Real From Fake: Is There Really Any Harm?

Buying fish was one of my most favorite jobs. Cutting that fish was the second. I find cutting fish a zen place to be and can disappear for hours and never move my feet. We ordered our fish skin on and often whole so we could see what we were buying. Whole fish I knew, but a filet of something white, well, even the fishmonger might find that a challenge.

Olmsted does an excellent job of making a heady and bothersome topic, faking our food sometimes at the risk of our health or life, easy to read and understand.

You don’t need to be a chef or a food purchasing manager for a restaurant to be affected by the choices of someone else somewhere else. What you don’t know can hurt you and there is little better armament for guarding one’s health than knowledge.

Shrimp, nearly everyone’s favorite, might be less wholesome than you prefer.  A sushi fan are you?  There are about even odds that fish you are eating isn’t what you were told it is.  So, what is it?

More than meets the eye

There is more fake food than we know.  Fake doesn’t always mean inedible (but sometimes it does), but fake in that it isn’t what it claims to be.  Champagne can only come from Champagne, France.  Port only from Portugal.  Yet, you can go to your local mega grocery store and buy California Port and Champagne and get nothing like their namesakes suggest.  Fake.  It’s a big problem and one that Congress has been none too eager to help fix, even to go as far as help perpetuate the problem.

Perhaps the most vexing part of the problem, even more so that borrowing names for things that aren’t, the stealing of your money for inferior products at high prices, trusting that the box reads right about what’s in there is that the FDA has apparently little interest in doing what they are supposed to do and there is little we can do to solve that problem.

Is there any way to fix this?

Olmsted’s purpose seems to show the problems with for reals fake food and the only mislabeled or misidentified.  Sometimes those problems lead to real health issues, sometimes just lightening your wallet.

A libertarian solution is the disband the FDA which seems content to do as little as possible and employ 3rd party systems of verification, much like those mentioned in the book who sleuthed out the fish and sushi problem.

Between then and now, those two things almost never happening, being informed, which Olmstead does very well, and attending carefully to what you buy, grow your own, and be vigilant, the fake food in your house can give way to the real stuff and the market pressure to make the good goods will at least exert some pressure in the right places. Complaints might be that the market works too slowly: have you seen the speed of Congress?