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A serial (cereal) offender is behind bars in Italy

News from Malta today tells the story of a serial food fraudster who has been detained over the export of counterfeit organic grains and oil seeds.  Malta Today reports that 350 000 tons of corn, soybeans, wheat, rapeseed (canola) and sunflower seeds worth €126 million and sold as organic over a period of six or more years probably weren’t organic at all.  Italian investigators found that the grains were grown in Moldova, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, certified as organic or bio by untrustworthy regulators in those countries and purchased by a Maltese company which then exported them to Italy.

The man behind the Maltese company is awaiting trial. Previously, he has been arrested over a shipment of GMO corn in 2014, implicated in counterfeit organic food scandals in 2011 and was tried for falsification of an invoice in 2010. Could we call him a cereal (serial) offender?

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Chicken flavoured nail polish and other food trivia

It’s always a joy to stumble across new and silly food facts as I take my daily stroll through the huge inter-web-universe of food industry news.  Here are my favourites from the last few weeks:

In Japan you can purchase sake-flavoured KitKats containing 0.8% alcohol.  Because sake and milk chocolate have always seemed like a great match…?

Pink peppercorns are the berries of a Peruvian tree and not genetically related to other types of peppercorns, despite the fact that green, white and black pepper all comes from the same flowering vine (Piper nigrum).  Green peppercorns are unripe berries, black peppercorns are dried berries and white peppercorns have had their dark outer husks removed prior to drying.

The famous fried chicken chain KFC plans to release flavoured nail polish that you can lick.  It has made two flavours available for market testing in Hong Kong and residents of that city can choose which will go into production; Hot & Spicy or Original.  This is not a prank; they really have developed chicken flavoured, lickable nail polish.  And it comes in two colours.

Watermelons looked really weird in the 17th century.  And probably didn’t taste that great. This painting by Giovanni Stanchi from around 1650 is of a watermelon of the day.  Who says genetic engineering is a modern-day phenomenon; we have been doing it for centuries.

Stanchi via Wikimedia Commons
Stanchi via Wikimedia Commons

Animals known as bearcats or binturong in South East Asia have popcorn flavoured urine.  Researchers confirmed this by squeezing 33 sedated binturongs, which are about the size of raccoons, to obtain samples for chemical testing.  Yes; squeezing.  The researchers published a paper in the prestigious journal Science of Nature which prompted one journalist to be tempted by the unfortunate pun ‘passing the popcorn’.

 

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The FDA doesn’t want you to use the term GMO

The US FDA has published guidance for food manufacturers about labeling of food derived from  genetically engineered plants.  The guidance document discourages the use of the acronym GMO (genetically modified organism), preferring instead the terms ‘genetically engineered’, ‘bioengineered’ or ‘modern biotechnology’.

The intention of the guidance is to prevent claims that could mislead consumers, and the guidance reminds food businesses that it is possible to mislead consumers with information and also with absence of information.

So why not use GMO?  Firstly ‘genetically modified’, when used in the strictest sense, applies to almost all of the plant and animal foods we regularly eat.  Traditional selective breeding is a form of genetic modification that has been used by humans for thousands of years to improve the foods we grow.  When viewed in this context, it is difficult to think of a food that isn’t ‘genetically modified’; the FDA gives the example of berries picked from wild varieties of bushes.   With this in mind the term genetically modified becomes open to all kinds of interpretation and wider interpretation means more room for any claim to be misleading.

Secondly, very rarely to do we eat foods that contain actual ‘organisms’, live-culture fermented foods such as yoghurt being the exception.  Mixed foods and highly refined foods do not contain organisms and even whole produce comes into question; is a tomato an ‘organism’ or is it merely food derived from the organism known as a tomato plant?  Although the FDA acknowledges that consumers can understand the intention related to the use of the phrase GMO, the guidance document is quite specific about  encouraging food manufacturers to use alternative phrases to avoid confusion.

It all sounds like a good plan from a legal and compliance perspective, but given that claims related to GMOs are used for the purpose of marketing foods, I have to wonder what the marketing teams of food businesses are going to say when told to replace ‘non-GMO’  with a phrase like this one suggested in the FDA Guidance document:  “our tomato growers do not plant bioengineered seeds”.  Catchy, huh?

The full guidance can be found here.