Issue #66 | The Surprising Source of Methanol in Illegal Drinks | GMO Foods (Out There) | Metal Detectors | Innovative Farms |

2022-11-28

Welcome to The Rotten Apple, an inside view of food integrity for professionals, policy-makers and purveyors. Subscribe for weekly insights, latest news and emerging trends in food safety, food authenticity and sustainable supply chains.

• GMO foods - which foods are actually ‘out there’?

• Methanol in food fraud, the surprising way it gets into illicit drinks

• Supplement for paying subscribers: Metal Detectors and X-Ray Systems Knowledge Base

• Just for fun: Farming innovations on film

• News and Resources Roundup

• Food fraud incidents, updates and emerging issues

Hello!

Welcome to Issue 66 of The Rotten Apple. If you’re new here, thank you for joining me. I do the hard work for you, by scouring food safety news from all over the world every week, to bring you only the most focused, relevant and interesting.

Here’s something interesting I learned last week:

In a metal detector, ferrous wire is hard to detect if it’s lying at a 90-degree angle to the flow of product and easier to detect when aligned along a conveyor belt or product flow. Non-ferrous wire is the opposite: easier to detect when lying at 90 degrees.

I learned that tasty tidbit while putting together this month’s supplement for paying subscribers. Find a link below.

Last week was 🦠 antimicrobial resistance 🦠 awareness week and the World Health Organisation published guidelines about antimicrobials in food production. There’s a link to the guidelines in this week’s news update, but here’s the short version: don’t use antimicrobials that are important to human health in food-producing animals; stop using the ones that are in use, and don’t start using new ones when they are made available. Der.

In this week’s email, I discover which foods (exactly) are approved GMOs… plus what’s the difference between ethanol and methanol in a food fraud context. And (just for fun), a short video featuring 11 high-tech farms.

As always there’s a round-up of food fraud incidents and horizon scanning news for paying subscribers at the end, plus an 🎧 audio version 🎧, so you can catch up while on the go.

Have a great week,

Karen

P.S. Thank you for sharing this newsletter and its contents with your friends and colleagues. More shares helps me to keep writing and publishing high-quality, ad-free content for our international community.

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GMO Foods (Which Ones, Exactly?)

Earlier this year, the USA implemented a new labelling rule for GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) foods. The rule says that any food that contains detectable genetic material which has been modified using laboratory techniques - as opposed to conventional breeding - has to be labelled as “bioengineered”.

According to one source, the rule is being “widely ignored” by industry.

Worse still, the word “Bioengineered” is not well understood by consumers and critics complain that loopholes in the rule mean that many foods that contain genetically modified ingredients don’t need to be labelled as such.

Around the world, misinformation about GMOs is at epic levels, with a new study showing that 250 million people were likely exposed to misinformation about GMOs in the past two years.

In the USA, there are just 12 food crops that are approved for use as foods AND that are available to buy and eat, plus two more animal foods that are approved but, according to the FDA, “not widely available”.

• Alfalfa

• Apples

• Canola

• Corn

• Cotton (edible cotton-seed oil)

• Papaya

• Potatoes

• Soybeans

• Summer squash

• Sugar beets and

• Pink pineapple (see our Just for Fun piece on pink pineapples in Issue #35)

• Norfolk Plant Sciences’ Purple Tomato

AquaBounty Salmon and GalSafe pig are approved in the USA but, according to the US FDA are “not widely available”.

🍏 Source: The FDA’s factsheet “Where Can You Find GMOs” 🍏

Gene-edited products (GE), which are different to classic ‘GMOs’ (read about the differences in Issue #4), are in development around the world, with just a few foods available on the market now, including the ones listed below. Thanks to Popping and Diaz-Amigo, writing in NewFoodMagazine, Issue 5 2022, for this list.

• maize with a modified starch composition (approved in Canada),

• red bream fish that makes more meat (Japan),

• tiger Pufferfish (Japan)

• a gene-edited tomato (Japan).

Different countries have different rules about whether GMOs can be used for/in food and about the labelling requirements if they are used. More about that here (pdf link).

Further Reading

🍏 The USDA has an interactive decision tree quiz/tool which helps food businesses know whether their foods need to be labelled as Bioengineered.:  https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be/zingtree 🍏

🍏 Issue #4 of The Rotten Apple has a deep dive into the definitions, regulatory status and labelling rules of genome-edited foods. Check it out. 🍏

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Monthly Supplement: Metal Detection and X-ray Inspection Systems

I’ve got to admit, I didn’t have a clue about how metal detectors worked before I set out to create this month’s supplement for paying subscribers; a knowledge base with unbiased, free-from-jargon information for food professionals.

Click the link to see what we learned.

Metal Detectors and X-Ray Systems Knowledge Base

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Methanol - a Deadly Food Fraud Ingredient

It seems that almost every week there is a new report of people dying after consuming illicit alcohol. Just last month, eight people died and 40 people were otherwise affected by methanol poisoning linked to the consumption of commercial artisanal beverages in Ecuador; clandestinely produced ‘bamba’ drink containing methanol caused the deaths of 22 people in Peru; and a counterfeit version of a branded beverage containing methanol caused the deaths of 54 people, also in Peru. That’s a pretty big death toll, just for October.

It is the methanol in illicit and ‘fake’ drinks that turns them deadly. But the source of the methanol is actually a bit of a mystery in these fraud-affected drinks.

Methanol and ethanol both belong to the class of chemical compounds known as ‘alcohols’. Ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol, is naturally present in beer, wine and spirit drinks, and is safe(ish) to consume in small quantities. Methanol is not safe to consume and causes poisoning and death.

Ethanol, as well as being an important component of beverages, is the main component of industrial alcohol which is used as a gasoline additive and as an industrial solvent and ingredient in the manufacture of drugs, plastics, lacquers, cleaning products and cosmetics. It is manufactured by fermenting plant materials such as sugarcane, sugar beet and corn.

Methanol, or methyl alcohol, produces highly toxic formaldehyde and formic acid when metabolised in the human liver, causing convulsions, stupor, coma and death from drinking methanol. Like ethanol, methanol can be made by fermentation, but for industrial uses, it is more often made by chemically combining carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

When methanol is produced by fermentation, the raw materials are cellulose-containing plant materials like wood, whereas carbohydrate-containing plants are fermented to make ethanol.

Methanol is an important building block for many commercially important compounds such as dyes, resins and pharmaceuticals. It is also used for rendering industrial ethanol unfit for consumption, in a process called ‘denaturing’.

Confusingly, in some countries, ethanol is marketed as ‘methylated spirits’ for use as a household cleaner, cooking fuel or solvent.

How does methanol get into ‘fake’ and illicit liquor?

When people are poisoned or killed by methanol-containing beverages, it’s usually assumed that the methanol was added deliberately by the person who manufactured the beverage. But that assumption is unlikely to be correct.

It’s important to remember that food fraud perpetrators and makers of clandestine (‘bootleg’) liquor do not want to get caught. If people become violently ill or die after consuming their products, they run a much higher risk of getting caught. This means that the presence of methanol in illicit or counterfeit liquor is almost certainly unintentional.

Methanol can get into beverages in four ways:

1. The beverage maker thinks they are adding (safe) ethyl alcohol to their product but accidentally adds (not safe) methyl alcohol after being confused by the name or label.

2. The beverage maker adds industrial methanol, not realising that it is different to industrial ethanol.

3. The beverage maker uses industrial ethanol which has been denatured with methanol to make the beverage.

4. Poorly controlled fermentation conditions produce methanol while the beverage is being fermented.

Methanol can occur in the production of traditionally fermented beverages when the fermentation is contaminated by microorganisms that break down celluloses and pectins, including yeasts, fungi and bacteria.

Scientists who investigated this in 2016 concluded that poorly controlled fermentations were a more likely source of methanol in traditionally fermented illicit beverages than deliberate addition of methanol. They assessed a range of traditional beverages and found agave drinks, arak, plum wine, grape wine, cachaca and cholai drinks to be vulnerable to methanol contamination.

In short

🍏 People who make illicit beverages, either ‘bootleg’ liquors, or counterfeit versions of premium brands, are perpetrating food fraud. 🍏 Food fraud perpetrators try to avoid causing poisoning and death of their consumers as this increases their chance of being caught. 🍏 Perpetrators who add industrial alcohol products to illicit beverages can accidentally contaminate their products with methanol, by mistaking pure methanol for pure ethanol or by using ethanol that has been denatured with methanol. 🍏 Methanol can occur naturally during the fermentation of alcoholic drinks. 🍏 Too much methanol in a beverage leads to the poisoning of consumers. 🍏

Sources:

Methanol contamination in traditionally fermented alcoholic beverages: the microbial dimension

https://www.britannica.com/science/ethanol

https://www.britannica.com/science/methanol

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News and Resources

Our news and resources section features a carefully handcrafted selection from around the globe and is free from filler, fluff and promotional junk. Click the preview box below to access it.

News and Resources Roundup

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High Tech Food Farms (Just for Fun)

Thought you might like this safe-for-work 13 minute video featuring innovations in indoor farming, dairy and poultry farming.

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What you missed in last week’s email

·       Big questions after the US FDA declares cultured chicken safe

·        Europol’s latest food fraud roundup

·        Food service worker on TikTok, your blood may boil

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Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, incident reports, and emerging issues, plus an 🎧 audio version 🎧 (with free cicada sounds)

📌 Food Fraud News 📌

An executive at the United Kingdom’s National Food Crime Unit said last week, of an operation conducted as part of Europol’s Opson XI, “While the results of this year’s operation have