Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation; Jordan Fermanis, The Conversation; Justin Bergman, The Conversation, and Dilpreet Kaur, The Conversation
Food fraud, the centuries-old problem that won’t go away
The Conversation55.8 MB(download)
Dairy farmers used to put sheep brains and chalk in skim milk to make it look frothier and whiter. Coffee, honey and wine have also been past targets of food fraudsters. Can the law ever keep up?
Cultured meat comes from cells in a lab, not muscles in an animal. While regulatory and technological aspects are being worked out, less is known about whether people are up for eating this stuff.
It may come as a shock to discover that businesses are allowed to pay local authorities for advice on environmental health standards and food labelling.
Can you call it meat if it’s been artificially produced? That’s the question cattlemen in the US are asking, and something food regulators will have to grapple with soon when it coms to labelling.
France recently adopted NutriScore, a series of simple colour codes that will allow consumers to easily identify the healthiest foods. But some of the biggest food conglomerates are fighting back.
When the United States was settled, nearly everyone was a farmer. Today only 2 percent of Americans live on farms, and many of us are illiterate about where food comes from or what kinds are healthy.
Food labels aren’t just nutritional information anymore: they’re moral statements about everything from fair trade to palm oil. But let’s not confuse shopping with effective political action.
Microscopic needle-like particles don’t seem like something you’d want to feed a baby. Whether safe or not, the way we deal with nanoscale food additives leaves plenty of other questions.
There is a curious paradox at the heart of the food group’s new nutrition scheme: the less consumers trust Big Food, the less attention they will pay to the labels.
The new country-of-origin labels are supposed to change a confusing system that led to public outrage about hepatitis infections from frozen berries earlier this year. They fall considerably short.
Rather than informing consumer choice, Australia’s year-old health star food rating system is failing customers, and allowing food manufacturers to give an aura of health to junk foods.
Food labelling is a contentious topic that has been going through the mincer for decades. Many of the issues have been designed to aid the consumer, such as the traffic light system, and clearer displays…