Food Industry Forensics: Safety and Quality Issues

Abstract

Taking into consideration its importance to life in general, food will stay the most fundamental of our necessities, as it represents the source of all the energy needed to carry out daily activities, including those which delineate the very specifics of life. Authorities have reinforced strict regulations for certain information to be outlined in the labels and labeling, which should comply to the rules and regulations set by describing properly the geographical provenance and authenticity of all that is claimed in terms of quality and composition on the packaging labels. The rules, guidelines and regulations that have been set utter extensively about the legality of the whole issue on food provenance and fingerprinting, with laws being enacted to prosecute the culprits, offenders and transgressors. This sort of fraud is termed as “crude fraud” and in many cases it involves expensive, highly moveable items such as alcoholic beverages. Another type of fraud that takes place within the food industry is known as “sophisticated fraud”, in which some food components are manipulated by either replacing a quality ingredient with inferior ones or the entire food product is subjected to dilution (e.g. addition of water to milk, brine to frozen meat, glycerol to wine, etc.). Urbanization and globalization encourage a specific trend of food supply chain to sustain the large population concentrated in urban areas. To control such a complex food supply chain in the current global economy in the presence of limited resources, creates room for transgressors to perform unethical business deals with food products. As time goes by, they come up with new ways of committing fraud, which leads to more challenges in dealing with this issue.