167 | The Great Tuna Scam | Chemical Hazards in Paper Drinking Straws | Rescinded Recall (?) |
Plus, a 3-minute tour of Europe’s only mustard mill
The Great Tuna Scam (and what was going on with my salad in New York?);
Packaging corner: drinking straws and hazards in plastic alternatives;
Food Safety News and Resources, including a rescinded recall;
Peek inside a mustard mill;
Food fraud news, emerging issues and recent incidents.
Have you ever heard of a rescinded recall? Me neither! A recall of fresh green onions was rescinded - cancelled - last week after an investigation revealed a laboratory error. The recall was prompted by a positive Salmonella result in a single sample. When sequenced the Salmonella was found to be a genetic match for the laboratory’s positive control strain. Oops. More on that in this week’s Food Safety News Roundup.
Welcome to Issue 167 of The Rotten Apple with seafood fraud, packaging hazards and a peek inside an English mustard factory (imagine what it smells like in there!)
Enjoy.
Karen
P.S. If you know someone who would like this newsletter, please share it with them and help grow our community of food safety champions.
The Great Tuna Scam (and what was going on with my salad in New York?)
Seafood is one of the world’s most fraud-affected food types, and when you think about all the ways you could commit food fraud with seafood, it’s no surprise.
There are the obvious frauds you’ve all heard about, like the practice of switching a cheaper fillet of fish for something more expensive in a restaurant, and less visible frauds such as the use of unapproved veterinary drugs in aquaculture.
There are sneaky cross-border seafood movements, such as the practice of importing shrimp to China, pretending it’s locally produced to get government subsidies, then exporting it again.
There are nefarious practices at sea, with fishing vessel operators ignoring catch quotas and harvest restrictions, encroaching into other countries’ waters and practising modern slavery.
There’s near-shore poaching, such as when shellfish are taken illegally, and provenance fraud, when valuable seafood from a certain location is replaced with the same species from another location.
For example, hairy crabs, a seasonal delicacy in China, are worth 5 to 10 times more if they were raised in Yangcheng Lake. It’s no surprise then that every season there are reports that the total harvest from that lake is significantly smaller than the volume of crabs that claim to be from that lake. The year a Yangcheng Lake authentication barcode was due to be implemented, it was already being faked and used on crabs from other lakes before the harvest had even begun.
Yes, counterfeit crabs are a thing.
It’s not just expensive seafood that’s affected, just last week I reported on counterfeit tinned pilchards, an inexpensive fish, in South Africa. The cans had been relabelled with the name of a premium brand after being rejected by a supermarket chain.
When it comes to adulteration-type fraud, where something is added to a food to make it appear more valuable, seafood is vulnerable to the addition of excess water-holding agents such as sodium tripolyphosphate.
In a recent survey of frozen shrimp in California, 37 percent of samples were affected by short-weighting and 26 percent were overglazed (that is, too much ice surrounding the product).
Other adulteration-type frauds are less common. At least until recently.
However, in June 2024, seafood company executives warned of a new risk. Tuna buyers in the USA and Europe were told to be wary of their overseas suppliers because low-grade tuna is allegedly being ‘masked’ with a concoction of undeclared chemical compounds and gas treatment, a practice they say is common.
The tuna treatments include:
Colour additives, including beet juice concentrate and paprika oleoresin, used to artificially enhance the appearance of low-quality tuna loins;
Ascorbic acid - the resulting product is colloquially known as ‘vitamin tuna’;
Citric acid, beet juice and carbon monoxide;
Soaking in solutions of sodium ascorbate, ascorbic acid, sodium tripolyphosphate (STPP), and sodium bicarbonate to increase the weight of the tuna by 12 to 18 percent.
Although such treatments and additives are not illegal in the USA, they must be declared on the label and the executives warned that some companies are not declaring the treatments or ingredients.
A Vietnamese fish exporter told a journalist from SeafoodSource that treatment of tuna with a combination of citric acid, beet juice, and carbon monoxide – which is legal in the U.S. if labelled but illegal in Europe – gives even bad-quality tuna a vibrant red colour. She estimates that around 60 percent of tuna exported from Vietnam is now treated this way and says the practice began around 5 years ago.
My mysterious salad
I love a good Nicoise salad… a vibrant medley of tender green beans, creamy potatoes, ripe tomatoes, and briny olives, crowned with canned or seared fresh tuna, and hard-boiled eggs.
So when I ordered a Nicoise at a classy-looking cafeteria in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (‘The Met’) during a trip to New York earlier this year, I was expecting something delicious.
The pre-packaged salad I received was not quite what I was expecting. Also, I think I may have been a victim of food fraud.
The ‘tuna’ pieces were slices of very firm, very dry white flesh with no discernable flake but a slight grain and almost no discernable flavour. The food they most resembled, to my mind, was overcooked rolled turkey breast meat. They didn’t seem like fish at all.
I’m not a seafood expert nor am I familiar with the different species of tuna that are sold in the US, but the ‘tuna’ I ate that day bore no resemblance to any type of fish I have ever encountered. Not saying this was food fraud, but it sure seemed strange to me.
[Paid subscribers, if this seems a bit familiar, you received a short version of this story in the food fraud news section of Issue 145]
Packaging Corner
‘Environmentally friendly’ drinking straws contain PFAS forever chemicals
Paper drinking straws and bamboo drinking straws contain significant levels of PFAS, say researchers in Belgium.
Okay, totally not a surprise to any of us who have been following the PFAS-in-food-supply-chains issue over the past few years. But…
Reminder: PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are added to paper-based consumer products to prevent them from becoming greasy or soggy. The worst offenders are fast food containers and microwave popcorn bags.
I’m consistently disappointed to discover that my non-technical friends are shocked that their paper-based coffee cups and serving wares are not made from pure paper. What do they think would happen to a cup made from uncoated and unmodified paper when filled with coffee?
Anyway, surely by now we’ve moved on from using PFAS to achieve water repellency in products like beverage straws?
Apparently not.
The researchers purchased 39 different brands of straws made from a range of materials, including 20 paper straws and 5 bamboo straws, and tested them for 29 individual PFAS compounds. The straws had been manufactured in Europe and Asia.
They found PFAS chemicals in almost all paper-based and bamboo straws, with concentrations varying widely between brands and the highest levels being 7.15 ng/g and 3.47 ng/g in paper and bamboo respectively.
A different group of researchers also reported PFAS problems in ‘environmentally-friendly’ food serving ware, saying “molded products made from plant-based fibers (e.g. bowls, plates, and food boxes) advertised as biodegradable or compostable consistently had the highest levels of PFAS” in their survey of 119 products from 17 countries.
Molded products made from plant-based fibers (e.g. bowls, plates, and food boxes) advertised as biodegradable or compostable consistently had the highest levels of PFAS. IPEN (2023)
Another PFAS researcher, Graham Peaslee, suggests the presence of PFAS in straws could be a surprise to the straw manufacturers. “All the straw manufacturers should take warning and say, ‘Hey, do we use this stuff?’ Because at the moment, they’re not even asking that question,” Peaslee said in an interview with NBC News.
The results have led commentators to question the ‘eco-friendly’ status of paper and plant-based servingware.
But think of the turtles.
Main source: Boisacq, P., Maarten De Keuster, Prinsen, E., Jeong, Y., Lieven Bervoets, Eens, M., Covaci, A., Willems, T. and Thimo Groffen (2023). Assessment of poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in commercially available drinking straws using targeted and suspect screening approaches. Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A, 40(9), pp.1–12. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/19440049.2023.2240908.
🍏 Learn more: An Introduction to PFAS in Food Supply Chains (Issue 73) 🍏
Hazards in non-plastic packaging materials
The benefits of alternatives to plastic packaging, as well as their limitations and potential hazards, are discussed in a new paper in Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety.
New food contact materials pose new hazards as well as being vulnerable to many of the hazards found in conventional packaging. New hazards include the presence of allergenic proteins in bio-based materials, chemical contaminants and microbial hazards in reusable packaging and chemical hazards in recycled materials.
Food Safety News and Resources
My food safety news and resources are expertly curated from around the globe and free from ads, fluff and filler. This week: an unusual situation leads to the cancellation of a recall.
Click the preview below to read.
A 3-minute tour of Europe’s only mustard mill (just for fun)
This low-hype 3-minute video gives us a peek behind the scenes of a mustard-making facility in the United Kingdom.
Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, research and incident reports
📌 Food Fraud News 📌
In this week’s food fraud news:
📌 Olive oil test method;
📌 Analysis fraud;
📌 Carbonated beverages;
📌 Fake oils.
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