a study commissioned by the Grocery Manufacturers Association estimates certain types of food and consumer product fraud cost the global food industry $10 billion to $15 billion annually
每年給大家帶來的損失100-150億美元,不大不小吧。為什麽美國西方製度這麽嚴,消費者意識這麽高還是有黑心食品?因為有利可圖,正如《食品和營養》報道引用一位專家所說的:“哪有金錢,那就有罪惡;哪兒有大金錢,那就有大罪惡(Where there is money, there’s crime; where there is big money, there’s big crime)。”
“In former days, we had fake champagne, vodka, Johnnie Walker whisky. What we see now is day-to-day consumer goods, [things like] tomato juice and orange juice. You wouldn’t expect it for a low-priced item like tomato juice — for God’s sake, why would they fake it? The answer is people don’t expect it to be cheated, and the profit is very low, but people drink more tomato juice than champagne.”
Tomato juice is usually adulterated by diluting a famous brand name with a cheaper product. Chocolate, coffee and cookies are also targets.
So a fish that was “caught 50 miles off the north coast of Scotland has been to China, has been to South Korea, and probably been to a couple of countries in between. What arrives back in a port in Scotland is a 7.5kg block of fish and you’re told, ‘That’s cod.’” A number of different fish frauds can be committed — Elliott calls them the “sins of sea fish” — substituting species, bulking up fillets with salty water, switching bulk catch for line-caught labels, deceiving on quotas.
又是一個大忽悠。美國超市海鮮大多進口,南美,亞洲(越南菲律賓之類),不少是人工飼養(這個倒是明確標明)。不過大家不留意的是假貨很多,“98 percent of the dishes tested actually contained another fish entirely”。就是說,魚沒有一包是貨真價實的。例子:
a sushi restaurant in Santa Monica, California that was busted serving endangered whale meat as fatty tuna
"More than 10,000 tonnes and one million litres of hazardous fake food and drink have been seized in operations across 57 countries in an INTERPOL-Europol coordinated initiative to protect public health and safety"
按照“海鮮作假”,“哪兒油水大哪錢多”的想法,一個大目標是日本壽司。"I hate to tell you this," journalist Larry Olmsted said over the phone, "but the sushi you are ordering is probably fake, or at least mislabeled. And I wouldn't eat it."
Cage-free eggs. Upscale wines. Ground coffees. Vanilla extract. Nutrient-rich “superfoods” of the moment (pomegranate juice, for example). Organic anything. Certain products like these that are in high demand and short supply often command a premium price tag. At the same time, higher price points make them ripe for manipulating, particularly when changes to the products can be made that are too subtle to detect.