Chimia: Swiss food counterfeit

For many, Switzerland is a benchmark for quality, which largely dictates its standards to the world. That only one Nestle is worth, whose products, most likely, even you have at home% username%!

Surprisingly, people live in Switzerland too. Some of them are engaged in "business" and want all the legal and not very ways to reduce costs in order to maximize profits. Of course, as consumers, to put it mildly, it is unpleasant for us when costs go down at our expense. Especially when it comes to such a sensitive area as the food industry.

The May issue of the Swiss Chemical Society magazine Chimia magazine was fully devoted to publications dealing with the problem of food counterfeit and the fight against it.
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For scandals of small and independent welcome under cat.

My article was drawn to an article in which Philipp Hubner, an active expert in the field of food quality, tells some remarkable and instructive stories about the facts of the detection of food counterfeit and the fight against it. For obvious reasons, the stories of a decade ago are cited, but they can also tell a lot of interesting things.

Story One: plunge into a historical perspective

Switzerland’s national food security strategy suggests that “if we can grow and produce something for domestic consumption, then we must grow, produce and consume it, even if it is cheaper to buy and bring”. Therefore, food and security in this country are taken very seriously.

For example, in 1910, in Germany, a thin brochure by Adolf Reitz “Food Products and the Art of Counterfeiting” (“Nahrungsmittel und Fälscherkünste”) was published. In the preface to it, the author writes that " everyone has the right to receive from the seller what he asks and for what he pays, even if the buyer usually does not have the opportunity to check the items purchased. " Great opening remarks!



And although over the past century, analytical methods have gone far ahead, you are amazed at how accurately the alcohol content, acidity and some other parameters of the products were measured, which allowed to determine the origin of a product, such as wine. Today, counterfeit wine is easily detected by its isotopic composition . About the application of the isotopic method in the case of wine can be read here .

The second story: alcohol from the canister under the guise of brand

Honestly, it was this story that made me read the text of the article. It seems like we all go to bars, restaurants, drink that beer, then wine, then cocktail, and, like, alcohol is poured from the right bottles, but for the morning for some reason, my head hurts.

Once, in 2003 in the canton of St. Galen (St. Galen), a former employee of the establishment “stukanul” (which, by the way, is not such a rare act) and gave a tip to the authorities on one big disco and bar.

In the face of the inspection team that arrived at the scene, the usual picture appeared: open bottles with dispensers coexisted peacefully on the shelves with their corked brethren. Everything created the impression of elitism. Samples were taken from both bottles of white Bacardi rum and some other types of alcohol.

The primary analysis did not show significant differences between one drink and another (slightly underestimated indicators can be explained by the gradual weathering of the components), with the exception of ethyl acetate , which turned out to be almost 10 times smaller!

The brilliant idea did not come immediately and it consisted in checking not the fragrances by themselves, but the content of ions in water such as chlorides, nitrates and sulfates. After all, if alcohol is produced on the spot under the bar, then its ionic composition should differ significantly from water, which is used in the production of one or another of the original alcohol.



It turned out that the “restaurateur” bought quite legally a perfume that fully corresponded to a bouquet of Bacardi rum, Jack Daniels whiskey and some other drinks in Austria (literally to move across the border). And the "cocktails" themselves were prepared in strict accordance with the recipe of the perfume manufacturer in the bar itself. One or two bottles were regularly replenished from the canisters under the bar, while the corked bottle created an “image”.


"Image" on the left and image on the right

The third story: tuna with rhodamine sauce (dye)

Another story cited in the article is related to eating tuna, including sushi.

Fresh tuna meat has a characteristic red color, which eventually turns into unsightly brown. Often, producers process meat with carbon monoxide, preventing the irreversible oxidation of Fe ²⁺ to Fe ³⁺ . However, such processing is prohibited in many countries (for example, in Switzerland), because it does not allow to determine the freshness of meat, and as a result, it can cause poisoning due to histamine accumulation.

According to statistics in 2005, more than 20% of tuna meat was wrapped at the Swiss border precisely after tests for processing CO.

In January 2006, the veterinary control in Zurich and Geneva sent samples of suspiciously red tuna for examination. What was the surprise of the researchers when they brought the sample under a UV lamp. The meat shone like a Christmas toy. The tuna fillet was simply dyed with rhodamine B and S , while the CO concentration was zero. Apparently, someone too zealously laundered meat in the Philippines.



Since then, any batch of tuna is checked at the border using a UV lamp, and then the samples are taken for examination.

Fourth Story: Chicken - Wounded by the Honor of Switzerland

Meat and meat products are the Achilles heel of the Confederation. And if beef with pork is not so susceptible to "fake", then the chicken is a tasty morsel for dishonest producers. Standards in Switzerland are as high as wages (yes, and even farmers' wages), so in neighboring Germany the chicken costs almost less than the price of that produced in the territory of a small but proud mountainous country. And due to the fact that the domestic market for food products from the EU is actually closed, it turns out that you only have to eat "domestic". Of course, no one forbids to go to neighboring Germany or France, to buy and return, but you can run into a border search and get a large fine or even earn a prison sentence. This happened recently in the canton of Zurich, when a Turk was caught on the border with more than 700 kg of meat planned for sale in the city itself.

Ten years earlier, the veterinary service accidentally decided to check the records of one manufacturer ( sic! ) Of chicken meat in Switzerland. It turned out that at the end of 2004 more than a ton of meat was imported into the country, 240 kg were processed and sold as it should be, 720 kg was packaged, labeled “made in Switzerland” and almost ready for shipment during the New Year holidays. Another 140 kg just evaporated somewhere. A large-scale audit revealed that more than 300 tons of chicken were imported into the country from 2001 to 2004 illegally.

The original article “ Food Adulteration in Switzerland: From 'Ravioli' over 'Springbok' to 'Disco Sushi' ” was published in Chimia ( DOI: 10.2533 / chimia.2016.334 ).

PS: About the defects noted in the text, please write in the LAN.

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