[In order to get as many people as possible to buy their products,
food companies often employ labeling which is misleading. A high
number of commonly purchased items are actually other, less
attractive, cheaper, or lab-created foods in disguise. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT THESE IMITATION FOODS ARE ACTUALLY MADE OF  
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Brian Boone
December 12, 2022
The Daily Meal
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_ In order to get as many people as possible to buy their products,
food companies often employ labeling which is misleading. A high
number of commonly purchased items are actually other, less
attractive, cheaper, or lab-created foods in disguise. _

Check the ingredients list on blueberry baking mixes and ready-to-eat
blueberry treats, because it's highly likely that the nature's candies
within aren't really blueberries., BW Folsom/Shutterstock

 

Foods, particularly mass-produced, packaged, and widely distributed
grocery store items and restaurant offerings, are rarely just one
thing. Most of the things we all eat on a daily basis consist of a
great number of ingredients that have been carefully selected, mixed,
and assembled to make something palatable, delicious, nutritious, and
familiar. But then there's marketing, the umbrella concept by which
all pre-made food is presented to the world. 

Marketing affects a product's packaging and advertising, and in order
to get as many people as possible to buy that can, box, or entree,
food companies can and will be a little bit dodgy. Products are often
not exactly what they seem, with the much-touted ingredients, place of
origin, or the food itself not quite aligning with what the box or
menu says that it is. A surprisingly high number of commonly purchased
and consumed items are actually other, less attractive, cheaper, or
lab-created foods in disguise. Here are some of the frequently faked
foods — and what they really are.

Blueberries are delightful little treats. Both growing wild and on
farms, they're not too sweet, they're one of nature's few naturally
blue (or bluish foods), and a handful packs a nutritional wallop,
offering high levels of healthy fiber and antioxidants, according to
Healthline. They're also a versatile ingredient, the star of stuff
like blueberry waffles, blueberry scones, and blueberry muffins. But
check the ingredients list on blueberry baking mixes and ready-to-eat
blueberry treats, because it's highly likely that the nature's candies
within aren't really blueberries.

According to a report by the Consumer Wellness Center watchdog group
(via the Los Angeles Times), the sweet, blue nuggets in cereal,
bagels, muffins, and bread are usually made up of sugar, corn syrup,
starch, oils, synthetic flavoring agents, and, to get the color right,
red and blue food dyes. If the "blueberries" aren't completely fake,
then food makers sometimes use a scant amount of tiny dried
blueberries combined with their convincing artificial counterparts.

Truffle Oil

Truffles, a fungus similar in biological makeup and flavor profile to
mushrooms, are one of the hardest-to-get ingredients in the world.
They can't be cultivated and grow underground in only a few regions
around the globe, rooted out of the ground by specially-trained pigs
and dogs, according to Modern Farmer. A few shavings are all a chef or
home cook needs to impart truffles' remarkable flavor, which is
fortunate, because authentic truffles are extremely expensive, with
prices reaching into the thousands of dollars per pound realm.

One way food producers have tried to meet the curiosity and demand for
this highly sought-after, exclusive, and exotic ingredient is with
truffle oil, a more cost-efficient way to add the taste and zing of
the buried treasure to dishes like truffle fries. But this "fancy"
ingredient is usually bogus. According to The New York Times, even
high-end restaurant chefs were fooled by truffle oil, which was viewed
as a miracle ingredient and thought to be made by steeping real
truffles in olive oil. Most of the time, it's not — truffle oil is
made by combining olive oil with synthetic chemical compounds and
derivatives, such as 2,4-dithiapentane.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon isn't just a flavor that resides at the corner of sweet and
spicy — it's a specific preparation of a particular plant. According
to Healthline, strips of the inside bark of the Cinnamomum verum tree
are dried until they form rolls — those are cinnamon sticks. Those
are then ground into a powder to create cinnamon that can be spooned
or sprinkled, or it's further processed to create a genuine cinnamon
extract. While it's often called cinnamon, after its source tree, the
authentic spice is also known as Ceylon cinnamon, and it's native to
southern India and Sri Lanka, which was once known as Ceylon.

And then there's cassia, a.k.a. Chinese cinnamon, because it's a
product of the China-native Cinnamomum cassia tree. It's able to grow
in many more places than Ceylon cinnamon relative, and it's a major
cash crop across eastern and Southern Asia. Nearly all supermarket
cinnamon is really cassia, not Ceylon cinnamon.

Canned pumpkin puree

Pumpkin pie is a can't-skip festive food for millions during the
late-year holiday season, appearing on grocery store bakery shelves
and family dinner tables from Halloween all the way through
Thanksgiving and until Christmas. It's a signature food that reflects
the historical harvest period for its dominant ingredient (according
to Gardena). All those affordable store-bought pumpkin pies, as well
as the homemade pumpkin pies made with relative ease in home kitchens
across the land, are made with canned pumpkin puree, a mass-produced
and commonly available ingredient thanks to companies like Libby's,
which, according to AdWeek, distributes enough of the stuff to make 90
million pies each year. Libby's calls its big moneymaker "100 Percent
Pure Pumpkin," even though it isn't really that at all. According to
Mental Floss, the Food and Drug Administration lacks strict rules
about what can legally be called "pumpkin,"

allowing Libby's and other companies to market its canned concoctions
with the "pure" signifier. Actual pumpkins — those orange behemoths
found in patches and turned into jack o'lanterns — are too watery,
stringy, and lacking in sweetness and flavor to easily make into
pie-ready puree. So, pumpkin canning companies use a combination of
pumpkin-like winter squashes, blending Golden Delicious, Hubbard, and
butternut squashes. Libby's uses the Dickinson squash, a plant it
helped develop to meet its needs, and it's a close relative of of
butternut squash — not the pumpkin.

Wasabi

In Japanese restaurants in the U.S., sushi in all of its forms, like
maki rolls or sashimi, comes with two standard garnishes/condiments:
palette-cleansing pickled ginger slices and a dollop of bright-green
wasabi, a paste best consumed in very small doses because it's
face-meltingly spicy. It tastes (and delivers a punch) like
horseradish because it is horseradish. Real wasabi is made out of
grated Wasabia Japonica root, according to HuffPost. But the wasabi
accompanying sushi orders in sushi bars in America (as well as
elsewhere in the world, including Japan) is overwhelmingly unlikely to
be authentic wasabi from the Wasabi Japonica plant.

According to Vice, the majority of the global supply of wasabi paste
is made out of European horseradish, a plant that's easy and cheap to
grow in many climates. The rhizome of the plant (which is a relative
of Wasabia Japonica) is ground up and combined with a particular green
food dye to make it resemble (and taste like) authentic wasabi. This
is all done largely out of necessity. Real wasabi is extremely
difficult to grow, requiring its roots to stay in water and needing a
cold climate and a lack of direct sunlight to properly mature, which
takes the better part of two years. It's tough to grow, and tough to
export, too, leaving Japanese restaurants around the world to make do
with the reasonable facsimile of dyed horseradish.

Vanilla extract

Lurking on spice racks across the country, laying in wait to add a pop
of rich, sweet, and creamy flavor to desserts and baked goods, are
tiny brown bottles of vanilla. Containers of real vanilla extract and
imitation vanilla look identical, but the contents inside are
extremely different.

According to America's Test Kitchen, about 80% of the global vanilla
crop originates in Madagascar, and vanilla extract is made by soaking
long, brown vanilla bean pods in alcohol and collecting the pure
vanilla that comes out in the process. Alcohol is also involved in the
creation of imitation vanilla. It's used to dilute the vanilla-like
substance created by processing vanillin out of guaiacol, a petroleum
derivative. Caramel color is added to make it resemble natural vanilla
extract. Real vanilla is both rare and expensive. Only 1% of all
vanilla sold is authentic, with the rest the fake stuff, which costs
about 50 times less than the real deal.

Caviar

Traditionally a hallmark of Russian cuisine, caviar earned a
reputation as one of the fanciest, most exclusive, and priciest foods
out there. True caviar, historically speaking, according to Reader's
Digest, is the roe — eggs — of female wild sturgeon, caught and
processed around the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea in Eastern Europe.
Those areas were so severely overfished in the 1980s and 1990s that
what was once known as authentic caviar became harder to come by, and
thus more expensive, and there wasn't enough to meet global demand for
the salty eggs served with sour cream on blinis. Black, sturgeon-based
caviar was joined in the marketplace by fish eggs labeled as caviar
that came from trout and salmon, both wild-caught or farmed, and in
colors like red, gold, and brown. In the 2020s, caviar sold at
less-than-astronomical prices outside of nice restaurants and
specialty grocery stores is very likely to have been harvested from a
pregnant trout, salmon, or other common fish, and not a Black Sea
sturgeon. While not technically caviar, those are at least real fish
eggs, unlike some faux-caviar alternatives. According to Pearls of
Caviar, imitation caviar is made with seafood extracts, gelling
agents, and dyes.

Honey

KFC purports to offer homestyle cooking, like fried chicken, mashed
potatoes, and biscuits, serving the latter with packets of butter and
honey. Well, sort of — the butter is a margarine called Buttery
Spread while the Honey Sauce contains just a small amount of honey. It
may taste almost exactly like honey, but apart from that small portion
of the real stuff, KFC's food scientists use six other sweeteners—
high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, sugar, fructose, and molasses
— and some coloring agents to create its faux bee product. Because
of food labeling laws, KFC is at least honest about its
not-quite-honey posing as honey. According to Insider, imitation or
adulterated honey constitutes a massive, fraudulent industry. It's one
of the most-faked foods on a global scale, and in 2013, the U.S.
Justice Department filed charges against importers Honey Solutions and
Groeb Farms for bringing in impure honey. Like the KFC packets,
operations substitute cheaper high fructose corn syrup (or beet syrup)
for the more expensive real honey or use chemically modified sugars to
make the industrially produced sweeteners resemble honey. Maple syrup
is similar to honey and it's similarly faked. According to Real
Simple, real maple syrup will say so on the bottle and on its
ingredients list. If the product, generally a mass-produced one like
Mrs. Butterworth's or Pearl Milling Company, is designated "pancake
syrup," it's because it has ingredients other than maple sap taken
from trees. Many pancake syrups have no actual maple syrup in them.

Subway's tuna

A cheap and hearty source of low-fat protein, tuna serves as the star
of the tuna sandwich, prepared at home or appearing on the menu of
sandwich shops, mixed with mayonnaise and veggies. Subway has long
offered a tuna sub at its thousands of locations, but it wasn't until
the 2020s that questions arose over if the sandwich actually contained
any real tuna. In 2021, according to The Guardian, California-based
Subway customers Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin filed a lawsuit,
alleging that the tuna subs didn't contain any tuna, which was a
problem because they felt fooled into paying extra for sandwiches made
with the product which they believed was healthier than other meats
(via The Washington Post). The story went viral, and The New York
Times investigated, purchasing three tuna subs from three different
Subway outlets. A reporter took out the meat and sent it to a food
testing lab, which analyzed the genetic makeup of the protein,
according to Forbes. According to the lab's report, "No amplifiable
tuna DNA was present in the sample," though that didn't necessarily
mean there was no tuna in the samples. However, according to Reuters,
in another test, traces of DNA were present for beef, pork, and
chicken. Subway dismissed the complaints and tried to get the lawsuit
thrown out of court, and other tests found that Subway's tuna was, in
fact, tuna (via Inside Edition). The case continues to drag on without
a resolution, per NPR.

Premium seafood

Not only is the tuna in a prevalent fast food tuna sandwich possibly
not tuna, but it might not be the real thing at more upscale
establishments either. In 2013, the conservation nonprofit Oceana
published the results of a two-year analysis of 1,200 fish samples
obtained by sushi parlors across the U.S. According to Ocean's DNA
tests, one-third of the fish samples were not what menus purported
them to be. Especially fraudulent were tuna and red snapper. About 60%
of fish proclaiming to be tuna were not tuna, and 87% of red snapper
was nothing of the sort — it was another fish altogether. And while
lobster is a relatively expensive food item that carries with it an
air of luxury and prestige, it's curiously and seemingly common, sold
at mainstream, middle-of-the-road sit-down restaurants like Red
Lobster and fast food chains such as Long John Silver's. Both have
sold seafood labeled as lobster, but it's not really that shellfish.
According to GTCL, big chains make major use of the very cheap,
lobster-masquerading langoustine, sometimes called "langoustine
lobster." It's not a variety of lobster — it's a mixture of various,
inexpensive crab and shrimp parts. As for grouper, a favorite fish of
fine dining establishments, it's also often fraudulent. According to
an investigation by the Florida state attorney general's office (via
The New York Times), restaurants were caught serving cheap, imported
seafood, like tilapia, hake, bream, and green weakfish, and passing it
off as grouper.

Extra virgin olive oil

According to Larry Olmstead's "Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don't Know
What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It," (via Delish) one of
the most common and far-reaching fake foods in the United States today
is extra virgin olive oil, which is used for a variety of cooking and
food preparation purposes in home kitchens and restaurants of all
levels. Even the chefs who use what they think is EVOO and the home
cooks who buy it in major grocery stores aren't aware that what
they're pouring isn't authentic. According to Forbes, a whopping 80%
of the global extra virgin olive oil market consists of fraudulent or
adulterated products. Some nefarious distributors — who charge at
high EVOO prices — dilute real olive oil with inexpensive and
widely-produced alternatives, like peanut oil or soybean oil.
According to The New Yorker, a federal raid of a New Jersey warehouse
in 2006 yielded 61,000 liters of EVOO and 26,000 liters of
lower-quality olive oil. A great deal of it, bound for widespread
distribution, consisted entirely of soybean oil.

Imitation crab meat

Crab is expensive, but it's delicious, so food producers have tried to
meet demand for the delicately flavored meat of the crustacean with
imitation crab, also marketed and sold under less blunt and more
obtuse names like "crab stick" and "krab." It's generally sold in
grocery stores' seafood counters right alongside its authentic
inspiration, often in airtight packages that show off its recognizable
white-and-red stripes — uncannily re-creating the color of crab meat
and crab shell, respectively. Not much actual crab meat, nor even any
distantly related shellfish, can be found in imitation crab, as it's
made primarily from an industrially processed fish product called
surimi, according to the Los Angeles Times. There's at least some fish
in there, per USA Today, in the form of a cheap and plentiful
whitefish, such as pollack, or a combination of different species
thereof. It's turned into a pliable paste, the surimi, which
constitutes anywhere between one-third and one-half of the imitation
crab product. The rest of the stuff is a mixture of starches, water,
vegetable oil, egg whites, soy, sugar, and lots of salt.

* fake foods
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* Food Labeling
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