. TTIP basically(in extreme simplification) says that if something is allowed in US it should be allowed in any other signatory country - which would obviously lower our standards as they are much higher than those in US.

This is a great argument to whip people into a frenzy, but it's a little bit of a straw man. The US has labeling laws as well - it's not that the government doesn't care, it's that they're nearly impossible to enforce at scale. Without genetic analysis of literally every shipment, how is a regulatory authority to know what's what if the paperwork is otherwise "in order?"

If you can't increase the number of tests, increase the punishment and let it affect the entire chain from supermarket to producer. You want being found guilty of a violation to be a nightmare scenario that will end people's careers and entire companies.

Look, as somebody that's lived many years in Europe and in US, the situation is incomparable. I don't know why - either you have crappy laws, or you have crappy enforcement. If you read the article, it claims both. The FDA has super-low requirements to do anything - and manages to do even less than required to.

The european market is significantly bigger than US one (380m people) but manages to have much better labeling standards.

The reality, as in so many other areas with regard to the US, is crappy enforcement. If inspection authority was enforced at the state level (while still being funded by the federal government) I suspect you'd see much greater results.

EU does enforce food safety and labeling laws quite well. That might be because every EU country has its own FDA equivalent that provisions much smaller market. Sure, incidents happen, but fake food is nowhere such widespread in EU than USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal

As I said - incidents happen. And if the last scandal you have found is dated back to 2013, that only confirms my point.

Sorry, I thought you were claiming that fake food was not widespread. ("because every EU country has its own FDA equivalent that provisions much smaller market")

> if the last scandal you have found is dated back to 2013, that only confirms my point.

Words fail me at your reasoning. How closely do you think I follow foreign food purity issues?

Well if you don't follow foreign food purity issues (closely) then, please, try to comment a little bit more humble. Maybe asking instead of definitive statements?

The point is, which many commenters seem to be missing, is UK Trading Standards and equivalent EU bodies regularly test to see that foods meet claimed ingredients and are not adulterated. Prosecutions, sanctions and bans are frequent. The periodic outrages are relatively rare and become front page news.

If you claim on the label that your product is 52% tuna it can be (and frequently is) randomly tested and if it's not tuna, or 52% you can be open to prosecution.

By the sounds of the US system you're probably eating horse regularly, but no one ever tests to establish this.

In the case of the UK, austerity has resulted in Trading Standards being stretched to breaking point or beyond as funding has sunk way below actual need. Presumably the Tories will soon point to this as proof that a state owned system cannot work so let's privatise it.

Brexit leaves me deeply concerned the UK will resemble the US more.

also all EU producers ferociously compete with each other and won't esitate to force the local health authority to inspect foreign products at the slightest hint

Speculating, I wonder if there's the echoes of an historical effect too: frontier peoples make do with whatever food they can get, in contrast many regions in Europe have centuries old traditions requiring very specific treatments of food items; does USA have that sir of tradition (the only one I know of is putting off-milk flavour in chocolate).

In USA you need not label GMO food as GMO. [1] Because "The FDA has determined that the fish is as safe and nutritious as nongenetically modified fish, and will therefore not require the company or retailers to label the fish as genetically engineered."

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/19/fda-approves-genetically-modi...

Which is fine (I say as European). Requiring GMO labeling is is about as sensible as requiring DHMO labeling - it's scaremongering not based on science.

No, it is not fine with me. I have to have ability to make informed decision.

While I tend to agree that the actual food is probably safe , there are several valid ideological justifications for such labeling. I would also support seed variety labeling wherever it is reasomably practical, as consumer choice can only be choice if fact are available. The history should also have taught us that if the industry tries to avoid labeling, they should generally be required labeling. They are likely not afraid of ink expenditures, rather they want to sell me one thing and tell me it is something slightly different, for profit.

Perhaps I choose not to buy GMO's because I find the notion of patenting the mechanics of life philosophically troubling.

We're not all a bunch of anti-science luddites, you know.

If you think only GMO varieties are patented, you are very ill informed. For example, google 'BASF clearfield'.

Patenting mechanics of life and GMO are two separate issues not really connected to each other. There's plenty of plant development, for instance, that is covered by patents or patent-like protections, even if it's not GMO in the sense you talk about.

(It's often GMO in the sense "let's take a bunch of seeds, expose them to radiation and carcinogens, and experiment with whatever comes out.)

In some countries (e.g. mine), these rights are not called "patent" but are not substantially different from what they are where the name is patent.

> Patenting mechanics of life and GMO are two separate issues not really connected to each other. There's plenty of plant development, for instance, that is covered by patents or patent-like protections, even if it's not GMO in the sense you talk about.

You can maybe get a patent for the process, but can you get a patent for the resulting lifeform or its individual genes? My understanding is that you can not, but if that's wrong I'd love to be corrected.

I agree that gene patents and whether to use GMO manufacturing are two different issues, but given that all of the GMO companies seem to be grabbing patents on their products, not buying GMO products seems like a good way to not support these practices. Especially since we already have GMO labeling in some places, whereas patent-information markings are very unlikely to ever be implemented.

>...can you get a patent for the resulting lifeform or its individual genes? My understanding is that you can not, but if that's wrong I'd love to be corrected.

Yes, you can get a patent. There are even organisations that aspire to patent organic plant variants that obviously aren't GMO. [0]

>given that all of the GMO companies seem to be grabbing patents on their products

No, not all are. First of all, not all developers of GMO technology are even companies - they may be universities or government agencies, for instance [1]. The widespread and misguided opposition to GMO technology works to the benefit for large companies (like Monsanto), though, because they have the resources to hire enough lawyers to manage the process where it matters.

Secondly, there's nothing "grabbing" about filing for patents or equivalent IPRs for plant variants; it's what you need to do to protect your variant even when you plan to release it into public domain (so that a malicious party would not claim them).

[0] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/08/07/challengin...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

The public is not made only/mainly of science-challenged people as you're subtly implying.

There are other reasonable motivations for labeling GMO, ie. political and environmental (not all environmental reasons are "GMO is frankenstein food").

Moreover, the GMO scaremongering will last, as any other fad, for a limited amount of time. The part of public who rejects GMO for shallow (no) reasons, will quickly forget and move one to be scared of something else.

I'm not so sure. People are still sure that MSG will slowly kill them, when it's actually been proven to be 100% harmless as far as we know. You still see "No MSG" labels on tons of food.

Mandatory labeling gives the impression that it's relevant information. Whether your food is GMO is totally without consequence. I don't see why the government should burden and mislead the rest of us so you can more easily wage your political campaign from the comfort of your local Whole Foods.

I'd actually be fine with mandatory labeling if it said something like "GMO. Totally harmless but the food hipsters wouldn't shut up until we forced everyone to read this stupid label."

If anything, GMO products should be be much safer than non-GMO, because they have gone through a much stricter approval process.

Surely the thousands of years of human civilizations consuming non-GMO products should count as a fairly strict approval process?

A vast majority of what you eat has been developed, not thousands of years ago, but some years or decades ago, using processes such as induced mutagenesis and selection. The variance in genome produced by GMO technology is very small compared to the changes in developed plants, which is not researched at all prior to feeding to humans.

For example, the Honeycrisp apple was created in 1960, not thousands of years ago. Incidentally, it was also patented (in 1988, expired in 2008).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycrisp

The scientific literature doesn't show MSG to be completely harmless. Some people definitely have negative reactions it and other sources of free glutamates.

Eg http://www.livescience.com/47931-msg-not-safe-for-everyone.h...

Copying from Wikipedia:

>"Excitotoxicity is the pathological process by which nerve cells are damaged or killed by excessive stimulation by neurotransmitters such as glutamate and similar substances." //

Is excitotoxicity of glutamates a myth, it must be if the claim that 'MSG is completely harmless' is true.

> Some people definitely have negative reactions it and other sources of free glutamates.

And some people have an allergy to water. I think GP meant "harmless" as referring to general population. There are always people who are allergic or otherwise harmed by things that are harmless to the 99.99% of humanity. Additional labeling might be justified if their number grows beyond a rounding error. And that still doesn't change the fact that unless you're the confirmed rare case for which X is harmful, you have no reason to fear it or to believe (and spread) misconceptions about it.

Funny that you quote from the excitotoxicity article but not the MSG article, which lists study after study proving that MSG in food is harmless. All reports of negative effects are anecdotal and unsubstantiated. This is for one of the most widely consumed chemicals in the world.

>study after study proving that MSG in food is harmless //

The side issue is objective truth here. So, you're telling me that no one has ever been harmed by consuming normal quantities of MSG? That's what "proven harmless" means.

It only requires one study to show some link between MSG and negative health effects to make it rational to seek that information, something like this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27312658 maybe, suggesting neuronal destruction (using mice as a model). It's not proof.

For example, from the Wikipedia article on "Glutamate flavoring":

>"At a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 1990, the delegates had a split opinion on the issues related to neurotoxic effects from excitotoxic amino acids found in some additives such as monosodium glutamate."

If neuroscience experts don't have consensus, that would be a reason to avoid "additives such as MSG", no?

I still think that if we're going to do this democracy thing that people who want "no MSG" labels ['no free glutamate' would probably be more useful] should get them regardless of my view of their scientific basis.

Personally MSG doesn't really bother me, I don't like the "enhanced" taste with foods that are rich in it but a little seems fine. I do get headache and bloatedness after having the UK version of Chinese Restaurant food, seemingly more so than with other food types, but I'm pretty sure that's just over-eating [perhaps the enhanced flavour encourages it?].

This might not be obvious but the primary problem with GMO is that as a farmer you have to buy (in FSF terms) proprietary seeds and fertilizers. After the first harvest the the soil has been "contaminated" with GMO seeds. Even if you stop using the GMO seeds immediately you can still be sued by the seed manufacturer.

it's actually been proven to be 100% harmless as far as we know

As was smoking, and sugar, and thalidomide. What about what we don't know yet?

BTW there seems to be a development for some more sensible marking of GM foods beyond the GMO/non-GMO labeling which really tells you nothing of value.

The idea with this is that you put much more information available:

http://www.marklynas.org/2016/07/time-compromise-gmo-labelli...

> People are still sure that MSG will slowly kill them, when it's actually been proven to be 100% harmless as far as we know. You still see "No MSG" labels on tons of food.

"People" is sure of that... and so what? Food with additives sell. Have a walk in the street and observe what's the volume of organic (I'm using "additive-free-as-possible" for comparison purposes) food sold against "regular" one.

Talking at home about good intentions, irrational fears and so on translates little to purchasing habits. I actually heard only two people in my life talking about MSG, and only one is the "food hipster" who doesn't buy.

Of course, cases like associating skulls and crossbones with microwave ovens are an entirely different story.

> so you can more easily wage your political campaign from the comfort of your local Whole Foods.

I'm not sure if you're intentionally disingenuous here; the supermarket (generalizing, purchasing of goods) is actually the least comfortable place where to wage political campaigns, because it's the place where one puts the money where the mouth is if he really believes in his ideas, and doing so is expen$ive.

> Totally harmless but the food hipsters wouldn't shut up until we forced everyone to read this stupid label.

Let me make sure I understand you correctly. In the jar of yogurt I have in front of me, whose main readable are is ~250 cm², an OGM writing would take an estimated 0.8 cm² (it would necessarily follow the typical guidelines of mandatory warnings), and it would also be in a part which has no immediate visibility. I therefore exclude that as "forcing everyone to read". I also extremely rarely see advertisements in the supermarkets with warnings - this would cannibalize a part of their own offer.

Can you explain who and how would exactly "force" the public to read such warnings?

Note that of course some food would, for marketing purposes, shovel "GMO free" in shiny colours. That's advertisement, it's not government-regulated mandatory warning.

Do you think you should get to dictate to others what food they eat?

It doesn't matter if you think how people choose their food is not sensible, what matters for GMO labeling is whether you think they should be allowed to choose.

Don't know what you mean by DHMO in this context, are you trying to make a joke about water? FWIW we have labeling for food dosed with water, eg bacon, such labeling is perfectly proper.

The problem isn't with labels per se. Sure, informed choice is best and all. But people are asking for GMO labels not because of a need to exercise informed choice - the campaigning is done because of irrational fears of GMO. Call it asking for an OK-ish thing for very wrong reasons.

And DHMO in this context means the GMO fear makes about as much sense as DHMO fear. People are afraid because it sounds "chemically".

You're assuming and generalizing what people think based on nothing but your own prejudice. Maybe GMOs pose no risk (even though the definition of 'GMO' is so vague that it is impossible to be so generally affirmative), but what if I want to eat traditional varieties, what if I don't want to support multinational companies which ruin the lives of small farmers around the world, don't I have a right to do so ? Should that right be taken away from me because you don't think personally it is something worthy of concern ?

>the campaigning is done because of irrational fears of GMO.

But not allowing be to have the data to make a choice because a certain undefined cadre of society considers that choice to be irrational seems exceedingly likely to have a chilling effect.

So now you can't label your goods as phthalate-free because someone somewhere decided, perhaps with the help of a plastics manufacturer (yes I'm cynical), that "there's no rational reason to avoid them"?

This prevents people from being more conservative with risk than the authority who decides we're not allowed to have that information; yes it also means people can make a decision that you wouldn't but we all have the information available.

If you the GMO products are consistently 15% cheaper (thanks to better yields and lower waste they are promising) and routinely labeled organic (thanks to the promised reduction in pesticides requirements), consumers will be attracted to it.

If GMOs have nothing to offer, why would the consumer want them, harmful or not?

> and routinely labeled organic (thanks to the promised reduction in pesticides requirements)

Except they won't be, because "organic" doesn't involve less pesticides - it often involves more pesticides but of a more "natural" flavour. It may have started from the desire of some consumers to buy food that's made locally and with a more pre-industrial feel to it (because they believe it's healthier), but now it's just a way to milk people who have strong opinions about food.

Are you talking about USA labelling here?

In the EU (as we still are in the UK for the moment) this http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/organic/eu-policy/eu-legisla... is the situation with food labelled "Organic". It's certainly not about being pre-industrial, it's about being sustainable and cautious with natural resources and health.

Okay, thank you. I'll have to read a summary of the thing so that I know more.

> Greek Yoghurt has to be made in Greece and nowhere else.

This is a really stupid regulation though. It's just protectionism for Greece, like the regulation that you can't call it "champagne" unless the grapes were grown in Champagne, France. There is no reason to expect this; consider Cheddar cheese, Peking duck, French toast, and Hamburgers.

I don't see it as stupid at all! To me, Greek Yoghurt has to come from greece, that's what I expect as a customer. Any non-Greek Greek yoghurt is simply labeled as "Greek-style Yoghurt" and that's easy enough, when I go to the shop I know exactly what I'm getting.

> To me, Greek Yoghurt has to come from greece, that's what I expect as a customer.

Why do you expect that? It can't be based on the name, since virtually all foods with an origin name were not actually made there. I'm pretty sure you don't expect Cheddar cheese to have come from Cheddar? Would you accept ordinary yoghurt that was imported from Greece being sold as "Greek Yoghurt"?

If I imported Camembert cheese from Cheddar, it would still be Camembert. If I imported Cheddar cheese from Hong Kong, it would be Cheddar. French toast sold at a Denny's in New Mexico was made in New Mexico, not France. Peking duck is duck prepared in a style characteristic of Peking, not any duck prepared in whatever style but sold in Peking. And Greek yoghurt is yoghurt prepared in a style characteristic of a Greek company that decided to sell thickened, sweetened yoghurt.

You can expect that because EU regulation requires it to be that way.

If that's the reason you expect it, the regulation is the sole justification for its own existence. I feel quite comfortable calling that "stupid".

It isn't a case of there being regulation for the sake of it, but rather that the regulation has come into existence off the back of decades of what customers have expected from their produce.

This is not about protectionism for producers, rather the protection of consumers. Noone is telling the consumers what to buy, merely telling them what they can expect when they buy.

To take the example of wine, consumers of Bordeaux wines have accepted that since the classification of growths in 1855 there is a formalised structure and hierarchy of producers. One can know that wine from a First growth will be superior in quality to a lesser growth. From looking at the wine label, a customer immediately can tell that the wine will be of a certain quality without having to take a gamble. Codifying this into EU law allows no other winemaker within the EU to produce a wine with a label that claims the wine is a First Growth Bordeaux. This is great for consumers.

The EU is not protecting producers in that anyone can make wine to compete with these Bordeaux wines but cannot 'piggyback' off of the 'brand' (for want of a better word) that Bordeaux has built for its producers.

Now matter how much you may want to get an authentic product, you can't expect to get it without regulation. As the article shows very well. Therefore the reason for the regulation can't be the expectation itself.

The reason for that regulation is a combination of protectionism on one side and a desire to be well informed about the products you're eating.

in many, many cases quality of original vs copy is really not the same, cheeses which require very long and specific processes to mature are a good example (ie I've yet to taste Gruyere that would be equal to original Swiss one with AOC stamp, French copies are pretty bland in comparison and not cheaper either). Same can go for virtually any type of food. And yes I would prefer original cheddar compared to some done by some john doe in next town 'following original recipes' and I would vote with my wallet for it.

it might be a strange concept for non-europeans, but for us, this is one of the best things that came from EU integration. if I buy a copy, I want to know it's a copy and not original. simple as that.

And if I buy "Napa Valley wine", it can come from Chile, right?

That's a interesting example – I totally agree with you in the general case, but I'd actually always thought of 'Greek yoghurt' the same way I thought of 'French fries'!

What would be an example of food that conforms to the "general case"?

Champagne. Parma ham. Balsamic vinegar from Modena. Cornish Yarg.

I'm not sure exactly why I've never thought of Greek yoghurt in the same way!

No it's not just protectionism. If I buy Bleu d'Auvergne (it's a French cheese) in the Netherlands, I want to be sure I get the real deal, as a consumer.

exactly. the laws protect the customers from scam low quality product equivalents.

margarine is never labeled 'tastes like butter' here. same with Grana Padano. Sure everyone has the ability to produce knock off Parmesan. But when I want the real thing I know I'll get it.

But what if someone outside France is able to produce equivalent cheese using the same formula? Why do you care where it's from?

The same reason you cannot use someone else trademark even if you use the same formula. Origin guarantees are just collective trademarks for small producers.

Moreover quality of the product is not always the only reason to buy a product (see fair trade, organic product, religious belief ...)

In this particular case, as with the Champagne example, the name of the product indicates its origin. Bleu d'Auvergne means "Blue from Auvergne" (a region in France), where blue is short for "blue cheese".

If someone outside of France (Auvergne, more specifically) can concoct a product with similar quality, let them label and market it under their own name.

If you fork an open source project, wouldn't it be convenient to come up with a new name for your project?

But presumably there is more than one brand of Blue d'Avergne? I'm not suggesting one should be able to steal the trademarks of any of those brands.

And if someone from a different place makes a product that is compositionally identical then probably their ability to market it will depend on the customer's recognition that it is exactly the same thing.

You're confusing brand/trademark with origin labelling. A farmers market will inevitably have multiple cheeses created by different producers, all of which may be labelled "Blue d'Avergne".

Yeah, brands do happen, I bought a cheese labelled "Blue style cheese" the other day because it was cheaper and may have been made in Poland to the same process.

Blue d'Avergne is the brand. There may be more than one producer that follows the established rules for the brand.

Food is not like building a car in a factory. It's not a formula like chemistry.

The milk matter, cereal matter, where cow live matter. The whole supply chain. it's really difficult/impossibile to replicate that.

You can have something similar, but call it with the generic name.

In Italy you can get really good food everywhere. But i can assure you, you can feel the difference between location. For that we get DOC, DOP to certify location, tradition, etc.

It can get even more subtle than that. Speaking with a restaurant owner in a tiny village on the Pyrenees, I told him he would make a killing if he opened in a restaurant in Barcelona.

"It wouldn't work. The animals would have to be transported. They would sweat and that affects the taste".

Can only speak for myself, but as there is no really objective way to measure that kind of equivalence, we as consumers are left with the rather blunt tools of traditions and establishing brands when it comes to food. Some of the product types which are protected are several hundred years old, predating all trademark laws which would otherwise have had a similar effect.

There are also some products in EU which are sold as '<something something> style <fooditem> because of the reason you state, but with that said: They rarely reach the quality of the 'real deal'. Apparently it is not very easy to create similar quality products?

If you take for instance "Champagne" - you might have an equivalent product but it's not "Champagne" unless it comes from the Champagne region of France. Yet alternative sparkling whites such as "Prosecco" (Italy), "Cava" (Spain) and "Cristal" (US) seem to do quite well. If you have a good enough product, you shouldn't have any need to claim equivalence with another regional variety.

True. I think that Cristal is champagne though, at least the one I know of. Is there a local Cristal in the US?

The thing is, that's impossible. If you try to make Comté in the US, it would not taste the same and thus would be a scam.

That someone can call it the same - Cheese just like France but produced somewhere.

It is about representing the right information.

Much of the taste of food comes from inputs.

Even the water can make a significant difference. The animals producing the meat will influence taste depending on their life and what they're eating. It's reasonable that a regional product will turn out markedly different to the same recipe in a completely different environment.

It's reasonable to want the product as intended, not what it becomes after a series of shortcuts and cost savings to produce ostensibly the "same" product.

It's only heavily industrialised foods where this starts not to matter, mainly as it becomes so disntaced from those inputs.

They can label it as made the same way. They can do comparative marketing - 'we use the same techniques but better ingredients, our product is better'.

What they can't do is pretend their product is the actual traditional product from some other geographical location.

There seems like no possible way that can be detrimental to consumers?

Cheese is actually a tricky example. Cheeses produced outside of their origin geo tend to have somewhat different microbiomes and, therefore, somewhat different tastes and other characteristics. See, for example, this episode of Gastropod: https://gastropod.com/say-cheese-2/

I'm by no means an extremist on the topic. I think it would be pretty silly at this point to say that only Cheddar from Cheddar, England could be labeled as such. But origin naming rules aren't silly either.

There is reason to expect this if you want some expectation of eating what you're being sold. It's an extension of reasonable labelling.

It's interesting you pick out cheddar. Consider Cheddar cheese - much of it was so direly awful as barely meeting requirement to be called edible let alone cheddar. Labelling your cheese "cheddar" should give me some expectation of production process (it can't be cheddar if it's not been cheddared or aged) taste and texture just as labelling Fire Engine Red paint gives me expectation of colour inside the tin. Would it be stupid protectionism to be disatisfied that I received pale pink paint in the tin?

Fortunately there's an EU PDO protection for Cheddar - "West Country Farmhouse Cheddar", so this is what I now usually buy. It requires a minimum aging of nine months and that the milk come from the same farm producing the cheese. It's a dramatically better product.

It's just trademarks. We o Have them on Coca Cola, why not Champagne?

It's a way of effectively implementing trademarks for geographically based industries that predate IP law.

You're not opposed to trademarks, are you? (I don't see how any rational consumer could be, otherwise it's a free-for-all with fraud and fakes.) It's exactly the same thing, except for traditional industry.

People are free to call their new products whatever they like, as long as they don't take one that's already taken. They should compete on their merits, not freeloading on the goodwill established by an existing brand (i.e. geographical area with specific standards of production etc.)

It's generally suggested here in the US that you buy olive oil labeled as being from California, as the Italian labels are often adulterated or mislabeled. The periodic scandals out of Italy seem to support that view: http://www.eater.com/2016/6/30/12070668/olive-oil-fraud-ital...

Isn't that a problem with US regulations and enforcement, rather than EU ones?

It is a problem with US regulators assuming that EU regulations are something more than scams to bid up the price of olive oils by claiming they came from a particular region (usually one that makes some bogus terrior claim) when in fact they do not. If the EU cannot enforce its own vaunted food regulations then I suppose the US should just stop accepting any claims regarding food provenance and dispense with any DOP compliance whatsoever...

Most likely the oil is shipped in large containers and bottled in the US. So the labeling will fall under US jurisdiction, not EU.

EU laws aren't being enforced. All the fake olive oil is coming out of Italy. If you want real virgin olive oil in the US, you have to buy the California ones. It was also reported that Kobe beef was being sold at European restaurants even when Europe had a ban on Japanese meats during the Mad Cow Scare. Those are things just off the top of my head, i bet if you actually dug in, Europe has many examples of where fake products are sold.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2016/02/10/the-...

I don't think you can say that just because rules are being broken, that is a case for them being repealed.

It's the default American approach to assume that a failed implementation equals a failure of a concept.

To be fair to our American friends it's not solely their bias; a lot of the pro-Brexit voters have a similar feeling about the EU.

You don't really know how many of the voters voted against the implementation, and how many voted against the concept, do you?

No, but going by the commentary, and voxpops, I can safely assume "a lot", which is what I said and meant.

Did Japan have incidences of Mad Cow disease? I thought it was a British thing.

The UK had by far the worst problem, but there were at least 20-30 other countries that had BSE outbreaks.

> EU laws aren't being enforced.

Sorry, to be blunt, but this is bullshit. There are scams (olive extra-virgin was a big problem), but in general the rules do work and problems are being addressed, e.g. in Italy every olive tree is now digitalized [1].

If you want 'extra protection/certainty' then please buy labeled 'bio-food' with strict condition. Sure also there, you might find cheaters, but it is rare.

[1] (sorry, german) http://www.nzz.ch/nzzas/nzz-am-sonntag/ein-schmieriges-gesch...

> EU laws aren't being enforced. All the fake olive oil is coming out of Italy.

Not seeing how the two sentences follow. Why should the EU be enforcing its laws on food packaged there, if the latter is destined for shipment to the US where pretty much anything goes?

well for one thing wouldn't the EU want to be known as providing good food? The EU should simply not allow the products that are not true to be sourced from a EU country.

Your values aren't worth squat if they aren't applied to all you do. This just means that if you are willing to sell shit labeled as flowers to a foreign nation it will happen at home too

The regulations we're talking about concerns the marking of food. You are still allowed to sell shitty vegetable oil, you're just prohibited from calling it Extra Virgin Olive Oil when you're selling it in EU. The fact that the shitty oil can be labeled whatever in the US is outside the scope and reach of the EU.

Fair enough, but then again, you were complaining specifically about _Italian_ olive oil rather than EU values as a whole. Keep in mind that Italy has large regions that were traditionally run by the Mafia and the Camorra:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camorra

Also, keep in mind that - in contrast with the US and as already raised elsewhere - the EU tends to crack down on would-be fraudsters and prosecute when they find issues. Also, it's not unheard of for businesses to tip health inspectors to check out their competitors at the slightest hint of fraud. It might merely be an impression, but the same in the US seems to require alerting consumers and sometimes alarming them before the FDA bothers to wake up (as put on film in e.g. A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich).

Free trade requires harmonized regulation. If the EU adopts the less strict US regulations, the quality of food decreases.

Because TTIP is heavily influenced by the lobbying of big multinationals, the Monsanto's and the likes. As a result it favors the big food companies over small local producers. Eventually TTIP will lead to less local variety of food products and more food that is imported and therefore less fresh.

> the Monsanto's and the likes

Monsanto is an agrichemical and seeds company. It is not in the food business. I know 'Monsanto' is sometimes used as a general synonym for 'evil company', but this is somewhat inappropriate.

1. Monsanto wants the food grown with its seeds to be sold more.

2. TTIP is enormously encompassing, about far more than food.

3. A cursory search will show lobbying by Monsanto for TTIP.

and the like

Currently under EU regulations it is a requirement that GM be declared, so it is wholly appropriate.

Because currently the USDA and FDA equivalents in EU actually work, and the laws that require food inspections are stricter. The worry is that TTIP market access policies will force uniform, lowest-common-denominator rules, eliminating european food QA policies.

Here is a really good example of food differences between USA and Europe. Something as simple as eggs: http://www.thejournal.ie/refrigerate-eggs-usa-europe-1809120...

TLDR: European regulations force more stringent regulations on producers of eggs; therefore eggs are cleaner and you can store them for weeks without refrigeration.

IMHO they've also got a much nicer colour.

This is why eggs in Denmark (as of my last visit) cost approximately 1.5x to 2.0x as much as eggs in the USA.

There is a cost to having free-range eggs. There's a cost to controlling egg-quality so they can remain unwashed, and unrefrigerated for days.

Now in the US, you can choose if you want to pay that cost and thus shop at different supermarkets that cater to your tastes. In the EU countries, you must pay the cost because its mandated by the government.

If you'd prefer blander food, that requires more refrigeration, and deeper cooking because its inexpensive... you can't make that choice. It's taken away from you by the government.

Denmark isn't a great comparison because it's one of the places in Europe with the highest cost of living. Also these regulations aren't just to do with free range eggs but any battery farming facility.

You might be on to something, that you should have the right to cheaper food, even if it notionally means poisoning yourself.

The problem is though that you are not always in a situation where you can make an informed choice. Even if all the necessary information is provided at the point of sale (an exhaustive list of the details of the production of the food).

You don't always consume at the point of sale: You may be buying sandwiches or be in a restaurant. Perhaps you could have regulations about the point of consumption having to declare all details there. I can imagine that becoming quite tiresome in Starbucks.

If you have that, how do you enforce it? How much do you spend? How much time do you spend updating these rules to cover all the new permutations that an evolving market produces every day.

Effectively this has what has happened with eggs in USA by transferring the cost of producing clean eggs onto stores and consumers who must now bear the cost of refrigeration.

There is an environmental cost to all this energy used as well, in storage and transportation. Then there is food wastage because these eggs spoil more easily. So it's not even all about "your" choice any more ...

By enforcing standards at point of production it drastically reduces the amount of red tape required to ensure consumers get a certain quality product.

What I meant by choice is that the USA has standards that can be considered minimally safe by 1st world nations. Companies can and do exceed those standards for food quality and safety, and end up producing better products that consumers can choose to buy then.

Another example of the difference between the US and EU with regards to encouraging choice is labelling.

In the EU, food must be labelled for origin, and other factors. In the US, that's all option but if a food company does label, it has to meet strict standards as to accuracy of the label.

Do consumers care about GMO corn vs non-GMO corn? In the EU, the question is non-optional, you must label. In the US, the question is optional---some companies label themselves as non-GMO and charge higher prices, some do not label themselves anything and could be using GMO or non-GMO products.

The problem with your suggestion is information. The difference in quality is not in any way made available to the consumer. Terms people believe to indicate quality mean basically nothing, as indicated in this article. These cheap products, which are often the only choice, are intentionally advertised as the higher-quality product. So, no, it is not a matter of Americans having more options. They're being openly deceived, while their regulatory agencies are intentionally dismantled.

I buy Pasture Raised eggs from Whole Foods, about $6-$8 per dozen. Expensive but the only eggs I've found in the US with actual orange yolks like I found overseas. Even the farmers markets here disappoint. Pale yellow yolks are a very bad sign.

Pale yolks mean little. It just means the farmer added a different colouring agent.

http://blog.chickenwaterer.com/2013/03/influencing-egg-yolk-...

That's not quite true. What all your sources say, is that it is influenced by chicken feed. Specifically "the amount and type of carotenoids the chicken consumes."

You can argue that it doesn't matter what chickens eat, and you could win. But I'd wager that to a great many people the quality of food does matter.

There is the spurious matter of the nutritional quality of the eggs as discussed here http://www.thekitchn.com/what-does-egg-yolk-color-actually-m...

"Some studies have shown, however, that eggs from pasture-raised hens can have more omega-3s and vitamins but less cholesterol due to healthier, more natural feed."

The better indicator of quality is how well the yolk and white hold together. A low quality egg will have a runny white and the yolk will break very easily.

"Now in the US, you can choose if you want to pay that cost and thus shop at different supermarkets that cater to your tastes."

The point of the article is US consumers can't really choose what they're buying, because we are constantly, systemically lied to about the contents of our food purchases.

You can store European eggs for longer because they're unwashed, precisely because they're dirtier. It's a value judgement, and I don't think it should be regulated either way.

They can be sold dirtier because the chickens live in a cleaner environment. They have to be washed in the US because they're not sellable otherwise.

Being dirty doesn't magically make eggs last longer; these eggs don't need to be washed because they're not very dirty.

While I can't speak for all European eggs, you can store UK eggs for longer, outside the fridge, because they are likely to be significantly less dirty at the point of collection, the chickens they came from are less likely to be infected with salmonella, and because they are not subjected to a damaging process (washing) that aids the transfer of harmful substances from the outside of the egg to the inside.

What do you mean be "store longer"? I've stored average American eggs in the refrigerator for multiple months without a problem (I only use them on the rare occasion that I bake something).

I am under the impression that European eggs are not refrigerated. My understanding is that once you refrigerate an egg, the membrane separates from the shell, requiring that you continue to refrigerate it, as the egg is no longer properly sealed. Since American eggs are refrigerated to begin with, you need to continue refrigeration.

Its a chemical layer that's removed by washing, that makes eggs need refrigeration. Until washed, they're an antiseptic capsule. After - bacteria can enter through exposed pores in the shell.

> IMHO they've also got a much nicer colour.

The colour is just an additive put in chicken feed. You can get colour charts for the egg colours.

Have you got a source for that? First result on google indicates otherwise http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/egg-color-chart-find-out-w...

Ah, those are for the shell. I'm talking about the yolk.

http://blog.chickenwaterer.com/2013/03/influencing-egg-yolk-...

The shell appears to be genetic: http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/why_are_chicken_eggs_different_...

Yeah I wasn't talking about that. Was talking about those creepy paper-white eggs you get stateside.

Those that want TTIP, want lowest common denominator, to force the EU into lower standards and force what would be democratic decisions into crappy backroom arbitrage. The capitalists have a world wide conspiracy to kill democracy.

TTIP will also force us europeans to allow import of food sprayed with more pesticides (than currently allowed) linked to, among others, infertility.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/22/eu-dropp...

TTIP mandates use of private arbitrage courts, which in theory could be influenced by the stronger (not on merit) of two parties, against regulations already present in the EU. For example, if EU requires the use of substance X to be no more than Y% in 1 kg of apples, but such regulation is absent in USA, an American producer could sue EU for anticompetitivenes and win.

Yes, this is a huge worry for me. The quality of food in the US is atrocious. When I was there, almost nothing tasted as it should, everything tasted bland and mildly sweet. The only way I found to get decent meat was to buy ultra-posh organic stuff at ridiculous prices, and then it would be no more than on par with the cheapest meat I could buy in Spain. Even chocolate is affected!

TTIP is one of the worst things that could happen to quality of life in Europe.

For what it's worth, I live Ireland and moved here after 30 years in the US. I agree that the TTIP is a terrible idea (and feels a bit like imperialism chasing after me as I exit). Food on the continent is a sheer delight for the senses.

However, if you visit this fine emerald isle, you will find the US has no monopoly on bland, mildly sweet food. (To be fair, we _do_ have some pretty great cheese)

>However, if you visit this fine emerald isle, you will find the US has no monopoly on bland, mildly sweet food.

Well, apart from whisky, nobody ever considered Ireland a place for good food. For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine.

> For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine.

As someone from the UK I take offense at that, sure we might not be on the same level as Italy or France (but really, who is?) but we have some great traditional food. Pies of all kinds, fish 'n' chips, traditional sausages, good old roast dinners, chicken tikka masala and of course the healthiest breakfast in the world. Tasty stuff. And lets not forget our mayonnaise and ketchup beats all others, hands down.

I came across a great article from 1946 by George Orwell, where he both explains the problems of British food, and comes to its defence: http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-a...

I think I blame the British connection for some of the issues with American food: overly sweet, fish without bones, little seafood, etc.

A summary of the problems of British food from 1986 would no longer be applicable. One from 1946, even less so.

True enough — but it explains where British food got its bad reputation from. As it happens, real British food is delicious: savoury, flavourful and just generally wonderful.

I remember ordering garlic chips for the first time after moving from CA.

I had been foolishly looking forward to a meal of fried potatoes, olive oil, Parmesan, salt, and lightly seared diced garlic, with perhaps a bit of parsley (or, dare I dream, cilantro/coriander). I thought it might bring back memories of nights spent at Giants games

What I got was chips with a gigantic blob of sightly garlic-scented mayonnaise plopped on top of it. Disappointing, to say the least.

To be fair, there is some fantastic food, but you have to look for it. Dublin has some surprisingly good burritos, for instance. I think the issue comes from the fact that inexpensive street food in places like Italy is phenomenal, but in Ireland and the UK tends to be mediocre.

>To be fair, there is some fantastic food, but you have to look for it. Dublin has some surprisingly good burritos, for instance.

That's hardly what one means when talking about a good national cuisine though... The UK also has excellent Indian restaurants, but that's again something else.

Were we limiting this to national cuisines? What is that, even? When people ask about my favourite American (they mean US but that's another conversation) food I typically answer Mexican or Ethiopian, because those are some of the best foods I've had in the US.

> I remember ordering garlic chips...

That's your first mistake. You can get all that, but it's not exactly English. You'd have better luck with getting all that on roast potatoes to be honest.

> I think the issue comes from the fact that inexpensive street food in places like Italy is phenomenal, but in Ireland and the UK tends to be mediocre.

I agree, but then again we don't really have a street food culture like those places. London has got pretty into the street food idea, and there are tonnes of really nice food markets springing up everywhere. Pretty damn expensive, but nice once in a while.

I know it was my mistake, and I don't even mean it as a complaint but rather as an observation.

For what it's worth, I've gotten really in to cooking since living here. I make my own Doro Wat and tequila lime chicken in particular.

In general, foods here don't usually have a lot of nuanced flavours. There are exceptions, and I love a hearty uncomplicated meal as much as the next person, but I do miss it. Admittedly I may have been spoiled when I was in CA, where I lived (San Diego and SF) both seem to have pretty great food.

>Pies of all kinds, fish 'n' chips, traditional sausages, good old roast dinners, chicken tikka masala

Sort of makes my point. None of these have anybody (of statistically significant percentage) outside the UK salivating, or have ever created something like a "British restaurant" to be found abroad (like there are French or Italian restaurants everywhere).

And even the best of this list was invented by taking from a foreign (the Bangladeshi) cuisine tradition.

>and of course the healthiest breakfast in the world

Bacon, sausages, eggs, and beans? I think nutritionists can point to at least 20 other candidate countries for that title...

whooooooooooooosh

> None of these have anybody (of statistically significant percentage) outside the UK salivating

Have you ever tried a traditional English pie? I'm a bit biased obviously, but as an anecdote my Italian co-worker who moved here recently absolutely loves them (and I can't help but say 'who ate all the pies, guido?' to him). They don't have that kind of pastry in their cuisine at all and he can't get enough of them. It's a national cuisine, just because not a huge number of people outside the UK eat it doesn't make it bad in any way.

> or have ever created something like a "British restaurant" to be found abroad

You're right, cuisine isn't our major cultural export (I'd say that's TV) but it's hard to find authentic national food outside of the respective nation. Most Italians would cry at the sight of most of the "Italian food" served at "Italian restaurants", just because it's not a label you can stick on your restaurant doesn't mean it's bad...

> Bacon, sausages, eggs, and beans? I think nutritionists can point to at least 20 other candidate countries for that title...

You forgot the hash browns, black pudding and toast, all in huge quantities. Also that went way over your head, it's possibly the most unhealthy breakfast in the world when done right.

You know, I just realized that I really miss pasties after a night out when I don't have them around. And let's not forget that English cheese can be spectacular!

Certainly there are great foods to be had, but on the whole it seems it's not the UK's strong suit.

> They don't have that kind of pastry in their cuisine at all and he can't get enough of them.

Well, Italians have pastry in their cuisine — but they boil it and call it pasta grin

What do you consider to be a traditional English pie? I need to make sure I have one of these.

Steak and Ale, Steak and Kidney, Chicken and Mushroom, Pheasant and other game (that's not as common though). If you want a great one then make sure it's from a small, non-chain pub somewhere in the countryside for the full English experience.

Pork Pies are pies as well I guess, but they are a different beast and as nice (no gravy, solid filling) unless you get an amazing melton mowbray one.

"You're right, cuisine isn't our major cultural export (I'd say that's TV)"

Probably cultural products more generally, including books and music.

Wouldn't an English pie be similar to something like "torta pasqualina"?

It's not usual to see a pie with meat in Italy, usually its filling it's all vegetables/eggs, seldom some ham. There are plenty though.

> Wouldn't an English pie be similar to something like "torta pasqualina"?

Nope, nothing like that, I think. English pies use thicker pastry, are filled with gravy and never anything green. Something like this[1] gives you an idea. Perhaps it's the sort of equivalent, but the Italian I work with says there is nothing like them that he's ever had in Italy.

1. http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3148692/dads-beef-mushroo...

If I search "traditional English pie" I see images of something more similar to what I suggested than the image you linked.

I'm in the U.S., so the search results might be affected by my location.

edit: I tried on google.co.uk and I get more results similar to what you suggested.

Yeah I think that's google trickery. How strange though, I would have thought the search "traditional English pie" shouldn't/wouldn't be affected by the location.

If you search "Carbonara" in the U.S. you get something with cream, peas and garlic.

So, it's definitely affected. :)

Maybe not restaurants per se, but there's quite a few British pubs around here that do serve some variety of British cuisine (usually fish n chips / pot pies / etc.)

I will also add that traditional British ales played a pretty huge role in fueling the underpinnings of the American homebrewing / craft brewing movements. Of course, us Americans transformed it entirely in a different direction from the British CAMRA "real ale" world. :) But some of the most popular American craft brew style clearly have clear British lineage: IPAs / pale ales, porters, and stouts.

> Sort of makes my point. None of these have anybody (of statistically significant percentage) outside the UK salivating, or have ever created something like a "British restaurant" to be found abroad (like there are French or Italian restaurants everywhere).

British-style pubs that serve those exact dishes are very popular in Canada.

In 2000 I spent a couple of weeks in the Shrewsbury area, and most lunches were had at small, out of the way village pubs. The food was surprisingly good, both traditional and continental. Not just surprisingly good for England, but for anywhere in such venues. The only bad experience was our first shot at getting fish & chips, which were rubbish. Second try at a different place fixed that.

> and most lunches were had at small, out of the way village pubs

These are the best places to go in England IMO. Avoid any chain pubs at all costs, the smaller local ones serve the best food in the countryside hands down.

I mean, I don't think there's room to argue the "actively known for" claim. British food is absolutely known for being bland, fatty, and overcooked (at least in America); it's even the punchline in that "in hell the cooks are British" joke.

As for whether its true, that's a much harder sell. I can buy that Britain has quite a bit of bad food; 'British' mass-market food can be a bit shoddy, since it tends to be traditional dishes like fish'n'chips and pies that respond terribly to low-quality ingredients and lengthy storage. The restaurant stuff is much better, but it can certainly seem rich and heavy to those unfamiliar (partly because it's special-occasion food being served every night).

But to sincerely claim that the Brits don't have good food is a bit absurd. It seems to be born of either ignorance or ahistoricism. People know "fatty pies", but not cullen skink or any of the other more specialized delicacies, and they seem to have gotten their sense of what's available in around 1945, which was understandably not a high point in British cuisine.

> For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine.

That's a myth that's refusing to die, it's not true at all.

In what ways? Where in the world do they care for British cuisine?

Everywhere.

I haven't stayed in a single hotel anywhere that doesn't serve English Breakfast. And I'm sure a lot of people are enjoying a Sunday Roast or a Chicken Tikka Masala every now and again.

But of course, I know there are a lot of ignorant people in the world, which is why I admit the myth persists.

Chicken Tikka Masala

That's not British though, it's Indian.

It's a British national dish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala

Have you read the article you linked?

Chicken tikka masala is chicken tikka, chunks of chicken marinated in spices and yogurt, that is then baked in a tandoor oven

Those don't sound like British words... let's follow the links:

Chicken tikka is a chicken dish originating in South Asia.

A masala is any of the many spice mixes used in Indian cuisine. The name comes from the Hindi word for spice.

The tandoor is used for cooking in Southern, Central and Western Asia.

Did you mean British commonwealth, or British isles?

Have you?

"...The historians of ethnic food Peter and Colleen Grove discuss various origin-claims of chicken tikka masala, concluding that the dish "was most certainly invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef".[14] They suggest that "the shape of things to come may have been a recipe for Shahi Chicken Masala in Mrs Balbir Singh’s Indian Cookery published in 1961".[14]..."

From earlier in the same section: "The origin of the dish is disputed. One explanation is that it originated in an Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom,[3][7] but probably from the British Bangladeshi community which ran most Indian restaurants in Britain.[7] Rahul Verma, a Delhi expert on street food, offered a different explanation, speculating in 2009 that the dish may have originated—probably by accident with subsequent improvisations—in the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh during the last 50 years.[1]"

So? Tomatoes aren't Italian, but pizza is.

Nobody is disputing the Asian influence on British cuisine. And nobody is disputing whether or not tikka masala is British.

I'm reasonably sure that peruvian people knew the concept of putting a potato in the fire much before british "invented it".

Its an adaptation of Indian cooking to British tastes developed fairly recently historically (different stories point to different origins either in Britain or in India during the British Raj or within a couple decades of its end.)

> Where in the world do they care for British cuisine?

Ever eaten pot roast? That's British food. Ever eaten a roast potato? That's British food. Ever eaten cheese, mushrooms, roast beef or rabbit? Those are all British foods.

British food, properly done (i.e., not the result of WWII rationing or Victorian institutionalisation) is savoury and earthy: roasts, onions, cheeses, mushrooms, potatoes, carrots, turnips. It is hearty and filling, and goes well with the native ale. It's delicious.

Don't knock what you haven't had.

Reminds me of the food descriptions in the Redwall books :-)

Having lived in various EU countries, I'm still amazed by how unaware of taste people are in UK and Ireland.

In addition to great whiskey (whisky is Scottish), Ireland has a lot of really great microbreweries. There's some fantastic beer here.

What foods have you tried in the UK, that turned out to be bad? Perhaps I can recommend different restaurants for you to try.

First of all, not talking about Indian, Chinese or whatever restaurants in the UK. Talking solely about the British cooking tradition.

Second, my point is not that I had some pot roast or fish and chips that were "bad" -- as in bad cooking (although you get that too a lot). My point was that even cooked the best way, they are nothing to write home about compared to other national cuisines and their dishes.

"Talking solely about the British cooking tradition."

Then you're talking about food which:

- Is a very small proportion of all food consumed in the UK

- Is the food least likely to be affected by TTIP (as it's traditional, many/all of the ingredients are readily available and don't need to be imported)

So, regardless of how you or I feel about traditional British cuisine, it has little to do with the comment to which you replied (which commented on the potential impact of TTIP).

You're quite out of date. The food in the UK has changed beyond recognition in the last 10-15 years. It's still possible (but increasingly rare) to find bad food but in any decent-sized city there are many great places to eat. London in particular has some of the best food in the world.

> For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine.

Only by people who've no idea what they're talking about. British food got a bad reputation due to, I think, three factors: first, it's the native cuisine of the English-speaking world (which means both that people don't notice it and that there are a lot of cheap, poorly-executed examples to hand); second, rationing during and after the Second World War badly hurt both availability of ingredients and folks' taste for ingredients; third, Victorian-era institutions were terribly efficient at churning out 'scientific,' 'cutting-edge' food-like substances which were almost but not quite entirely unlike the real article.

Native English, Welsh, Scottish & Irish cuisines are all delicious.

>Native English, Welsh, Scottish & Irish cuisines are all delicious.

Anybody that cares for it the way people globally care about French, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Japanese, even German etc food?

One can find more Korean BBQ joints than British restaurants the world over...

Let's put it this way: some countries have more interesting (to the world) cuisines than others. Not every national cuisine is of the same caliber.

> Anybody that cares for it the way people globally care about French, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Japanese, even German etc food?

As I understand, there was a long down period essentially as a side effect of the way industrialization played out in Britain, but that's turned around recently internally and there is growing international acceptance of the British cuisines among people who are into food.

It hasn't reached the same kind of popular currency as some other cuisines, globally, but I'd not be strongly inclined to think that's due to inherent quality factors, rather than awareness.

I'm ethnically Indian, and grew up in London. So I'm used to having good Indian food both at home and in restaurants.

I recently visited Dublin for the first time, and picked an Indian restaurant based on Yelp ratings/reviews. I've never eaten worse Indian food than I did that day.

I don't believe that the restaurant operators are unable to make OK food. They were Indian themselves. Perhaps they had to change their flavours to adapt to local palates, and their ingredients due to economic pressure?

I think there is some adjustment happening, and I've never had great Indian food here. It's certainly not as large a part of the cuisine as it is in London.

I find the same thing happening with Mexican food with regards to dulled flavours.

I recently moved from Utah to Wisconsin, and the drop in quality of Mexican food is astounding. Even the gringo-ified chains in the western United States are better.

I had a friend who was French and ran a French bistro in Galway. He said his Irish customers didn't really appreciate good food and were more into cheap booze and chips so maybe they cater to their market. That said there are some very good restaurants here.

In fairness, Galway is a big student town. I think you'll find similar sentiments in student towns around the world.

Friend of my girlfriend used to own a Chinese restaurant in Canada and said that he had to have alternative recipes for the locals because they didn't like the traditional flavors. It's a shame though, I've had his food cooked in a more "traditional" sense and it was bursting with flavors. I sort of always assumed is how it goes in North America.

Cheese and bread. I would take good soda bread over almost any other country's national starch.

*and oysters, but one can't really take credit for the ocean currents.

There's plenty of cheap crap food in Europe, but at least it's labeled as such. Pretending something is something it isn't, is lying to the customer. It should be illegal.

Unrelated, but I was just debating GMO labels on "change my view" on reddit.

I admit I was trolling that if GMO are healthy, then ultimately there is no harm in a neutral label. My comments got downvoted very hard. It boiled down that those labels would essentially be a form of misinformation, or that the uneducated public would make uninformed decisions. I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but the post got 400 comments.

It's exactly like democracy, no one wants democracy when it goes against what they personally want.

That's a bit of a lazy analogy. Loads of people want democracy, even when it doesn't achieve their goals.

After watching the Brexit aftermath I think it's safe to say there also are loads of people who don't. The Brexiters are all just stupid and misinformed (focus on all, and no look at ones own chosen group for comparison), "mob rule", whataboutism (the Brexiters too would have continued to argue had they lost), etc.

The fact is that nobody knows if GMO are healthy or not.

This is like saying that "machines are safe". It makes not sense, there all all kind of machines you can design. You should study a specific machine case by case.

Gene modification is enormous, and open to all kinds of unintended consequences. Just because we don't understand it yet it does not mean it is safe(we modify genes without really understanding what they really do with detail, we are unconscious ignorant).

I believe people should be able to buy GMO food if they what , but with traceability, if something wrong happens, and something wrong always happens with everything, to know it soon and do something about it.

But traceability is exactly what companies like Monsanto want to destroy. Look at Volkswagen, when something wrong happens, with traceability the lawsuits alone could bankrupt the company if people have children with leukemia or autistic and a scientific connection is proven.

You can never prove that any food is safe beyond a doubt. You can only say whether it riskier or not than other types of food or breeding. In the case of GMOs, it has been shown to be no less risky than conventional or mutagenic breeding.

"we modify genes without really understanding what they really do with detail"

Except that with genetic engineering, we know precisely what they do. Ironically previous ways of changing genes are a lot more random.

>You can never prove that any food is safe beyond a doubt.

Ultimately, this. You can test for very, very small numbers, but you can't test for zero. This is why, for example, even though lead has no biological function, extremely small "acceptable levels" are specified in regulations rather than simply saying zero lead. You can prove that, for example, lead levels in the air are less than 0.15 µg/m^3, or that they are not. You cannot do that for zero (nonzero is easy to verify, but zero is not).

There is also, of course, the fact that no food is safe in all scenarios. Even pure water is toxic at high enough doses. For that reason, it makes no sense to hold GMO food to even higher standards than non-GMO food: equal standards certainly make sense, but not higher.

> For that reason, it makes no sense to hold GMO food to even higher standards than non-GMO food

Normal food has the advantage that we already know it has no disastrous ecological consequences, by virtue of the fact that is has coexisted in its environmental niche for a while. The more food is altered, the less sure we become about that.

As Taleb has pointed out, our standards for danger should match the risk/reward involved. (E.g., we're ok with fast-tracking unproven cancer treatments because the alternative is death. Likewise, we have high standards for a common cold treatment because the alternative is inconvenience.) Unfortunately, we have no backup plan for the planet, so we must be extra careful with what we introduce to it.

To me, saying we don't need more stringent standards for GMOs is like saying we can definitely burn $X billion more oil reserves and not worry about global warming.

"The more food is altered, the less sure we become about that."

Except with genetic engineering, by being precise as to how and where the new genes are inserted, we are actually altering it less than with traditional breeding or mutagenics. Those types of breeding have far less testing than transgenics. We can potentially create new genes with those older methods that have never existed before and never know about it.

This is something that taleb was criticised for by biologists and geneticists (and basically his reply was "that they are idiots", yup, great argument).

"Normal food has the advantage that we already know it has no disastrous ecological consequences".

There is no such thing as normal food: Take the sweet potato. It has been altered transgenically using the agrobacterium twice in its history without human intervention. The agrobacterium is the same bacteria used when doing transgenic GMO. Basically nature beat us to it a long time ago when it comes to transgenics.

You can breed a potato the old fashion way to contain high level of solanine (which can be poisonous). Its not how the genes are altered, its what they do that is key.

Except that with genetic engineering, we know precisely what they do

No, we don't. At best, we know a few of the reliable consequences of that gene locus. We know nothing of the proliferation that gene may have in a wild population, or how our modification will help or hamper the organism to adapt to a changing environment.

what I meant is that we know what proteins the genes at that location will do.

"We know nothing of the proliferation that gene may have in a wild population, or how our modification will help or hamper the organism to adapt to a changing environment."

We don't know exactly, but we do know a lot more than nothing.

The GMO issue should really be broken apart in to different parts.

-GMO because tons of Roundup® has been dumped on it ~Is Roundup® safe?

-GMO for marketing or other purposes but which could have features harmful to humans. ~How much, if any, scientific & statistically valid tests have been done?

-GMO for any reason but could have features which disrupt the current flora & fauna of their environment. ~Can a problem be observed before it is too late to correct for it?

-GMO which results in expansion and/or defense of monoculture. ~Are consumers ok with low quality food with minimal variety?

Don't forget

-GMO which is almost certainly owned by Monsanto ~Are we prepared to cede most of the benefits (and control; cf terminator seeds) of GMOs to a ruthless, aloof megacorp?

Well put, but there is more to GMO than health issues. How does it affect workers? How does it affect agriculture? How does it affect biodiversity? All of it interesting and worth studying in detail.

It is also a way to enact intellectual property regimes over the world's biggest industrial sector. It is worth looking at how this has affected other parts of the economy.

The problem with GMO not being labelled is not the health issue it is that my freedom of choice is being eroded.

The problem with GMO labeling is that the same people who now say "if it's safe, there's no harm in a neutral label" will latter say, "if it's not unhealthy, why are you being forced by law to put a label about it"?

I wouldn't mind GMO labels at all - hell, I'd buy primarily GMO-containing products on purpose, out of spite. But there's enough insanity going on about the labels we already have (e.g. E-numbers paranoia) that I don't think labeling GMOs will end well.

I'm from the US, and currently vacationing in Spain. My wife and I typically only eat at restaurants once or twice per vacation, so we've got ample opportunity to try local groceries. In my experience, the food here is superb. Some tomatoes we've bought are quite bland, but eggs are good. Preserved meats tend to be good (I mean tasty, maybe not good to eat all the time), and raw meats seem to be good quality and hygienically stored. I did find a decent, locally made IPA this morning for about $2.50 per 12 oz bottle at the Carrefour. My impression is that if you're a stranger to a place, it takes a while to find the good places to shop, because if you've only been there a week you might be trying to buy steak at the 7-Eleven.

Just a heads up, Carrefour actually is a very large multinational hypermarket chain, not a local grocery. It's one of the top ten retailers, on roughly the same scale as Walmart and Costco. They just don't have a presence in North America.

Mind you, the food they sell is still significantly better than an equivalent low cost grocery in the US.

I find it really odd that when comparing European and American grocery stores people somehow turn a blind eye to the "supermercat" places you can find about three to a block here, whose sole mission is to sell dusty canned goods and 90 degree wine to desperate people who can't find anything better.

If you knew what happened to the animals your cheap meat comes from, or what their meat contains, or what the process of raising those animals does to the environment, you wouldn't consider organic meat to be ridiculously priced.

I get decent meat from my neighbor, who raises hogs and cattle. Bud dresses it for a reasonable price. Make my own horseradish from plants I inherited from my father. Hot as I like it. Chocolate from my sister's shop, who gets it from the Winan family who have been making it for 4 generations - they temper their chocolate only with more chocolate so no wax or junk. They get their chocolate liquor from their Nicaraguan plant that processes beans on site. Doesn't cost any more. My brother makes wine from grapes grown on my southern hillside.

But I live in rural Iowa (USA). Not everybody can live this way.

Unfortunately, a lack of standards and enforcement removes the ability of consumers to knowledgeably choose their food.

If organic / grass fed / 100% / fish species meant something, then consumers could decide whether they wanted to spend more for quality or save money on alternatives. With a lack of differentiation, race to the bottom prevails.

PS: The shenanigans from international importers are criminal. Trade pacts should include a clause where one-sided tariffs can be legally imposed as punishment for a lack of export policing on the sending country's side.

That's hard because each country has different standards. Why should Spain have special customs/inspections for goods destined for America? Makes it very hard to export. Simpler by far to inspect inbound with a uniform policy.

As the proportion of international:domestic trade continues to increase, I'm pessimistic it's ever going to be effective to inspect inbound shipments.

Aka blacklist vs whitelist computer security policies

It's too easy for a willful infringer to cloak their goods in the sheer volume of imports. The vast majority of which, by economic necessity, will never be searched in a thorough manner.

Furthermore, if you do detect counterfeit/dangerous goods on the inbound, what can you do without cooperation of the exporting country? About the only option you have available is "ban all X from Y" until the other party does something.

Indeed. For a different angle, see a recent publication by TNI: they argue that TTIP flies directly in the face of the Paris climate agreement.

This text looks like it has been drafted with the main purpose of safeguarding the interests of industry, and the producers and consumers of fossil fuels. Instead of including text that would help to ensure that climate targets can be met, as we had hoped, this text will only make it more difficult to reach the needed energy transition

https://www.tni.org/en/article/ttip-leaked-eu-trade-proposal...

This is one of my biggest worries,bathe EU has been great so far with food regulations, no high fructose, gmo's or any nonsense. Hopefully they can keep it up for a while.

EU has many of the same problems that are mentioned in the article, though. Here in Germany efforts to enforce proper food labeling so far have failed. The olive oil scam is a thing here, too (so I have heard). Sea food - it comes from the same places as the sea food in the US.

I suspect the differences are minor, and some things people fear are maybe even not so bad. Here they fear "chlorine chicken" from the US, but who knows, maybe it actually is better to soak chickens in chlorine before selling them. Maybe you should be afraid of chlorine free chicken in the US if TTIP goes through...

From a 2011 UC Davis* report on extra-virgin olive oil sold in California:

http://olivecenter.ucdavis.edu/research/files/report041211fi...

>Of the five top-selling imported “extra virgin” olive oil brands in the United States, 73 percent of the samples failed the IOC sensory standards for extra virgin olive oils analyzed by two IOC-accredited sensory panels. The failure rate ranged from a high of 94 percent to a low of 56 percent depending on the brand and the panel. None of the Australian and California samples failed both sensory panels, while 11 percent of the top-selling premium Italian brand samples failed the two panels. Sensory defects are indicators that these samples are oxidized, of poor quality, and/or adulterated with cheaper refined oils.

*"We are grateful to Corto Olive, California Olive Ranch, and the California Olive Oil Council for their financial support of this research."

I am surprised this isn't more commonly known. Locally (Australia), there has been recent furore over the 'blueberries' in most foods (including blueberry muffins etc.) not actually being blueberries, but a bluey chemical gel.

Also, a local delicacy, the Barramundi fish is commonly replaced in restaurants with the cheaper, imported, less tasty, commercially raised Nile perch. Same with prawns, where beautiful sea fresh King prawns are being replaced with poor sample raised in Vietnamese sewerage farms.

I believe by law now restaurants and shops have to show the actual name of the fish, plus whether it is local or imported.

Additionally, most Australians (don't know about the rest of the world) have never eaten an actual scallop.

Mostly they're discs hole-punched from skate wings (a skate's a bit like a stingray)

Here in New Zealand, most of the time when I get scallops they have the orange egg-sac bit still attached.

Is that not the case in Aus?

Sometimes the anonymous white discs will have a bit sliced almost off and coloured with orange food dye. Often not.

You'll see genuine (imported) scallops at markets occasionally, but it's years and years since I saw a restaurant serve the real thing.

Australian. Citation please?

See for yourself - like toomanybeersies says, they should have an orange roe (boys and girls both have them - scallops switch sex as required), attached by some stringy material.

The roe has a flavour and texture different to the white meat of the scallop, which is the muscle used to open and close the shell.

The white meat should have a firm and homogeneous texture - fakes tend to have textured lines through them, but not always.

In the UK, most scampi (a crustacean) is actually monkfish tail.

Skate wing is legitimately tasty. It definitely has a shellfish taste to it, so I can see how you could fool someone into thinking it was a scallop.

To be honest I'm going to be a slight eco-terrorist right now. (Usually I want to tell commenters like me here to go fornicate with a cactus!) Seafood is being overexploited dramatically. While substituting gel for berries is downright despicable (or wood pulp in meat), substituting unsustainable exploitation with somewhat sustainable (pretty sure those come with a slew of own problems) seafood farms is a good thing.

substituting unsustainable exploitation with somewhat sustainable (pretty sure those come with a slew of own problems) seafood farms is a good thing.

Oh absolutely, but you shouldn't lie about it.

This article is so over the top that it borders on parody.

Start with the title: "Everything we love to eat is a scam". I can provide lots of counter examples to that statement.

Other statements with my comments

"After reading it you’ll want to be fed intravenously for the rest of your life." - Look up total intraparenteral nutrition and see if you would prefer that to eating.

"Escolar is so toxic that it’s been banned in Japan for 40 years, but not in the US, where the profit motive dominates public safety. In fact, escolar is secretly one of the top-selling fish in America.". - By toxic the author means causes diarrhea due to unabsorbed oils/waxes. Also when we you hear that a lot of people are eating a lot of very toxic food, the food either is not very toxic or else not widely consumed.

"These fake foods produce shallow, flat, one-dimensional tastes, while the real things are akin to discovering other galaxies, other universes — taste levels most of us have never experienced." - I can imagine Galileo realizing that discovering the moons of Jupiter pailed in comparison to eating real Parmigiano cheese.

"Imagine if half the time you pulled into a gas station, you were filling your tank with dirty water instead of gasoline,” Olmsted writes. “That’s the story with seafood.”" - Zero calorie seafood, I never knew?

"Perhaps most surprising of all: discount big-box stores such as Costco, Trader Joe’s, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Walmart are as stringent with their standards as Whole Foods." - In my opinion, the more "hipster" a food establishment is, the less likely that they are really taking care of the food basics. When was the last time you heard of a large-scale McDonalds food poisoning incident? How about Chipotle?

This is one of those genres where books try to convince people that the sky is falling. In reality, we have never had such abundant, safe food in the history of humanity. Other than the people who truly have food allergies, the vast majority of people are really unaffected by any of these "revelations". In addition, especially for seafood, the substitutions are probably more ecologically sustainable.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/915/

> By toxic the author means causes diarrhea due to unabsorbed oils/waxes.

Oh, I see. No problem then, move along.

> Zero calorie seafood, I never knew?

Reading favourably before going into a rant is an important skill to have. If you try it, you'll see that the article has a good point with fake seafood, past the somewhat ridiculous comparison.

> In reality, we have never had such abundant, safe food in the history of humanity.

The US has also slipped to 27th place in life expectancy. So is everything good enough now? Should we never innovate again, because "look how bad people had it in the past"?

>So is everything good enough now? Should we never innovate again, because "look how bad people had it in the past"?

I don't think the guy you're responding to said we should never innovate again, just that the level headed response to today's food situation in the United States is not to declare there is an apocalypse, which is what the article is doing.

Tbh. I'm a bit confused by this reaction. When we had the horse meat scandal in Europe, it was a huge, in the news for weeks. If this article is right, it seems like this sort of scam is almost the norm in the US, and people don't really seem to care. In the countries I'm most familiar with (Western Europe, Japan), if a restaurant turns out to be feeding you a cheap substitution for what they advertise, they are done for. Even big chains like Mac Donalds aren't safe, as they had to painfully recognise in July 2014 [1] following a meat scandal. Their sales went down a third for about a year, resulting in quite a substantial operative loss. If potentially dangerous fake olive oil or Tuna doesn't cause a huge media outcry in the US, what will?

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/food-scandals-push-mcdonalds-jap...

Escolar is generally not a problem if you limit portion size, so calling the fish "toxic" is a little bit overblown. It is a very tasty fish, to be honest.

The problem here is that the labeling is poor. It's too often called "white tuna" in American sushi restaurants (as the article implies), for I guess marketing reasons. And there's no warning about potential gastrointestinal difficulties.

From what I can Google, sushi restaurants are incredibly bad about mislabeling fish. (We all know that "wasabi" is usually green dyed horseradish, too. :) )

Did you include Chipotle as a joke, or is it somehow more "hipster" to you than McDonald's...?

I really don't understand this comment. I agreed with the first sentence and then proceeded to get more and more lost until I got to the bottom and found your 'relevant' xkcd that has nothing to do with the article at all.

The Chipotle thing is a joke at the expense of Chipotle. They had a reputation as being greener, having real food, and being healthy, and then it turned out that a lot of people got food poisoning from food in their supply chain.

As for the xkcd, here's a guide to how it's relevant, as I interpret it: cheap wine is to American food as good wine is to real food.

> Perhaps most surprising of all: discount big-box stores such as Costco, Trader Joe’s, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Walmart are as stringent with their standards as Whole Foods.

That's not really all that surprising: they are large enterprises and have the economies of scale to ensure that they are selling authentic food.

What I'd like to see is police resources directed away from the War on Some Drugs and towards this sort of fraud, which is an actual crime with actual victims.

Food in the US is sh*t. There are great things in the US and UK( from where it comes from), but food is so wrong there.

I lived some years in Japan, I enjoyed the food. China, not so much, but is is so big you can find anything, they have gastronomical culture that is different and you have to get used to new flavors.

The US totally lacks gastronomical culture. Everything is about money, and quantity.

As an Spanish that lives in Germany I am so worried about TTIP and Americans telling us(Europeans) what to eat. Their way of eating is making a big part of the population obese with arteries clogged.

A nation of 300 000 000, spanning 4-5 time-zones, 5-6 climate ones and not a single person with functioning taste buds ... what a tragedy /s

The blandification and sugarification in the supermarket isles does not represent everything a territory has to offer in the culinary department.

But does have a tremendous effect on the food. Of course you can get good food in the US I have been to many restaurants that were both good in an absolute sense and good value.

But you know that there is something wrong when children say "I can't eat this it's too sweet" which is what happened to me when I took my family with me to North Carolina for an extended business trip. In the supermarkets almost everything you can buy is heavily sweetened and seems to be designed for the most childish of tastes.

The problem here is that you do not know how to shop or find a decent restaurant. I can find truly bad food anywhere in the world, the US does not have any sort of monopoly on this.

Look at the other way around. It's possible to find good food if you know good food and keep looking. That is a problem when people grow up with that, they rarely know good food, thus they cannot find it.

I can guarantee you, take an average family in the US, make proper food for them for 6 months, and then server a meal that they used to eat. They will find it bland, too salty, and too sweet.

You need to shop around the outside of the store - that's where the vegetables, fish, milk, yogurt (unsweetened greek/skyr), and eggs typically are, with a stop-by in the flour/sugar/etc. aisle when you run out of those.

Alternatively, speciality stores - vegetable markets or farmer's markets, Asian/Mexican markets, etc., buy bread from a bakery, not a supermarket aisle.

Why should I have to try so hard to find good food? Why isn't it there in the supermarkets? Presumably because the customers are at least willing to buy the junk that is there.

You are going to be countered by some Americans who will as usual point to some niche examples. But theres no denying that most of the market for food is terrible. Even many of those upmarket niche examples are terrible because Americans really have underdeveloped pallettes until recently.

I don't really get this, I've found European food to be fine, but really not any better than here in New York, especially for food that isn't native to the specific country (New York is filled with excellent restaurants for many Asian countries, even though it is obviously not in Asia).

Then there's the obvious farmer's market culture here (Union Square especially is a madhouse on Saturdays), and some people do CSAs, food co-ops, etc.

The article is filled with mistakes and misunderstandings or maybe this guy eats in really terrible places:

Spanish people weren't buying "fake olive oil" when poisoned. This was canola oil, was advertised as canola oil, and everybody in Spain can spot the difference among the wine and cider or between the cheapest olive oil and other vegetable oils. All this paragraph is false, including the “No one is checking, Olmsted writes".

Not, Your salmon is most probably true salmon, because to use fake salmon is a mess when the true species is breeded in farms since decades, is relatively cheap, can be found easily in your market, and its origin can be tracked easily by the tag.

There is only an "acceptable" substitute to salmon available, and is rainbow trout feeded with carothenes; smaller and more expensive to produce for farmers than true salmon. This is like to say that your coke bottle is probably faked because in the restaurant somebody could refill it with other thing of equal value or more expensive.

Yes, I must admit that milk is basically a cheap imitation currently, and there is a lot of things that must improve in tracking fisheries and marine species, but spreading fears and saying that nobody is surveying this is not correct. You have the NOAA for example, blatantly ignored in the article.

What's the deal with milk?

Each country is different, and some have still real milk, but the product was kidnapped many years ago by enterprises and EU regulations and is worse each year. The "whole milk" of today is equal as the advertised as "ultra-mega-skimmed milk" only a few years ago. Yes, people like it, because everybody likes water.

When I was child, we drank real milk, directly from the cow and just boiled. Is a totally different product, with lots of fat. Milk today has the same flavor as sucking a whitewashed wall.

The cheap imported rape seed oil blamed for the Spanish epidemic was probably a cover-up, it was actually pesticides being used in the cultivation of tomatoes. ( Posted earlier today here on HN: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/25/research.h...)

A lot of conspirative theories arose of course, but the oficial version was that some oil destined to industrial uses was imported from French to Spain and sold door-to-door as edible oil by some unscrupulous sellers.

The case was not repeated since that, so tomato pesticides aren't really a strong candidate. A lot of the tomatoes eaten in Germany, Holland and other European countries are from Spain (and pass strict quality tests in those countries) and nobody developped the same symptoms ever. Tomato production created a new type of spanish landscape in fact, that we call "the sea of plastic".

In my family we use exclusively olive oil for all. In any case, I will love to taste the sazanqua oil, that is the equivalent to an olive tree for japanese and is reputed also as excelent. Have somebody tried it?

I see a lot of Americans claiming that respecting origin naming laws is "stupid".

Im guessing this is partly the general "disrupt" mentality At work, and partly because based on your bread, beer and cheese, you clearly have long ago "evolved" to have no tastebuds.

Having seen what Americans insist on calling pizza, I can't imagine what you lot would do to other foods.

Of all the foods to call out, you choose pizza??

Name any pizza joint outside of Naples, and I bet I can find half a dozen in the US that have a superior take on the style.

Pizza is a good key here in my mind because if you consider what americans call 'deep dish' pizza - the rest of the world calls that a flan/quiche/tart/pie. And then there is the insistence on calling all pizzas, 'pizza pie'. Pizza and Pie are two different foods, with very little in common besides dough and an oven.

> superior take on the style.

Im sure there are people who would tell me the same about american beer, or american cheese, or american bread, or any other food. I'm sure there will be people who claim american-style Thai food is better than authentic Thai food.

I've been to a few countries, and literally the only food I've found that is consistently the same experience is Indian food.

However, even taking that into account, America somehow manages to make its own 'versions' of food just so much worse compared to the rest of the world. The obsession with quantity, and the ridiculous use of corn syrup probably plays a factor here.

> american beer

Is superior to almost all other beer, aside from a few outliers, such as the stuff the Trappist monks produce. It's all subjective though, because what you (general you) think tastes good, tastes like watered down swill to my taste buds, or just nasty (Czech beer for instance).

Our cheeses are rather good too, though not the pre-packed brand name stuff.

Really, the thing is, the US is huge, and there are a lot of mom and pop, or small time businesses that are local or regional. People come visit here, go to a chain store, and think that Kraft is the only cheese we sell, or see Budweiser and think that's the only swill we make. No, craft beers here blow all of your brand name beers away, hands down. (all IMO, of course)

You're complaining about what you assume is compared, and then doing the same thing.

You admit american mass-produced products are terrible, compared to their international equivalents, and then go on to claim that US 'hand crafted' products are better than the mass-produced products of other countries.

well the WTC ruled against the US using COO naming recently in the beef trade and it probably occurred elsewhere. So how do you label without having someone claim its unfair trade practices?

Can you provide some kind of reference so I know what the heck you're talking about?

Oh come on, I'm tired of hearing about US beer from people that don't drink real US beer. Yeah, the domestic big seller beers like Budweiser are pretty crap, but there is an incredible craft beer scene. Look at brewers like Stillwater and Dark Horse, or even bigger ones like Sierra Nevada. Even European brewers like Evil Twin now have US based breweries.

Other countries have excellent small-scale beer producers too. But some of them also have quite good mass-produced beers too, which is my entire point.

Like someone else, you're trying to compare American small-scale products against mass-produced international goods, as if other countries don't also have very good small-scale producers.

I live between NYC and Bangalore, India. The taste and freshness of vegetables and fruits in India is way more than what is available from Fairway in NYC. Some of it could be attributed to the broken cold storage (and hence most perishables come from around Bangalore).

I normally buy Spinach (and other Indian greens) from the lady outside a small community park. "No Agathi (type of green) today? What happened?" She grins widely "Went to the movies yesterday. Did not pluck them." To me this is fresh :)

I use the prices of vegetables swing wildly as a proxy for freshness. Tomatoes swung between 10Rs to 80Rs a Kg in a matter of days and is now around 15Rs a Kg. It is hard on the farmer, no doubt, but it also shows how local demand and supply is.

I moved from Edmonton, Canada to Goulburn Valley, Australia: the foodbowl of Australia; and the difference in food is just astonishing. The first time I had a bite of the salad here, I was mesmerized. Right back to the childhood spent in Punjab, India. Nothing beats onions, guavas, coriander, mandarins, olive oil, plums and the berries from the garden. The earth is golden here. The biggest difference is the vegetable and the weather here. Else, I miss Canada and especially the Rockies.

Btw I wouldn't trust most vegetables in India. You don't know the source of water and if they have been injected by oxytocin. My grandfather owns a big farm and grew vegetables (never laced them though). BTW NorthEast India has good quality produce too.

Food is actually a surprisingly good market for counterfeit goods, because the evidence gets eaten.

This article is all about how the "evidence" is around us in the stores we shop at and restaurants we go to.

Right. I just meant that if you sell a counterfeit painting that could come back to bite you twenty years later. But sell tilapia as red snapper for a week, then wait a month, and you should be in the clear.

Companies using fake advertising need to be held accountable.

I have seen and heard about so much fake advertising, that I don't really even care what the label says anymore.

How hard would it be to create easy to use testing kits? (like home water tests for heavy metals)

If we could create test kits to help identify heavy metals, peanut oil, or other bad additives. Then that would help consumers to identify fake food.

I don't know how hard it would be to make kits like this, but it seems there is a market for it.

Here's a thing on food science from The New York Times from three years ago I keep referring to. Long but really good read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

In the context of new developments of food replacements from the internet (Soylent etc), you can't help but see a tragic waste in how food science has spent all this time on addicting snacks, cynically geared towards heavy consumers.

When I think about this emotionally and feel like oversimplifying, I can't help but to lump this in as a part of the James Howard Kunstleresque argument of how Western Civilization wasted much of the potential of the "good growth period" of global capitalism on completely unsustainable living conditions (suburbia etc).

Is there an app or a site that tracks brands and tests their claims of what's in their food? I'm always curious especially when buying olive oil if what I'm buying is actually real. I think the biggest issue is consumers have no way of knowing what's actually in the food they eat. If the information were readily available it'd be much harder to push food substitutes.

In Italy, a bottle of proper extra-virgin olive oil is roughly 10 euros per liter. If you're paying less than that, it's not real.

That seems a bit too much.

In Greece, when you buy unlabelled bottles (dark green and sooo tasty) directly at a farmer's you pay about 8€. And that's probably a tourist-price.

I imagine that price is even lower when produced industrially, here austrian supermarkets you pay 3-5€ per bottle.

Ah, but that's only a one-directional test. Cheap oil is obviously not olive oil, but that doesn't help you choose in the supermarket aisle if the expensive oil is also not olive oil.

(And, in fact, the expensive oil being the fake is rather the whole point: the Italian Mafia wants to sell something cheap as something expensive and capture the margin; there's no point in just selling something cheap as something cheap.)

Not really, and I can't say I blame them - the amount of work, resources, and various research fields you'd need in order to maintain such a database would be pretty big. Plus, it seems like it'd be a legal nightmare, even if the site was in the right 100% of the time legally and scientifically.

Basically, as much as I would like something like that, it seems to me that the cost would be too great to maintain well and the necesary knowledge for the site to have would also be great. Even if they relied on volunteer research, it's still a lot to aggregate, and also probably easily subverted with UPC updates, brand switching, and consumer apathy. Plus, I'm' not entirely sure that it would have the intended effect of making people demand higher quality food.

I'm trying to find the report, but I recall reading that after being on a diet of canned and other low quality foods for a long time, a person can become averse to fresh foods, preferring the taste of the lower quality foods just because it's what they're mentally used to - a peach tastes like "this" (canned in syrup), not like a fresh peach. Spinach is "bad" because it's slimy and has no texture (frozen spinach), not like good fresh and tasty spinach.

Given how used we are to the olive oils and fish and such, I do wonder if we'd have the otherworldly experience or if we'd more wonder why our olive oil has a weird taste and why our sushi tastes different.

In switzerland the WWF has a very good overview over all (mostly swiss) labels for meat, fish and all other kinds of food. I suggest to checkout one of those very critic organizations.

YES :-) Open Food Facts is an open, collaborative effort to try to make more sense of food and food packagings. A bit like Wikipedia, but for food. Using smartphones, you can scan any food item and get detailed info about what you're about to buy/eat. If it's not yet in the database, you can help by taking a picture

Since we collect all claims and labels, and nutrition info, we can see if your cheese is actually low fat cheese, or just in the average. You can - compare between countries, brands, whatever you like… - easily create comparison charts - much much more

Web: http://world.openfoodfacts.org Android: (http://android.openfoodfacts.org) iPhone: (http://ios.openfoodfacts.org) Windows Phone: (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/openfoodfacts/9nb...)

We're looking for volunteer contributors and developers from all over the world to: - translate it to more languages - add food from your fridge - enhance the apps and web version

Is there a way to sign in to my account on the Android app, take a bunch of pictures of my food, then sit at my computer to do all the typing while looking at the photos I just took?

Yes, there's a login button in the Android app. We also have OCR and autocompletion to help with the typing.

I'm glad that this article is about actual fraud rather than the much more common (and less interesting) "Processed food isn't real food" type hysteria that is much more prevalent these days.

It is more common because that problem is much more widespread and ultimately much more dangerous for the health of the victims.

When you cook something on your stove, it becomes "processed food". If you have an aversion towards anything you hear is 'processed food', you are basically a chump.

The problem is industrial food is usually made with industrial grade additives: Monosodium glutamate, modified palm oil, various stabilisers, buckets of sugar, etc - I would list more, but I literally threw away the worst offender I had on hand (Pre-made meal-in-a-jar)

How is MSG an industrial grade additive? There's a lot of it in tomatoes.

It occurs naturally in many foods (at varying concentrations), but that doesn't mean we have to smother everything else in it. It makes snacks harder to resist, which is why industry likes it. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Its current usage basically encourages unhealthy eating habits.

It doesn't make snacks any harder to resist than salt.

From a food production standpoint, MSG is a popular additive because it offers an affordable way to enhance the flavor of a wide variety of savory foods. MSG can also be used to reduce the amount of sodium in foods - it contains 30 percent less sodium than table salt, but its flavor-boosting ability keeps low-sodium foods palatable.

All MSG does is add umami flavor, which your body responds favorably to as taste is an indicator of nutrition. So in some way, yes, MSG does make the 'snacks harder to resist', in the same way that literally any flavor makes food harder to resist.

Our body wants sweet/salty/umami/bitter flavors depending on current needs, and naturally gravitates towards foods with those flavors, as taste is a direct indicator of nutritional value.

> All MSG does is add … an indicator of nutrition

I think you've made the point: not-very-nutritious food can be dosed with MSG, and then it seems nutritious.

That's what people object to.

My point is that salt also produces that effect. And sugar. And bitterness, for that matter. Literally every flavor is a biological indicator of nutrition.

MSG is no 'worse' than anything else.

I'm glad you bring up MSG because it's a great example of something that's been repeatedly proven harmless but people still irrationally fear. It also occurs naturally in large amounts in many foods.

People are stupid when it comes to food. It's probably an evolutionary thing, from back when heeding food lore from other people could mean the difference between life and death.

I have severe acidic reflux - I can pretty quickly tell when something is laden with MSG - I literally start gushing acid within few hours. Also the issue is of amount - some processed foods just go nuts

How can it be even more widespread than the practically ubiquitous fraud reported in the article?

Processed food is real food in that you can eat it. That's about it. It's a very bad food in that it decreases consumers' life quality. The industry is horrible in that it is based on deception and misinformation and it thrives on an ignorant consumer base. It also requires a much larger amount of plastic wrapping than non-processed foods. I'm not linking to any studies or statistics, because this is not obscure knowledge.

I start sneezing whenever I eat processed food. I think it's an allergy to preservatives.

There's no test for that. I first noticed it about 5 years ago. After eating Subway, I always got sneezy, and also after drinking beer. I had an allergy test but nothing came up positive.

After years of trial and error, I'm pretty confident when I see a fake juice, condiment, or something commonly canned like olives that I will have a reaction if I eat it.

I should be a food taster for health nuts

Carls Jr sent me to the hospital, twice. Had an horrible allergy to their cheese.

I can eat other cheese fine.

>As with so much regarding food safety, the USDA, which makes the rules, and the FDA, which is meant to enforce them, are nowhere to be found. These institutions routinely cite cost-cutting and low staff.

Hmm. Maybe the better solution is to give consumers legal standing, with massive punitive damages, to sue restaurants to mislabeling food. Even better, make it a strict liability tort (i.e. no need to prove intent or negligence) if the restaurant is notified but doesn't clean up their act. Also, let the restaurants sue up the supply chain.

I bet that after the first restaurant or supplier loses a multi-million dollar lawsuit for pretending to serve Kobe beef or white tuna, the problem will solve itself.

Most of that mislabeling is legal. Unless there is standard set by the USDA/FDA marketing has free reign. I can totally call my salmon "purplefin tuna"

I'm skeptical, but if so, it sounds like another aspect of the law that needs to be changed. Definitions can be tricky, but the difficulty in drawing an exact line doesn't necessarily matter. There will be plenty of cases where the line has clearly been crossed. And sure, give the defendant the benefit of the doubt in those cases where it's a close call.

What stops it from being fraud?

Regarding Italian food, it's important to be aware of how widespread illegal dumping of toxic waste is affecting food production in that country: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/the-mob-made-southen-italy-a-...

Endless deregulation makes people lots of money but is exactly why Europe should never sign TTIP.

My company[1] builds machine learning and AI based quality control and production optimization for food manufacturing...

Would consumers be interested in a food verification service?

For the most part, we don't / wouldn't deal in food-safety, but we could do things like verify the age and provenience of wine, or the terroir of coffee.

Discuss here or shoot me an email[2]!

[1] www.Gastrograph.com [2] jasonCEO [at] ^

I've always been frustrated by the lack of government involvement in situations like this. Not specific to food but businesses in general.

I leave my car parked for an hour past when I'm supposed to - harming no one really - and I get a ticket. Meanwhile blatant fraud gets ignored?

Ferengistan in all its disgusting purity. The profit (or avoiding-cost) motive always prevails.

Enforcement of parking rules by low paid workers should more than pay for itself. Prosecuting food fraud is more expensive for the government, and unlikely to be an election issue.

Believe it or not, it is possible to make good food in the US for cheap, despite what the article says. I was lucky enough to be raised by two people who took cooking very very seriously (and to be fair we did buy olive oil from some family friends who owned a farm in Greece).

Point being that I have eaten all across Asia, Europe, and the Americas and very few restaurants produce food better than what I get when I go home. I suppose that it may be easier to find good ingredients in rural areas (local produce, seafood bought off the dock as the water-men brought it in etc..), such as the one where I grew up, but if you are paying $350 for fake Kobe in NY than you are more interested in the price of your food than the flavor anyway.

The author recommends a few labels from food-certifying organizations, but can't food sellers or manufacturers just slap a logo on there too? Or do these food-certifying organizations' aggressively litigate for misuse of their labels?

At least in Austria, it is like you say - nobody would dare doing this, as this would make them liable. For no really good reason at all, because people probanly cannot distinguish a trusted certificate from a made-up one anyway.

They do - quite aggressively. It lets the localized producers sell at quite a markup, and a lot of the GI/DOC designations are protected at the level of international treaties.

http://www.gourmetretailer.com/top-story-profiles___trends-p...

WIPO and WTO handle a lot of them: http://www.wipo.int/geo_indications/en/

They seem to be more effective because there's a very direct cost/benefit to the GI-protected producers when people infringe. IANAL, but I suspect that because it's a WIPO/WTO treaty issue, it's also probably easier to prosecute than a very generic claim that someone is mislabeling "white tuna", again because the incentives are aligned for producer to show that they're being damaged by the forgery.

US restaurants need not list ingredients. But is it illegal for them to lie? That's an honest question.

In some places, yes. A few sushi spots around here were fined for using not-lobster in their lobster dishes: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-fake-lobster-r...

Eight restaurants paid a total of $19k. That's not a very strong deterrent.

An FDA FAQ tells me:[0]

> Inspections and licensing of restaurants and grocery stores are typically handled by local and county health departments. However, FDA serves as a scientific and technical consultant to state and local regulatory agencies by publishing the FDA Food Code, which sets forth model provisions for keeping food safe in restaurant, cafeteria, and institutional food operations. Most states adopt these model provisions as legal requirements applicable to restaurants and food-service establishments within their jurisdictions.

Looking at Food Code 2013, I don't see anything about ingredient listing for restaurant food. But I do see this at p 102:[1]

> 3-601.12 Honestly Presented.

> (A) FOOD shall be offered for human consumption in a way that does not mislead or misinform the CONSUMER.

> (B) FOOD or COLOR ADDITIVES, colored overwraps, or lights may not be used to misrepresent the true appearance, color, or quality of a FOOD.

[0] http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/Transparency/Basics/ucm194244.ht...

[1] http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/RetailFoodProtect...

Is there even any definition of what “keeping food safe” actually means? And it still would mean nothing as long as those standards aren't being enforced.

I get the sense that it's mostly about foodborne illness.

One could search the CFR, but I'm not up for that today.

Unless there's some sort of Federal law that pre-empts such actions, one could plausibly sue a restaurant on a common-law fraud theory.

Has anyone ever sent anything to a lab to be examined? How would I get started

For the escolar example, would we need to do genetic testing or is there something cheaper?

> would we need to do genetic testing or is there something cheaper?

I would assume that DNA sequencing services are pretty cheap nowadays. You would need to understand basic genetics to be able to request them to sequence sites that suit your needs, and then you would need to interpret the results yourself when you get the data.

23andme does a pretty comprehensive profile for $199, and to figure out the species of a fish, much less sequencing would be needed.

23andme does SNPs, not large scale sequencing. I don't think it knows what to do without a library.

I have actually researched full genome sequencing. That is why I asked if there was a cheaper way to do it.

You need nothing like full genome sequencing to figure out the species of a sample. Just sequencing some mitochondrial D-loop and cytochrome regions will do. I am not sure exactly, but we're talking some hundreds or some thousands of base pairs only.

This story reminds me of the episode on This American Life on doppelgangers, specifically on Calamari Rings. A warning, if you like Calamri Rings, ignorance is bliss.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/484/d...

That illustration of the pig is priceless

I believe you can purchase that illustration as a print for wall decoration purposes. It will be quite a conversation starter.

Can anybody comment on how well food is regulated in Canada? Since moving from the US to the EU I've definitely noticed a difference in food quality. I'll soon be moving to Quebec so I would be interested to hear if Canada is more like the US or EU in this respect.

During the winter, most fresh vegetables in Canada are imported from Mexico and the US. These are mostly breed for shelf life and usually bland. In the summer, local fruit and vegetable can be quite tasty if you know where to shop. The public markets of Montreal are very good (http://www.marchespublics-mtl.com/). You can also subscribe to get weekly organic baskets from local farms during the harvest season (http://www.paniersbio.org/en/).

I will add that for products with nutrition labels, label claims are way stricter in Canada. In the USA, a label claim such as 200mg of Caffiene or 200mg of Sodium must be true at the best before date in order to be valid, but there is no tollerance for how far outside of it the product is when fresh. So 200mg of caffiene could actually mean 400mg of caffiene, with a five year shelf life, so that as the caffiee degrades, the product stays on the shelf long enough to sell, and is still 200mg at expiry. In Canada, a product must be within a percentage of claim value (5-10%) at all times, so things are much more likely to contain what they say they contain in the amount they say they contain it. Further, many products are pre-market regulated (supplements/fortified foods) and/or regulators are on-site full time (meat and some cheese processing) as opposed to the US where there is mostly post-market regulation (ie. a complaint is followed up by an inspector).

Okay, I have to ask. Which brand of Olive Oil that can be found in US stores is actually olive oil? Is there a good resource for finding real foods? Outside that stamp which might only exist for CA originated oil I don't see a good indication in the article.

So, so many of our problems are caused by profit motivated people poisoning the well for themselves and others.

It is truly a shame that our culture is so motivated by money over doing the right thing.

edit:

Also, this article makes it sound exhausting to buy real food. :(

http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/the-colors-we-eat seems relevant in how this goes unquestioned for the most part

see this Tim & Eric song for more information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Re6pZri8Gw

Wow! Can I blame this for my obesity?

You legitimately can (combined with other, related, avenues of blame). Of course, doing so won't remove your obesity.

What good is blame? You can focus on what you know is good for you and improve your health little by little. Blame might keep you from doing that.

Sometimes it really could be a conspiracy.

http://imgur.com/W7AcUDV

Medieval peasants ate 4000 - 5000 calories per day.

As late as the 40s, it was recommended that people eat 3000 calories per day and many men ate 4000 calories per day.

Now it is recommended we eat 2250 calories per day.

Neither of the first two groups are known for being fat. Actually the opposite. They look amazing in photos, all of them.

This is despite many of them eating low quality foods and insane amounts of fats and sweets. Gluttony is not new. Fat people everywhere is new.

So the number of calories we've been absorbing has steadily decreased over time.

It is all physical activity that accounts for the discrepancy?

I'm not confident that is the case. It sounds wrong to me because although I accept that our grandparents were far more physically active than we are it is known that exercise burns calories at a low rate. Exercise has always been a bad way to lose weight. It has always been easier to lose weight by eating less. You could skip the gym for two days by neglecting to eat half a mars bar.

I wonder whether there is some other systemic affect at work. Like the temperature is warmer outside so we burn less calories just living.

I'm sure that's probably wrong, I'm just offering up that there may be some alternative explanation than the conventional one.

Here's another one. Our brains use most calories. Maybe we're using them in less energy intensive ways than we used to. Maybe our brains actually use up more energy when engaged in physical activity for an actual purpose i.e. not mindlessly zoned out on a treadmill and that is a hidden multiplier affect.

Now I'm going to make a sandwich because I'm hungry.

>Medieval peasants ate 4000 - 5000 calories per day. As late as the 40s, it was recommended that people eat 3000 calories per day and many men ate 4000 calories per day.

That's the input, but what's the output? If your hypothetical peasant was burning 6000 cal a day, that's very different if they were burning only 1000 cal.

>I'm not confident that is the case. It sounds wrong to me because although I accept that our grandparents were far more physically active than we are it is known that exercise burns calories at a low rate. Exercise has always been a bad way to lose weight. It has always been easier to lose weight by eating less. You could skip the gym for two days by neglecting to eat half a mars bar.

I don't want to call you out for exaggerating, but you are approaching exaggeration by orders of magnitude. A mars bar is under 300 calories.

For me? a 6', 210lb man? bicycling for one hour at 14-16MPH is gonna burn well north of 900 kcals. (Note, this is completely reasonable at my fitness level, though I need to carry water; I'll consume a litre during that time period, and judging from the condition of my clothing, excrete it from my skin; without it I make it about 20 minutes and then slow to 8mph. As far as I can tell, if you are carrying around as much spare weight as I am, there's no reason to use gels or really worry about eating extra before or during the ride; but the water is essential to performance.)

Check out some numbers for walking:

http://www.nutristrategy.com/caloriesburnedwalking.htm

My point here is just that cardio is a real thing. And it takes time and effort and sweat, (oh my god, the sweat) but it is a real thing, and one of the interesting bits is that the fatter you are, the more you burn doing any cardio activity.

I'd bet money that the increased caloric intake of our ancestors is entirely explained by their increased physical activity.

> I don't want to call you out for exaggerating, but you are approaching exaggeration by orders of magnitude. A mars bar is under 300 calories.

I was making a general point. It is easier to stop eating than to lose weight by exercise. Much easier. Also mars bars have been undergoing food inflation. It's another sinister conspiracy we can actually prove is real. They used to be about 1/3 bigger. The world around you seems a little darker now doesn't it.

> For me? a 6', 210lb man? bicycling for one hour at 14-16MPH is gonna burn well north of 900 kcals.

I should warn you that those machine counters are kind of optimistic. The human body is really good at holding onto calories. We walk and run very efficiently, I think we may even be the most efficient at long distance running in the animal kingdom.

I'm not trying to stop you running or cycling around. I approve of it. It is very good for your health even if it doesn't lose many calories. I think there is also a multiplier affect indirectly coming from exercise in that it elevates mood and this makes you less likely to binge on food. It is however probably not the calories you burned per se that are causing you to lose weight, not unless you're the 1% that actually exercise seriously and continually.

Maybe this is subjective. I don't consider 500 calories a lot of food, but to me it's a significant amount of running. A mouthful of food vs half an hour on a treadmill.

> I'd bet money that the increased caloric intake of our ancestors is entirely explained by their increased physical activity.

I'm not denying our ancestors were very much more physically active than we are. Probably that accounts for at least half the results despite us also eating half or less of the calories we used to.

I think there could be confounding factors. Like a slightly warmer world would presumably mean the inhabitants burn less calories on an ongoing basis. Less obvious factors could invisibly add 50 or 100 calories per day and that would add up over time.

By the way I am not fat! This isn't an attempt to avoid guilt :)

>I was making a general point. It is easier to stop eating than to lose weight by exercise. Much easier.

Now, I've been overweight on and off for much of my adult life, and... that hasn't been my experience. In my experience, if I want to stop gaining I need to cut out sweets and sodas, and that takes some effort and will, but I feel okay replacing my mountain dew with carbonated water and tea. I would classify that as 'easy' - but it doesn't make me lose weight, it just stops the expansion.

My experience has been that I feel... pretty bad if I try to cut beyond just skipping the sweets, the sodas and maybe the fries. I mean, I do lose weight without serious calorie-burning activities, but focus completely goes out the window, and I end up feeling really lethargic, and I become kitten-weak. It's quite possible that this is due to me not balancing the food I do eat correctly, or something of that nature, but the point is that nearly every time I've lost weight through caloric restriction, I stopped because I didn't like the side effects rather than any failure of will

I mean, maybe you are right; my lethargy actually makes it easier to not eat than to eat, but I don't get anything else done, either. I have successfully gotten down to a normal BMI this way, but if that's how being thin feels, I don't really see the point.

Exercise, on the other hand, generally makes me feel better on all fronts right away. I mean, it's still hard for me to stick with it, but when I stop it's always pretty clearly me being a flake or just not setting aside the time or properly prioritizing it, rather than the negative effects that significant caloric restriction seem to have. For me, when I stop exercising, it's nearly always clearly a failure of will. Last time, it was that they shut down my bike path for resurfacing. But I was feeling pretty good; I could take some time off... and yeah, that's how you get fat. That, and allowing myself to eat the incredibly good employer-provided sweets.

I have also gotten down to a normal BMI through exercise and avoiding sweets, and it feels great.

(there are injuries that will throw me off, too; but that's why I bicycle or eliptical rather than running; I ran a lot when I was thin, but as a fat person, trying to run enough to stress the cardiovascular system properly usually resulted in minor injuries that prevented me from running often enough to get into shape. On the bicycle and the eliptical, the limits are my will, my time, and my cardiovascular system.)

>I should warn you that those machine counters are kind of optimistic. The human body is really good at holding onto calories. We walk and run very efficiently, I think we may even be the most efficient at long distance running in the animal kingdom.

I was going off of http://www.bicycling.com/training/weight-loss/cycling-calori... -

In theory, you can put a floor on how many calories you are burning, because you can measure the output. On bicycles, often this is done with strain gauges in the rear freehub, but the idea is that you can put a floor on it; thermodynamics says that you are putting out at least that much energy. Of course, then you can argue about how efficient your body is... and if you really believe that man is an incredibly efficient machine, well, you probably have not seen me engage in any sort of sport.

>Maybe this is subjective. I don't consider 500 calories a lot of food, but to me it's a significant amount of running. A mouthful of food vs half an hour on a treadmill.

well, 500 calories most of the way to a pretty good burger, if you skip the cheese, fries and mayo. I mean, I'm not saying it's a huge meal or anything, but it's not just a mouthful. Double that, and I think one hour on the eliptical while watching silly action movies is totally doable, and you've got a fully loaded fat-man double-burger with bacon and cheese. (I've still gotta skip the fries if I want to lose weight, but I get to eat the burger, which is the best part.)

yeah. I guess I don't really see a half an hour on a treadmill as a huge amount of gym time. I personally have a goal of 5 hours a week of intense (read: I'm dripping with perspiration) cardio every week. And if I keep that up for any period of time, and manage to avoid sweets? I lose weight. And doing any of that at all makes me feel better, even if I fail to meet the goal (which, as evidenced by my current 14 stone weight, has been the case rather more often than not lately.)

Of course, everyone is different and your body probably responds differently than my body does to all of these things. Certainly, if your point is that a half an hour at the gym three times a week probably isn't going to move your BMI very much, I agree, though it is likely to make you a somewhat healthier fat person.

> In my experience, if I want to stop gaining I need to cut out sweets and sodas, and that takes some effort and will, but I feel okay replacing my mountain dew with carbonated water and tea.

I do the exact same thing! I get absurdly cheap sparkling water and leave it chill in fridge. Sometimes I add crystal light lemon or cherry.

> I have successfully gotten down to a normal BMI this way, but if that's how being thin feels, I don't really see the point.

Sure but a chocolate bar just tastes incredible if you haven't had one for a long time. I think sweets are much harder to kick than fats.

> I ran a lot when I was thin, but as a fat person, trying to run enough to stress the cardiovascular system properly usually resulted in minor injuries that prevented me from running often enough to get into shape

Don't bother running! Walking is shown in study after study to make you more creative. Better yet walk in a forest (maybe you saw the plant research thread?). A mysterious journey in the brain happens when physically walking.

> if you really believe that man is an incredibly efficient machine, well, you probably have not seen me engage in any sort of sport.

Take a look at hurling. It's like a sport found in Harry Potter but without broomsticks.

I think it is worth improving physical coordination abilities. You might be bad at it but improving in weak areas should improve seemingly unrelated areas in your brain. Even if it didn't, you will live longer.

> I personally have a goal of 5 hours a week of intense (read: I'm dripping with perspiration) cardio every week.

Trust me, you're the 1%. Your gym's existence depends on the fact.

> I'd bet money that the increased caloric intake of our ancestors is entirely explained by their increased physical activity.

I'd bet that there were other factors involved, like parasites (worms) and lower quality food (inedible/rotten food tends to leave our intestines quickly).

Maybe. I bet, though, that if you made me do the work my grandfather did when he was a youngster, or that my great-grandfather did when he was my age, I'd burn those 4000 calories a day, just 'cause being a fat desk worker, I'm not going to be nearly as efficient, even if I get to keep my 21st century digital healthcare and hygiene.

Nah, blame your diet and caloric intake. You can however possibly blame your allergy! My allergy flares up when I eat out often, haven't been able to isolate it. When I eat at home for long and only home cooked meal, it clears up!

Some people have a bad reaction to escolar, but it does taste really good. Well worth the risk.

Yes, I went to a sushi restaurant that was honest enough to list it on their menu. I only ordered one piece because I was aware of the reported digestion issues, but it was delicious and I had no distress later on.

> That Kobe is probably Wagyu, a cheaper, passable cut, Olmsted says.

I am not sure if something is lost in translation between the article and the books' authors, but that is rubbish. Kobe beef is PDO (which US is not participating internationally), so you can cure ham at home, and call it "best original prosciutto".

Wagyu is a breed of cattle. And depending on the produces/sourcing it may even surpass the beef from Kobe (which also comes from Wagyu animals) in quality. There is nothing that prevents US farmer or Australian one of producing the best beef in the world. Or the best wine, best cured meats, best beer, best cheese, best whatever.

Some people try to capitalize by falsely designating their products as coming from regions that have put centuries into perfecting products. That says nothing about the quality of the underlying product - it depends on the producer.

Kobe beef - for USDA and the like means nothing. You can call your beef Kobe, Kube, Kombe, Kombat, Kohinoor and it will be all the same as long as it is beef.

In the other parts of the world Kobe beef means well - beef produced in Kobe, in a specific way that is of certain quality.

I'm always surprised the Japanese (or more specifically the Japan National Wagyu Registration Association) don't kick up a fuss about the name 'Wagyu' being used for the name of the breed (no matter where it is raised) and not the origin of the meat.

'Wagyu' in Japanese literally means 'Japanese Cow'. I wonder what it would take to name an existing cattle breed 'US Beef', send breeding stock to somewhere with lots of land and cheap labor and starting a new domestically raised 'US Beef' industry.

I think that trademark dilution is in place. Also it is tricky - if it comes to mean Japanese (as the territory), I will just put some third rate cattle on the disputed islands under Russian administration and it will become as Wagyu as they come.

Personally I think they decided to take smaller slice of much bigger pie - if the world gets a taste for Wagyu - there will be a lot of money in the business. And as long as they make sure they are providing among the best stuff - they will always be able to sell everything with a premium.

The article conflates the problem of "the physical item is a bait-and-switch" with the problem of "same thing made the same way, just not in the geographical location with the name". If the only thing that differentiates two food items is the name of the location in which one was made, then that's just pure food wank.

Well it's not as simple as that, because if for example a given wine is produced a few kilometers from the Bordeaux region for example, it's probably similar in quality and you can consider yourself a wise consumer for finding it. However, if it's made in a very different place, the conditions might be different, and tradition will most likely be different, so protected designations of origin (PDOs) make sense in certain markets.

Not always. An onion marketed as a Vidalia onion can only come from Vidalia, Georgia (and a few counties around it [1]). Vidalia onions are different because of the soil used to grow them; they are sweeter and milder than normal onions (and if you take seedling Vidalia onion plants elsewhere, you'll end up with regular onions).

Now, does this make Vidalia onions a different food from onions? I don't know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidalia_onion#Legislation

shutterstock picture to illustrate article about fake food. Irony at its best.

Shutterstock photo to illustrate an article promoting a book warning us about fake food. Best kind of irony.

Can we trust the factual accuracy of this article? It was written for the New York Post, which is a tabloid. It has posted misinformation before.

http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_new_york_posts_disgrace.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post

Reply on news.ycombinator.com