Monday, 7 July 2014
Testing to target food fraud - ABC Rural (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Testing to target food fraud - ABC Rural (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
Testing to target food fraud
ABC Rural
Cath McAloon
Updated Tue 24 Jun 2014, 4:43pm AEST
French butcher prepares horse meat Photo: The substitution of horsemeat for beef in Europe last year led to more Australian companies testing food products. (AFP: Christophe Simon)
Audio: Food testing ramps up (ABC Rural)
Map: Melbourne 3000
From fake honey, to horsemeat dressed up as beef, cases of food fraud are increasingly making headlines.
While food fraud is causing concern for consumers, it's also a big problem for retailers and food manufacturers and the industry is responding by ramping up testing regimes and developing new technologies that can identify dodgy ingredients and spot fake food.
Michael Jackson, managing director of the Australian Wool Testing Authority (AWTA), which owns independent food testing laboratory Agrifood Technology, says testing for food quality, nutritional values, allergens, chemical residues and toxins, as well as fraud, is becoming more common in the Australian food industry.
"I think the retailers, particularly, who are selling goods are looking at their suppliers to insist that they've got professional Q.A (quality assurance) systems in place to make sure there won't be problems of a food safety nature when you have the embarrassment of product recalls and all the things that go with that, not to mention potentially harming people," Mr Jackson said.
He says international events, like the horsemeat substitution scandal, which saw horsemeat passed off as beef in pre-packaged products like lasagne in Europe last year, often lead to a spike in Australian companies requesting tests of food products.
"We all know about the horsemeat substitution scandal and that was the type of event that provoked a lot of retailers in Australia to get some testing done, to check and double check that they were not inadvertently part of that food fraud scheme," Mr Jackson said.
Matthew Hill, a food chemist working for technology company PerkinElmer, selling mass spectrometers and infra-red spectrophotometers that can detect minute levels of impurities in food products, says demand for the technology is increasing in the wake of international food fraud scandals.
"We've seen overseas various issues within certain sectors of the food market where people have been diluting down products, or been introducing supplements that are either harmful to the environment, or human health, or not what people are paying for, they are diluting down products so they can get better value through their supply chain," Mr Hill said.
He says testing equipment is currently being used to detect olive oil that has been diluted down with soya bean oil and pomegranate juice diluted with red grape juice.
PerkinElmer has also developed specific testing equipment to analyse milk powder, and Mr Hill says its selling well in China, where several babies died in 2008 after consuming milk powder that had been tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.
Mr Hill predicts the technology will become more sophisticated and able to detect smaller particles.
"I think it will be a case of the spectrophotometers will get more and more sensitive.
"We can see right down to levels of detection that were never thought of previously. It's not too long ago when seeing parts per million in a solid sample was extremely difficult and now we've got products that can see residues of pesticides in soils, waters and food down to sub-part per billion level.
"It's just as the technology advances, the limits of detection will advance as well."
Topics: food-processing, livestock, agricultural-marketing, melbourne-3000
Testing to target food fraud
ABC Rural
Cath McAloon
Updated Tue 24 Jun 2014, 4:43pm AEST
French butcher prepares horse meat Photo: The substitution of horsemeat for beef in Europe last year led to more Australian companies testing food products. (AFP: Christophe Simon)
Audio: Food testing ramps up (ABC Rural)
Map: Melbourne 3000
From fake honey, to horsemeat dressed up as beef, cases of food fraud are increasingly making headlines.
While food fraud is causing concern for consumers, it's also a big problem for retailers and food manufacturers and the industry is responding by ramping up testing regimes and developing new technologies that can identify dodgy ingredients and spot fake food.
Michael Jackson, managing director of the Australian Wool Testing Authority (AWTA), which owns independent food testing laboratory Agrifood Technology, says testing for food quality, nutritional values, allergens, chemical residues and toxins, as well as fraud, is becoming more common in the Australian food industry.
"I think the retailers, particularly, who are selling goods are looking at their suppliers to insist that they've got professional Q.A (quality assurance) systems in place to make sure there won't be problems of a food safety nature when you have the embarrassment of product recalls and all the things that go with that, not to mention potentially harming people," Mr Jackson said.
He says international events, like the horsemeat substitution scandal, which saw horsemeat passed off as beef in pre-packaged products like lasagne in Europe last year, often lead to a spike in Australian companies requesting tests of food products.
"We all know about the horsemeat substitution scandal and that was the type of event that provoked a lot of retailers in Australia to get some testing done, to check and double check that they were not inadvertently part of that food fraud scheme," Mr Jackson said.
Matthew Hill, a food chemist working for technology company PerkinElmer, selling mass spectrometers and infra-red spectrophotometers that can detect minute levels of impurities in food products, says demand for the technology is increasing in the wake of international food fraud scandals.
"We've seen overseas various issues within certain sectors of the food market where people have been diluting down products, or been introducing supplements that are either harmful to the environment, or human health, or not what people are paying for, they are diluting down products so they can get better value through their supply chain," Mr Hill said.
He says testing equipment is currently being used to detect olive oil that has been diluted down with soya bean oil and pomegranate juice diluted with red grape juice.
PerkinElmer has also developed specific testing equipment to analyse milk powder, and Mr Hill says its selling well in China, where several babies died in 2008 after consuming milk powder that had been tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.
Mr Hill predicts the technology will become more sophisticated and able to detect smaller particles.
"I think it will be a case of the spectrophotometers will get more and more sensitive.
"We can see right down to levels of detection that were never thought of previously. It's not too long ago when seeing parts per million in a solid sample was extremely difficult and now we've got products that can see residues of pesticides in soils, waters and food down to sub-part per billion level.
"It's just as the technology advances, the limits of detection will advance as well."
Topics: food-processing, livestock, agricultural-marketing, melbourne-3000
Sunday, 6 July 2014
Demonization By Litigation: Food Ingredient Makers Face Frivolous Charges - Forbes
Demonization By Litigation: Food Ingredient Makers Face Frivolous Charges - Forbes
Glenn G. Lammi
, Contributor
When some future legal scholar writes the history of how the public health activist-plaintiffs’ bar-government regulator axis of paternalism tried to use litigation to alter America’s food choices, S.F. v. Archer Daniels Midland ADM +0.99% et al.may
not even merit a mention. But for now, it stands as the most notorious
illustration of how a baseless lawsuit can effectively demonize one
disfavored food ingredient.
The Complaint. S.F.
is the mother of S.E.F., a fourteen-year old who suffers from Type 2
diabetes. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and the other three defendants (Cargill , Ingredion INGR -0.25% Inc., and Tate & Lyle
Ingredients Americas) make up the entire corn refiners industry. They
refine corn into, among other things, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a
food ingredient public health activists have long vilified. In her
complaint, S.F. rattled off inflammatory allegation after another,
including such unsubstantiated charges as “HFCS is a toxin.” She
eventually got around to asserting that HFCS is “unreasonably dangerous”
and caused her daughter’s diabetes. She demanded $5 million in damages.
The suit achieved its immediate, and perhaps only, goal of garnering
sympathetic media attention. Most reports parroted the plaintiff’s
outlandish statements and quoted professional food activists who are
attacking HFCS in others venues, such as before the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). Of course only scant reporting has been done on
the suit since, with just a few stories in the trade press about the
defendants’ motions to dismiss, documents which have effectively exposed
the suit as legally and factually baseless.
Undeniable Legal Flaws. The legal flaws in the plaintiff’s case, detailed in the defendants’ initial motion to dismiss and their November 1 reply memo, are abundant and clear, so we’ll only briefly summarize them here:
to the plaintiff’s motion to amend her complaint. How often does one
read a legal document that references Darth Vader, Superman, Stephen
Colbert, Men In Black (1 and 3), and smoking grass? All those
references arise in the context of the defendants’ dismantling of the
plaintiff’s proposed expert, celebrity anti-sugar crusader Dr. Robert
Lustig.
Dr. Lustig believes that “sugar is the most destructive force in the
universe” (a point that the defendants ridicule in footnote 7 with a Men in Black
reference). Dr. Lustig’s past writings also inconveniently reflect his
scientific opinion that HFCS “and sucrose are, for all intents and
purposes, biochemically and metabolically equivalent.”
In his affidavit for plaintiff S.F., Dr. Lustig asserts that the
“dietary fructose from HFCS is metabolized differently from sugar
(sucrose).” Why the sudden conversion on HFCS? Perhaps, as the
defendants argue, Dr. Lustig saw S.F.’s case as an opportunity to, as he
wrote in his book Fat Chance, “us[e] the judiciary to moderate
sugar consumption.” The lawsuit would certainly advance the goals of
Dr. Lustig’s advocacy group, Institute for Responsible Nutrition.
Dismiss Prejudicially and Sanction. S.F. v. ADM et al. isn’t
the first time a plaintiff with an allegedly diet-related ailment
directed blame and legal firepower on one target. In 2003, an obese and
diabetes-afflicted teenager filed a class-action lawsuit against McDonald's MCD +0.45% on grounds similar to those in S.F.’s suit against the corn refiners. Pelman v. McDonald’s should have been dismissed immediately, but indulgent federal judges allowed it to drag on until 2010, when class certification was finally denied.
Despite the court loss, public health activists delighted in the fact
that McDonald’s had to spend millions in legal fees and made some public
relations concessions, like adding “healthy” items to its menu that
customers largely ignored.
Judge Skretny, who is presiding over S.F. v. ADM et al., can
cite numerous legal grounds for dismissing the suit. He should do so
with prejudice and should also seriously consider invoking his inherent
powers and sanction the plaintiff and her lawyers for filing such
frivolous claims. The judge does not have to explicitly state that he is
doing so to send a message to activists who waste (taxpayer-funded)
judicial resources when they abuse the court system to demonize a
defendant and advance a cause.
But that’s exactly why he should do it.
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Glenn G. Lammi
, Contributor
not even merit a mention. But for now, it stands as the most notorious
illustration of how a baseless lawsuit can effectively demonize one
disfavored food ingredient.
The Complaint. S.F.
is the mother of S.E.F., a fourteen-year old who suffers from Type 2
diabetes. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and the other three defendants (Cargill , Ingredion INGR -0.25% Inc., and Tate & Lyle
Ingredients Americas) make up the entire corn refiners industry. They
refine corn into, among other things, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a
food ingredient public health activists have long vilified. In her
complaint, S.F. rattled off inflammatory allegation after another,
including such unsubstantiated charges as “HFCS is a toxin.” She
eventually got around to asserting that HFCS is “unreasonably dangerous”
and caused her daughter’s diabetes. She demanded $5 million in damages.
The suit achieved its immediate, and perhaps only, goal of garnering
sympathetic media attention. Most reports parroted the plaintiff’s
outlandish statements and quoted professional food activists who are
attacking HFCS in others venues, such as before the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). Of course only scant reporting has been done on
the suit since, with just a few stories in the trade press about the
defendants’ motions to dismiss, documents which have effectively exposed
the suit as legally and factually baseless.
Undeniable Legal Flaws. The legal flaws in the plaintiff’s case, detailed in the defendants’ initial motion to dismiss and their November 1 reply memo, are abundant and clear, so we’ll only briefly summarize them here:
- S.F. cannot demonstrate that HFCS alone was a substantial cause of
her diabetes. “Millions of people eat HFCS every year without becoming
diabetic.” - S.F. makes no attempt to connect any particular defendant to the
HFCS she consumed, and she cannot utilize market-share liability theory
under New York law. - Overconsumption of food can rarely provide the basis for liability,
and HFCS presents no unknown danger different from the fructose in
other sugars. - The defendants cannot be held liable for failure to warn of the
supposed dangers of HFCS. As a mere ingredient provider, ADM et al. is
incapable of affixing warning labels to the multitude of products (made
by other companies) that contain HFCS. - The plaintiff’s claims are preempted because federal law dictates
the design of HFCS and FDA recognizes it as “Generally Regarded as
Safe.”
to the plaintiff’s motion to amend her complaint. How often does one
read a legal document that references Darth Vader, Superman, Stephen
Colbert, Men In Black (1 and 3), and smoking grass? All those
references arise in the context of the defendants’ dismantling of the
plaintiff’s proposed expert, celebrity anti-sugar crusader Dr. Robert
Lustig.
Dr. Lustig believes that “sugar is the most destructive force in the
universe” (a point that the defendants ridicule in footnote 7 with a Men in Black
reference). Dr. Lustig’s past writings also inconveniently reflect his
scientific opinion that HFCS “and sucrose are, for all intents and
purposes, biochemically and metabolically equivalent.”
In his affidavit for plaintiff S.F., Dr. Lustig asserts that the
“dietary fructose from HFCS is metabolized differently from sugar
(sucrose).” Why the sudden conversion on HFCS? Perhaps, as the
defendants argue, Dr. Lustig saw S.F.’s case as an opportunity to, as he
wrote in his book Fat Chance, “us[e] the judiciary to moderate
sugar consumption.” The lawsuit would certainly advance the goals of
Dr. Lustig’s advocacy group, Institute for Responsible Nutrition.
Dismiss Prejudicially and Sanction. S.F. v. ADM et al. isn’t
the first time a plaintiff with an allegedly diet-related ailment
directed blame and legal firepower on one target. In 2003, an obese and
diabetes-afflicted teenager filed a class-action lawsuit against McDonald's MCD +0.45% on grounds similar to those in S.F.’s suit against the corn refiners. Pelman v. McDonald’s should have been dismissed immediately, but indulgent federal judges allowed it to drag on until 2010, when class certification was finally denied.
Despite the court loss, public health activists delighted in the fact
that McDonald’s had to spend millions in legal fees and made some public
relations concessions, like adding “healthy” items to its menu that
customers largely ignored.
Judge Skretny, who is presiding over S.F. v. ADM et al., can
cite numerous legal grounds for dismissing the suit. He should do so
with prejudice and should also seriously consider invoking his inherent
powers and sanction the plaintiff and her lawyers for filing such
frivolous claims. The judge does not have to explicitly state that he is
doing so to send a message to activists who waste (taxpayer-funded)
judicial resources when they abuse the court system to demonize a
defendant and advance a cause.
But that’s exactly why he should do it.
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