DIRTY SECRETS OF THE FOOD WORLD

You’re a food lover – you buy ethical free-range meat, pay a bit more for ‘craft’ beer and always read the label carefully. But what if, despite being perfectly legal, the label isn’t as it seems? Daniel Tapper has some surprising facts about the food we innocently consume every day

Food fraud is so hip right now. Since the horsemeat scandal of 2013, barely a day has gone by that hasn’t seen a newspaper headline featuring the crowd-scaring spectre of adulterated ingredients. Cheap honey is relabelled and sold as £20-a-pot manuka honey. Moonshine makers conjure potentially lethal counterfeit spirits. And takeaways are regularly found selling lamb kebabs made with beef – and who knows what else.

Meanwhile, the UK now takes this kind of food fraud so seriously it has established its very own MI5-like National Food Crime Unit, whose state-of-the-art laboratories can detect everything from counterfeit cocoa to minute amounts of banned chemicals. Unsurprisingly, the food-crime-fearing public has been thrust into a state of red alert.

But could we be missing the elephant in the room? The following dirty secrets haven’t been devised by shady garage-dwelling criminals but, instead, are executed by well-known restaurant groups, food producers, farmers, brewers and bakers. More surprising still, many of the methods used to confound the unwitting public are fully enshrined in UK law. The darkest food practices are often hidden in plain view.

1 ‘ZERO GRAZING’ MILK

If the quaint logos found on most milk cartons are anything to go by, British dairy cows live out their lives on verdant pastures, munching away happily as birds twitter overhead. Wrong. While most dairy cows graze on fresh grass in summer, the majority are kept indoors for much of the year and an increasing number of ‘zero grazing’ herds never have outdoor access. Why?