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Makes you wonder how many other common foodstuffs are wildly mislabeled and contain harmful ingredients. It's hard to imagine any US government agency having th

Makes you wonder how many other common foodstuffs are wildly mislabeled and contain harmful ingredients. It's hard to imagine any US government agency having the manpower to conduct the scale of testing required to find standards violations, even if the standards themselves were perfect. I know nothing at all about the law on this topic, but would a producer of contaminated/illegal food be able to avoid responsibility for violating standards if they just shifted blame onto suppliers that are out of US court jurisdiction?

sjcoles 5y ago
With olive oils you can prevent this by purchasing PDO or PGI olive oil. If you cook often it's worth the slight bump in price to know you are getting good oil. I love me a nice peppery Sabina olive oil.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Or just buy Costco. They don’t fuck around with sourcing
  - glial 5y ago
    And they sell Avocado Oil in huge half-gallon jugs.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Olive oil is wildly adulterated with blended cheap oil. Vitamins and "supplements" are almost completely unregulated, which is one reason despite known benefits from a limited number of supplements, I've hesitated to use any. There are third party services that test some products, but I gave up on them because many of the certifications were years old and you really have no fucking idea; the company could switch to cheaper manufacturing/suppliers right after getting "certified." Vegetables have to be washed because food pickers aren't given proper bathroom facilities so they shit in the fields and have no way to wash their hands or clean themselves, so there's both soil and product contamination with feces. Could be fixed by the federal government mandating field-accessible bathrooms with hand-washing stations, which you think farmers could afford given the trillions of dollars in subsidies they get, but...nope. Most fish sold in the US is wildly mislabeled - tilapia, which is cheapest, is the most common fish substituted. Particularly annoying since it often causes gastric distress for some. Only DNA testing is reliable. Baby food contains a shocking amount of heavy metals. Packaged chicken products (and I believe eggs?) are washed in bleach, because the poultry industry has managed to gaslight us and regulators into thinking that a)salmonela is just a fact of life with chickens and b)it's the consumer's fault for not properly "handling" said food (in Europe, for example, salmonella is actively controlled, and there's a vaccine.) American cheese doesn't contain any actual cheese (though I think the FDA finally cracked down a bit on this one, so it's now called "cheese product" or something.) Chinese baby formula manufacturers figured out that melamine faked out protein tests to allow them to water down the formula. In the US, melamine and cyanuric acid were found in every formula mix, though supposedly at ~1ppm levels, but no level of either chemical is safe, and there was no reason for either to be in formula. There was huge outbreak of lead poisoning in mexican kids who were eating hard candies made from a fruit - tamarind, I think? - where growers supplying the candy company were getting paid by weight and the assholes were putting lead weights in their containers, and the lead weights were going through the fruit-crushing machines. The list goes on. Libertarians talk about how the free market will solve everything, but time after time when business is trusted or allowed to regulate itself, it doesn't. Greed almost always wins over civic duty and ethics.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  WRT vitamins and supplements - My rule of thumb is to stick to ones that you can test for in the blood that’s actually correlated by peer review scientific literature for appropriate level ranges. So for instance I take D3 since there is a test for that as well as methylated B9/B12 (homocysteine). Fish oil as well (omega 3). It doesn’t solve the adulteration issue but at least I can tell if I’m getting sugar pills.
chadash 5y ago
> It's hard to imagine any US government agency having the manpower to conduct the scale of testing required to find standards violations, even if the standards themselves were perfect. But i'd think that lawyers would be all over this, sending out samples to labs, so that they could file class action suits. Why is that not the case?

sjcoles 5y ago

With olive oils you can prevent this by purchasing PDO or PGI olive oil. If you cook often it's worth the slight bump in price to know you are getting good oil. I love me a nice peppery Sabina olive oil.

rdtwo 5y ago
Or just buy Costco. They don’t fuck around with sourcing
- glial 5y ago
  And they sell Avocado Oil in huge half-gallon jugs.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Olive oil is wildly adulterated with blended cheap oil. Vitamins and "supplements" are almost completely unregulated, which is one reason despite known benefits from a limited number of supplements, I've hesitated to use any. There are third party services that test some products, but I gave up on them because many of the certifications were years old and you really have no fucking idea; the company could switch to cheaper manufacturing/suppliers right after getting "certified." Vegetables have to be washed because food pickers aren't given proper bathroom facilities so they shit in the fields and have no way to wash their hands or clean themselves, so there's both soil and product contamination with feces. Could be fixed by the federal government mandating field-accessible bathrooms with hand-washing stations, which you think farmers could afford given the trillions of dollars in subsidies they get, but...nope. Most fish sold in the US is wildly mislabeled - tilapia, which is cheapest, is the most common fish substituted. Particularly annoying since it often causes gastric distress for some. Only DNA testing is reliable. Baby food contains a shocking amount of heavy metals. Packaged chicken products (and I believe eggs?) are washed in bleach, because the poultry industry has managed to gaslight us and regulators into thinking that a)salmonela is just a fact of life with chickens and b)it's the consumer's fault for not properly "handling" said food (in Europe, for example, salmonella is actively controlled, and there's a vaccine.) American cheese doesn't contain any actual cheese (though I think the FDA finally cracked down a bit on this one, so it's now called "cheese product" or something.) Chinese baby formula manufacturers figured out that melamine faked out protein tests to allow them to water down the formula. In the US, melamine and cyanuric acid were found in every formula mix, though supposedly at ~1ppm levels, but no level of either chemical is safe, and there was no reason for either to be in formula. There was huge outbreak of lead poisoning in mexican kids who were eating hard candies made from a fruit - tamarind, I think? - where growers supplying the candy company were getting paid by weight and the assholes were putting lead weights in their containers, and the lead weights were going through the fruit-crushing machines. The list goes on. Libertarians talk about how the free market will solve everything, but time after time when business is trusted or allowed to regulate itself, it doesn't. Greed almost always wins over civic duty and ethics.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
WRT vitamins and supplements - My rule of thumb is to stick to ones that you can test for in the blood that’s actually correlated by peer review scientific literature for appropriate level ranges. So for instance I take D3 since there is a test for that as well as methylated B9/B12 (homocysteine). Fish oil as well (omega 3). It doesn’t solve the adulteration issue but at least I can tell if I’m getting sugar pills.

chadash 5y ago

> It's hard to imagine any US government agency having the manpower to conduct the scale of testing required to find standards violations, even if the standards themselves were perfect. But i'd think that lawyers would be all over this, sending out samples to labs, so that they could file class action suits. Why is that not the case?