I'm far too modest to gloat, but ... over a year ago I ranted about alleged Cold-Pressed, Virgin Olive Oils, and how there were far too many of them on our supermarket shelves for them all to be genuine, and even if they were, they didn't warrant the big ups they were getting over warm, hooker Olive Oils. Well, lo and flippin' behold, this article appeared in today's Guardian.
The Italian fraud squad recently announced they were
investigating allegations that the country's largest olive oil producers
have adulterated Italian oil with cheaper imports from Spain, Greece, Morocco and Tunisia.
Fraud is extensive, particularly adulteration and false labeling. The world's largest former dealer in olive oil, one Domenico Ribatti, plea-bargained his way to 13 months in prison during the 1990s for passing off Turkish hazelnut oil, which he had refined in his own plant, as olive oil. Another prominent importer, Leonardo Marseglia – appropriately based in a town called Monopoli – has variously been accused of selling cheap non-European oils as Italian ones, fudging documents to shirk import tariffs and forming a criminal network to smuggle contraband. Marseglia has denied the charges.
A 2007 EU investigation found that 95% of all known misappropriations of European Union agricultural misappropriations occurred in Italy, telling us something of the culture in which Italian olive oil fraud was taking place.
George Bennell is the managing director of Belazu, which markets a delicious unfiltered olive oil from a small producer northern Spain, among other goods. "I don't know for sure that Spanish olive oil fraud is less common than Italian," he says. "But the fact is, the Spanish produce twice as much olive oil as the Italians, and the Italians consume and export more olive oil than they can produce, so they have to import it."
Olive oil is far from being the only commonly adulterated food finding its way into British supermarkets. A British trading standards officer said last month that "criminals are moving away from drug offences to counterfeiting [food ingredients], because they are looking at severely reduced jail times. You are looking at 10 years plus for drugs, whereas it's half that for counterfeiting." This echoes what one EU investigator told Tom Mueller: "Profits [in olive oil fraud] were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks."
Only last week consumers were warned again about counterfeit vodka, and one recent estimate based on data from the Food Standards Agency suggested that fraud could affect as much as 10% of all the food bought in the UK. This includes "wild" salmon that is actually nothing of the kind – it's estimated one in seven salmon sold as wild have in fact been farmed – to the labeling of products as organic and so on, in order to exploit specific scruples in the customers.
In 2010, a UK businessman was jailed for a $5m scam in which he labelled battery eggs as free range and sold them to retailers including Tesco and Sainsbury's. A few years earlier, an investigation found that basmati rice was being mixed with cheaper rice costing half as much. This kind of thing does appear to be on the rise - when a family friend arrived at Christmas last year with a magnum of Pol Roger, everyone was delighted; upon examination, the label looked to have been printed on a domestic inkjet.
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To be fair, the same article has recently appeared in the local, digital rags here in SF, but let's not forget that this on-the-money RANT from yours truly, plus that other one about Cash 4 Gold, means perhaps I should re-badge this blog as Digital Astrology Jumble.
I certainly shouldn't stop ranting! Despite what you say.
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