There’s not much that can top a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.
Except for, of course, for what belongs on top: parmesan cheese.
But, it turns out, what we’re eating might not be parmesan at all.
Stay tuned to learn how chemists are fighting faux fromage and other phony foods.
A lot of cheese labeled 100% grated parmesan just isn’t.
The FDA recently found that several sellers in the U.S. were filling out their batches
by putting in lower-cost cheeses or even cellulose, also known as wood pulp, which adds fiber
and prevents clumping.The CEO of a Pennsylvania cheese company just pled guilty to doing so,
and that big cheese faces up to six-figures in fines or even prison time.
But that’s an extreme case.
Many of the parmesan imposters are guilty of a more semantic crime.
Over in Italy, regulators dictate that real parmesan--or parmigiano reggiano--must
be made from unpasteurized milk from cows in specific Italian provinces.
And those cows can’t be fed fermented grasses called silage according to the Parmigiano-Reggiano
Cheese Consortium -- yes, that’s a real thing.
That’s because silage can contain Clostridium bacteria, which produce unwanted gas and therefore
defects during the cheese-ripening stage.
So how can we tell if it’s legit?
Recently, a team of chemists at the University of Parma -- obviously -- discovered that milk
and cheese from cows fed silage contained small amounts of two unusual cyclopropane
fatty acids, or CPFAs.
The team then used the analytical technique gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to look
for these two culprits in more than 300 cheese samples.
Sure enough, their test worked.
Cheeses like parmigiano reggiano, fontina, and gruyere -- that come from cows not fed
silage -- didn’t have these CPFAs.
But grana padano, a hard cheese from cows that eat silage and one that’s often sneakily
mixed in with parmesan, did have these specific CPFAs.
So if a parmesan sample has these fatty acids, it can be flagged as counterfeit or not 100%
real parmesan.
And it’s not just the parmesan on your pasta that’s sometimes fake.
Olive oil fraud is rampant, because it’s much more valuable than other vegetable oils
and it’s easy to fake.
Although E.U. law dictates that extra-virgin oil must meet 32 chemical requirements, fraudsters
can often dilute olive oil with cheaper hazelnut, soybean, or seed oils.
The E.U. anti-fraud office has it’s own olive-oil task force, but the U.S. FDA has
thrown its hands up and doesn’t even check.
But c’mon, what’s the big deal if we want to have some spaghetti aglio e olio with our
multi-vegetable olive oil and parmesan-ish cheese?
Well, food mislabeling has caused such an international uproar that a global
trade treaty is being delayed by angry European cheese makers, along with other protesters.
Ok, so kind of a big deal.
What’s an even bigger deal in food authentication is making sure that products don’t have bacterial
contaminants or unwanted allergens, like nuts and seafood.
This is extremely hard because food has tons of different ingredients and comes in all
sorts of physical forms -- think tomato sauce versus graham crackers versus steak -- so
a single method has no hope of working for all foods.
But there are some testing staples.
Mass spectrometry is often used to look for pesticides, antibiotics, or specific unwanted
chemical compounds.
For detecting bacteria like E. Coli or Salmonella, labs can use the polymerase chain reaction,
or PCR, which multiplies DNA segments to look for genetic signatures of contamination.
PCR can also be used to test for geographic origin by comparing the DNA in food to the
DNA of plants and animals in the region the food supposedly came from.
So it could be used to determine that your parmesan cheese comes from the correct regions in Italy.
But PCR is tough to run on food because how a food gets processed--baked, steamed, shredded,
or otherwise--can mess with its DNA.
Ingredients like calcium can also inhibit the enzymes needed for PCR to run.
So researchers are hard at work developing other techniques to catch counterfeit or contaminated food.
At the same time, officials are fighting outside the lab about who gets to label their cheese
parmesan or their olive oil extra virgin.
But I think we can all agree that making sure food doesn’t have bad bacteria or unlabeled
allergens is a great thing, so let’s toast to that...
With some lovely bubbly. Because yes, you guessed it, EU regulators say it should only
be called Champagne when it’s made from grapes grown in the Champagne region of France.
Check out the links below for food authentication articles by Mark Peplow and Sarah Everts.
Thanks for watching!