Food is one of the largest industries in the world. There are
well over seven billion people on Earth, and we all have to
eat. Every day, fleets of trucks, trains, jets, and ships carry
mountains of food from one side of the planet to the other.
The global food industry is worth countless billions of dollars
every year. It is so vast that no one can keep track of every
part of it.
That’s a recipe for fraud! Wherever products are bought
and sold, some people will try to profit from cheating. In an
industry as complicated as food, it’s all too easy to cheat and
get away with it.The Global Problem of Food Fraud
“Food fraud” is when a seller dishonestly tampers with
food itself, food measurements, or food labels to make food
appear more valuable than it really is. Some sellers cheat the
measurements of the food they sell, such as by injecting
water into meat to make it plumper and heavier. Others se-
cretly blend cheaper ingredients into valuable foods. Cheaper
sugar syrup is sometimes mixed into supposedly pure honey,
for example. Some scammers sell food with fake or mislead-
ing labels. Or, they may sell outright fake foods—cheap imi-
tations disguised as the real thing. In some cases, fake food
isn’t edible. Food fraud can even prove deadly.
Some food trickery is legal; other scams are defi-
nitely crimes. Either way, the disturbing truth is that
quite a bit of the food sold in stores and restaurants
today is deceptive in some way. Almost everyone
alive has been fooled about food. This was not always
the case.The Invention of Fraud
Tens of thousands of years ago, every-
one knew exactly what they were eating.
That’s because they hunted and foraged
for their own food. If they dug up
roots, well, those were definitely roots.
If they killed a mammoth, they knew they
were eating mammoth.
Later, when ancient people began to
grow crops and raise animals on farms, they
still produced and prepared most of their
own food. Even with local trade, there was
little chance of fakery. If one farmer traded
some grain for a neighbor’s goat, both famers
could see if the grain was good and the goat
was healthy. Besides, people tend to avoid cheat-
ing in small communities because they don’t want
to anger the neighbors they rely on for help.
All that changed as soon as merchants startedto buy foods in one place and then sell those foods to
strangers in another place. It’s the business of merchants to
buy for as little as possible, then sell for as much as they can.
The diference is where they make their profits. Unfortu-
nately, misleading customers is one way to increase those
profits. For countless centuries, dishonest merchants have
tricked customers into paying more than they should for
goods of all kinds. Around 3,800 years ago, for example, one
Babylonian merchant took an order for 1080 pounds of top
quality copper ingots. Then he tried to pass of lower quality
copper to his customer instead. However, the customer
was not fooled. He wrote an angry letter on a clay tablet,
demanding a refund from the cheating merchant.Ancient Food Fraud
Ancient people obviously had some ability to detect
shoddy copper. However, it was often impossible to detect
food fakery. Customers had only their own senses to check
the quality of food. If a scammer could fool a customer’s
eyes, nose, and taste buds, the customer would fall for any-
thing.
The Greeks and Romans were all too familiar with the
problem of food fraud. They knew that foods were routinely
“adulterated,” or deceptively mixed with lower quality ingre-
dients. So were other luxury products such as ointments,
medicines, and perfumes. The Roman writer Pliny the
Elder described dozens of commonly adulterated
products, including honey and spices. Pepper, for
example, was shipped at great expense from far
of India. That made it very profitable for scam-
mers to mix pepper with cheaper substances.
The same was true for other expensive spices such
as safron.
Romans were especially irritated by wide-
spread wine scams. It ancient times it was
acceptable to alter the flavor or color
of wines using harmless substances
such as honey or raisins. However,
Pliny was horrified that the wine
faking industry often used poi-
sonous ingredients and “noxious
drugs” to alter wine to “suit our
tastes.” Wine fakery was so
common, Pliny complained,
that even the wealthiest cus-
tomers were unable to buy gen-
uine wines. He marvelled that the
wines with the best reputations
were actually the least safe to
drink. This was because the most
popular and expensive wines
were most often faked—often with
dangerous ingredients.An Ancient Problem
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