Florida seems to be losing something that it believed had made it special. Fresh local oranges, a simple pleasure that defined the state, tell the story.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS) recently recounted how natural disasters and diseases have reduced Florida’s orange production by 92% since the 2003–04 season.

Roadside stands and backyard trees once offered fruit that put big box store oranges to shame. Today they are essentially gone without any evidence of attempts to preserve them. This collapse isn’t just about agriculture, because it’s about a state trading its soul for generic tasteless development ruining quality of life. The forces killing orange groves — anti-science politics, climate change, unchecked growth, and quick profits — are erasing Florida’s actual distinctive character, replacing it with tepid chain stores in strip malls and cookie-cutter suburbs that could be anywhere… importing California oranges.

Recently I wrote about honey sold in the UK being ranked as fraudulent 10 out of 10 times.

Shocking.

Then I chanced accross a startup listed by LSE that has been developing a known effective strategy: integrity controls in the supply-chain.

Honey is one of the most adulterated food items on the market. We provide full traceability; we highlight 1. the location – area, country – from which we source our honey; and 2. the communities that manage our hives.

It’s curious that honey quality detection is only just beginning to happen. How much fraud has there been before now if 100% is suspected?

In March 2023, the European Commission found that 46% of sampled products (including all 10 samples from the UK) were suspected to be fraudulent – meaning they had likely been bulked out with cheaper sugar syrups. Scientists at Cranfield University then said in August this year that they had found a way to detect fake honey products without opening the jar.

Or perhaps more to the point, why is the UK fraud (given nearly £100 million/year is imported) suspected at something like double the EU rate?

The “new” method of detection mentioned is actually Spatial Offset Raman Spectroscopy (SORS) with machine learning. It’s a light analysis technique used in pharmaceutical and security diagnostics that can ID sugar syrups.

Unsurprising to me how the lessons from The Jungle have been completely forgotten in America.

Who remembers The Jungle at all? It was such bad exposure for industrial misconduct (e.g. grinding up rodents and even workers into the sausage making machines) that it led to the establishment of American food and drug administration (FDA). Or so the story goes…

A tragic example of how this system can go wrong occurred two years ago, when nearly 400 people got sick after eating a ground beef substitute – called French Leek and Lentil Crumbles – sold by Daily Harvest, the popular food subscription service. More than 130 of the people who got sick were hospitalized with gastrointestinal distress, liver injuries and other symptoms, and at least 39 people had to have their gallbladders removed.

Investigators determined that the most likely cause of the sickness was a new ingredient in the crumbles called tara flour – a high-protein flour made from the seeds of a tree grown in South America. Even though there were no published toxicological studies of tara flour and the FDA had not evaluated its safety, a company that imported tara flour from Peru had claimed that it was [exempt from regulations] and supplied the ingredient to distributors in the United States.

Loopholes in American food regulation are now so big it’s hard to find examples of things that are being tested for safety.

An analysis published in 2022 by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization, found that 98.7 percent of the roughly 766 new food chemicals introduced to the food supply since 2000 were not approved by the FDA.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the FDA acknowledged that under federal law, food companies do not have to get premarket approval from the agency to use ingredients in their products…

No approval necessary? Well then, no wonder people are getting sick.

Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic have found that consuming xylitol and erythritol increases the risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes. Their studies indicate that these low-calorie sweeteners promote the formation of blood clots.

Who will write the book on xylitol?