It’s a huge job to feed everyone in a society. The food supply in any large modern country is almost unimaginably complicated. It’s unfortunate but true that things sometimes go wrong in any complicated system.
It can be dangerous when accidents happen in the food supply. Modern countries have ways to fix food mistakes, such as removing meat from stores when tests show it could make people sick. Food safety is an important topic, but we aren’t going to talk much about mistakes today. Our topic is deliberate “food fraud.”
“Fraud” is when somebody uses a dirty trick to get something (usually money) from someone else. We have a lot of words for this kind of trickery—”scam,” “swindle,” “rip off” and so on—because fraud happens a lot. It’s as old as civilization. As long as greed and dishonesty exist, there will always be schemes to cheat people out of money.