121 | When Food Fraud Goes (Horribly) Wrong | Sniffing Supplements |
Plus, what is allergen cross-reactivity and why should we care?
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When food fraud goes (horribly) wrong;
Allergen cross-reactivity;
Food Safety News and Resources - lots of guidance and webinars this week;
“We’re making lobster rolls!” (just for fun);
Food fraud news, emerging issues and recent incidents, including an expected recommendation about sniffing food supplements
I’ve never eaten a lobster roll - a generous portion of freshly cooked lobster tails doused in a buttery sauce and piled onto a crusty white bread roll - but that’s officially on my to-do list after writing this week’s newsletter!
Hi, welcome to issue 121, which features fresh lobster rolls, a quick introduction to allergen cross-reactivity (I tried to make it jargon-free) and the story of a horrible food fraud accident, with lessons for today’s food industry.
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When Food Fraud Goes Wrong
Fraudsters don’t want consumers to die
In 1858, children in Bradford, England began to suffer from vomiting and convulsions. Then they began to die. Initially, doctors suspected cholera, which was common in England at the time.
However, a doctor who attended a household where all five residents had become ill, with two children dead, suspected poisoning. He discovered all had eaten peppermint lozenges purchased from a market stall operated by ‘Humbug Billy’.
Within hours, police were in the streets ringing bells, shouting warnings and going from pub to pub telling people not to eat Humbug Billy’s sweets because “They’re poison”.
“Don’t eat the sweets, they’re poison”
The poisonings, which resulted in 21 deaths and 200 illnesses, turned out to be the result of a terrible mix-up with a food fraud adulterant.
Cheap sweets made with undeclared fillers
In the 19th Century, sugar was expensive and the confectioner who made the lozenges had devised a way to save money by replacing some of the sugar in his recipes with plaster of Paris, a fine white gypsum powder: calcium sulfate hemihydrate.
Plaster of Paris, though not edible, is neither toxic nor corrosive, so its use as a food adulterant had likely gone unnoticed in the sweets for many years. Such use of plaster of Paris was even said to be “common practice” at the time.
Food fraud perpetrators typically choose innocuous fillers which won’t harm consumers when ‘bulking up’ foods to increase profits. Honey with added sugar syrups, milk with added water, grated hard cheese (‘parmesan’) with extra cellulose free-flow agents, and olive oil with added vegetable oil are food frauds that are thought to occur commonly, and are perpetrated by adding a ‘safe’ filler (‘diluent’) to increase the volume of the genuine food for economic gain.
Occasionally, however, ‘safe’ adulteration activities can go terribly wrong.
Deliberate fraud, accidental harm
In China in 2007 doctors noticed an alarming increase in the number of babies with kidney disease and injuries. These were finally traced to the presence of melamine powder in infant formula. The adulteration seemed to have been taking place at various points across multiple supply chains and was perpetrated by multiple independent people over at least two years (source).
The melamine was used to ‘trick’ protein tests, making milk appear to have more protein, thereby increasing the price sellers could get for their milk. It seems that the adulteration initially went unnoticed by formula makers and food safety officials before the alarm was raised.
Independent Chinese media outlet Caijing later speculated that low-grade ‘scrap’ melamine powder, containing high concentrations of dangerous impurities including cyanuric acid, and costing less than one-tenth the price of pure melamine, could have replaced more expensive pure melamine as the adulterant in 2007, contributing to the rise in illnesses at that time.
Reports suggest that milk farmers were offered ‘protein powder’ additives to help them pass milk quality-control tests and were unaware that these ‘additives’ were unsafe. If the reports are correct, the harm caused to babies was accidental.
Fraud perpetrators do not aim to hurt people with their fraud, because it greatly increases the likelihood they will be caught. After years of apparently undetected adulteration, the Chinese government intervened when the extent of the illnesses in China became known. Official counts put the number of affected babies at more than three hundred thousand. One of the people responsible was executed by firing squad.
Likewise, turmeric traders in Bangladesh were horrified to learn that their practice of adding lead chromate to turmeric was harming their workers and children. The adulteration was deliberate, but the harm they caused was unintentional.
Similarly, detectives who investigated the Bradford sweets poisonings discovered that the confectioner had not intended to hurt anyone. The plaster of Paris adulteration was unethical but not particularly harmful, at least not until the confectioner himself fell victim to a terrible accident.
A terrible accident
On the day the peppermints were made, the confectioner sent an employee to collect his usual supply of plaster of Paris, 12 pounds, from a pharmacist. The pharmacist was sick and unable to dispense the plaster himself, so directed his apprentice to collect the powder from one of two unmarked casks of white powder in the store.
One cask contained plaster of Paris and one cask contained arsenic. The apprentice chose the wrong barrel.
The sweetmaker was soon using the arsenic to make the lozenges, quickly becoming ill himself, but continuing to work. Analysts later found enough arsenic in just one lozenge to kill a person “several times over”.
When the stallholder Humbug Billy picked up his order of the tainted sweets from the confectioner he negotiated a discounted price because they were a darker colour than usual. Police who visited his house during their investigations found him sick in bed from eating the sweets.
Could this happen today?
This incident inspired new laws for drug dispensing in England, and food adulteration laws were also passed in 1875. Modern chemical handling laws prohibit the storage of toxic powders in unlabelled containers and the unregulated dispensing of bulk quantities of poison by unqualified workers.
Sadly, though, accidents like this continue to occur. Just last month, investigators revealed the cause of an 800-person food poisoning outbreak in Finland was the (presumably accidental) presence of ten times more of the chemical preservative calcium propionate in tortillas than usual.
In 2022, hundreds of children died after the toxic liquid ethylene glycol was allegedly used as an adulterant in propylene glycol sold to pharmaceutical companies for use as a humectant in cough syrup.
Prevention of such disasters is challenging because it requires education for food fraud perpetrators about the dangers of certain adulterants. This has been done successfully with lead chromate in turmeric for some spice traders in Bangladesh (see Issue 99).
In short:
🍏 Food fraud perpetrators are more likely to get caught if consumers are harmed, and therefore do not deliberately use toxic adulterants 🍏 Twenty one people died suddenly in England in 1858 after eating adulterated sweets 🍏 The adulterant was supposed to be plaster of Paris, but poisonous arsenic was accidentally used instead 🍏 Adulteration-type food fraud has caused accidental harm to consumers of turmeric (lead chromate), infant formula (melamine) and, perhaps, children’s medicated syrups (ethylene glycol) 🍏 Prevention is challenging due to the clandestine nature of food adulteration operations 🍏
Main sources (other sources are linked inline):
The Halloween sweets that poisoned Bradford. (2023). BBC News. [online] 31 Oct. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-67067171.
Wikipedia. (2022). 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Bradford_sweets_poisoning.
🍏 Did you know? Another form of gypsum, similar to plaster of Paris, is legitimately used as a coagulant in the production of Chinese-style tofu 🍏
Allergen Cross-reactivity: What is it and why should we care?
What is allergen cross-reactivity?
Allergen cross-reactivity in humans occurs when proteins in different substances share similar structures, leading the immune system of an allergic person to respond to a non-allergenic substance as if were the known allergen. It can cause allergic reactions to related allergens, even if a person is exposed to only one of them. Common examples include certain pollens cross-reacting with fruits and latex with fruits such as avocado or banana.
In food testing, allergen cross-reactivity refers to the potential for diagnostic tools, like immunoassays, to inaccurately detect allergens due to shared protein structures, similar DNA sequences or interference from other food components. For instance, a test designed to identify a specific allergen might also react to a structurally similar but different allergen, leading to false positives.
Known cross-reactivities include peanut with pulses and mustard with mugwort pollen or other seeds such as sesame or poppy seeds.
What happens when cross-reactions occur?
There can be serious consequences for allergenic individuals if they are inadvertently exposed to a cross-reactive allergen. The remainder of this post is about cross-reactivity in analytical testing.
One serious outcome of cross-reactivity arises when a false positive test for an unlabelled common human food allergen prompts a recall. Recalls are extremely costly for food businesses, damaging reputations and customer relationships as well as costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In such a scenario, a food product may be falsely identified as being contaminated with peanut, for example, when in fact the food contains some other legume. If further testing is not done to confirm which species is present, a costly food safety recall may ensue.
Mitigations
Being aware of cross-reactivities before conducting food testing can help prevent unnecessary recalls. If an allergen test kit shows a positive result, further testing by an experienced laboratory should be considered to rule out false positives from cross-reactivity.
Expert laboratories can advise of known cross-reactivities and can use next generation (DNA) sequencing (NGS) to investigate and differentiate between closely related species, thereby avoiding unnecessary recalls.
Before conducting allergen tests, have a plan for what you will do in the event of a positive result.
🍏 This week’s food safety roundup includes links to a free webinar which discusses new developments in allergen test methods 🍏
Food Safety News and Resources
Our news and resources section includes not-boring food safety news plus links to free training sessions, webinars and guidance documents.
This week’s highlight: diners face a hepatitis A timebomb
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Food Safety News and Resources | January
Lynja: We’re Making Lobster Rolls! (Just for fun)
This week’s food fraud news includes reports of a multi-ton cross-border lobster smuggling operation which, if successful would have resulted in the evasion of taxes and tariffs worth HK$1 million.
That got me thinking about eating lobster. Which lead me to Lynja’s cooking channel. I challenge you not to salivate at the end.
***Warning, multiple crustaceans were tortured and killed during the filming of this video***
What you missed in last week’s email
Cinnamon lead levels (big scary numbers, plus takeaways for food professionals)
Verification versus validation: a quick primer with King Canute
Chocolate croissant pug
Food fraud news, emerging issues and recent incidents
Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, horizon scanning and incident reports
📌 Food Fraud News 📌
An unexpected authenticity (sniff) test
A piece of somewhat contrarian advice crossed my desk last month, via the Herbalgram Botanical Adulterants Monitor. It suggests that consumers might want to check the authenticity of sand ginger powder supplements by
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