It sounds like the process to detect a carcinogenic red dye called Sudan IV is non-trivial. Something to do with HPLC?

I mention this because in 2005 there was a Sudan dye scare in the UK, which apparently led directly to higher food prices:

Two recent incidents of turmeric contamination and 97 cases of sudan-contaminated palm oil for sale on the European food market prompted the Commission to call for tighter controls for both these foodstuffs.

Once details of the measures are cleared, the tighter rules mean that imports of both these foodstuffs must be accompanied by certificates to prove they are free of the carcinogenic sudan red food dye. Such certificates are currently required for all imports of chilli and chilli powder products into Europe.

[…]

Over 600 well known processed foods were pulled from the supermarket shelves after the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) detected the illegal dye in a batch of worcester sauce made by St.Albans-based Premier Foods.

I suppose the recent incident in China should have the same effect, although it is not clear yet whether the Chinese are going to require red eggs to be more tightly controlled or just find someone to severely punish.

And while food prices might rise, I certainly would rather pay for food I can trust rather than some colorful piece of chemically altered substance that is approved for consumption by an agency that does not want to address the root of the problem (pun intended). In other words, my heartfelt congratulations to the Mayor of New York for the successful and complete ban of transfats even though the FDA seemed unable or unwilling to do so.

I understand the concern with a rise in food prices but sometimes I think people forget that the ban/control is for a known toxic substance that is almost undetectable to humans (i.e. tastes good). I’m happy to pay experts to ensure a better quality of life and prevent poison from entering my food, thank you.

Several years ago a para-legal, who also happened to be vice-president of the Brown Jug liquor store in Anchorage, initiated a new Fake ID law for Alaska. He promoted the notion that the market for fake IDs could be better regulated, based on the following logic:

When a minor uses a false identification or misuses a valid ID to attempt to circumvent the law, a crime has been committed, and that’s the case in almost every jurisdiction.

But too often the business that has been hoodwinked gets charged with the crime when it is in reality the business that is the victim.

In Alaska, they take a different tack: a business that is the victim or attempted victim of such fraud can confiscate the ID, then sue the perpetrator for $1,000 in civil damages.

After the law passed the Brown Jug started to alert parents of teens caught with fake IDs that they had the option of fighting a civil action or paying a $300 fine and sending the accused to alcohol awareness classes. Seems to me that someone using a fake ID to get alcohol is already plenty aware of the stuff, but I digress.

Has this approach been successful?

According to [Brown Jug’s] O’Neill, bouncers at the club spot a lot of false IDs and earn enough in resulting bonuses that these jobs have become very sought after and are considered to be high paying.

At Chilkoot Charlies, O’Neill said, one-third of the $1,000 penalty goes to the bouncer, one-third is kept by the company for administration (they pay a lawyer to process the letters and claims) and one-third is donated to a charity called People First.

As of the end of November, Brown Jug stores had confiscated almost 200 misused IDs. Last year the company nabbed 284, so word might be out that you do not attempt to use a phoney ID at Brown Jug—just the result the company was hoping for. “Kids spread the word,” O’Neill said.

“We confiscate more false IDs than all the other licensees in the state combined,” O’Neill said, not by way of bragging, but to illustrate how much more effective the law could be with more diligence from fellow licensees.

That last note caught my attention, especially as earlier in the article O’Neill admits

“Not enough licensees do it,” he said, “and no one at the police department has the time or desire to do it.”

Why not increase the fees until the police think it is worth their time or they have “desire”? Setting a bounty for accusations has its risks (aside from opportunity cost — police investigating other more serious offenses). For example, I wonder if they have run into a situation yet where unscrupulous bouncers or checkout clerks are generating the fake IDs themselves and then framing kids in order to blackmail parents? Taking that thought a little further, I wonder if Alaska will soon promote legislation that allows the people to sue companies responsible for security breaches involving IDs? That might help prevent fake IDs from reaching the market and thus be a powerful counterpart to the Brown Jug Law (incentive to detect fake IDs). Or, in a more specific sense, it would help decrease the incentive to steal an ID from one customer to blackmail another.

I found the Brown Jug Law article on the Montana Gaming Group website.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest CSPI released a memo in October that apparently urged the State of California to find a way to use regulation to prevent another E.coli outbreak:

In a legal petition filed with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Department of Health Services Director Sandra Shewry, CSPI food safety director Caroline Smith DeWaal said that mandatory regulations governing manure, water and sanitation on farms could help reduce the number of produce-borne food outbreaks.

[…]

In addition to the recent spinach outbreak, tomatoes, lettuces, melons, sprouts, carrot juice and other foods contaminated with E. coli, Salmonella or other pathogens have caused outbreaks. Those pathogens are usually—though not always—linked back to animal agriculture, which CSPI says warrants a particular regulatory focus on manure and water.

[…]

CSPI says that the use of raw manure as fertilizer should be prohibited during the growing season, and that composting practices should be monitored to ensure pathogens are destroyed. Water used for irrigation must be tested and found suitable and only drinkable water should be used in produce processing facilities, according to the group.

CSPI’s petition also urges better hygiene and sanitation on farms, and for improved package markings that can be used to track back produce to the farm of origin.

Crazy. That almost sounds like they want food to be clean. Wonder if they can find a way to not only convince consumers but foreign countries that American food is safe.

And if you think it’s getting hard to trust food that comes from some remote farm (that you will never step foot on), it turns out you even can’t trust pesticides anymore:

In February this year, a counterfeit herbicide used in Italy was found to contain quantities of a potentially dangerous insecticide. In 2004, hundreds of hectares of wheat were wiped out in France, Italy and Spain because of a fake herbicide. And a 2002 study of supermarket produce in the UK found traces of eight illegal and potentially dangerous compounds.

Not that pesticides should have ever been trusted, but the fear of “terrorism” certainly highlights the flaws in a web of trust surrounding modern agriculture. Wonder if China will be facing some similar urgings after events like this one:

China has arrested the manager of a factory which used grease from swill, sewage and recycled industrial oil to make edible lard, a Chinese newspaper said on Monday in the latest health scare to hit the country.

Health officials also detected “toxic pesticide” in lard produced by the Fanchang Grease Factory in Taizhou, in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, the Shanghai Daily said.

Yuck. It is even harder to control something when people believe it to be the key to their health. I’ve met many Americans who are convinced that pesticides are what keeps their food safe for consumption. But I find that about as ironic as the last part of the AP story on Chinese lard:

Authorities in several cities last month found Sudan IV, a cancer-causing industrial dye, in “red-yolk” duck eggs sold to poultry farmers who had mixed it with feed.

Red yolks are regarded as a sign of extra nutrition, thus making them more expensive.

So you pay more for the colorful appearance of nutrition, even though the color is cancer-causing — sounds familiar.

First I read an AP story that seems to give the impression that immigrants eat all kinds of crazy game and unsafe food:

Authorities say the discoveries are part of a larger trend in which markets across New York are buying meat and other foods from unregulated sources and selling them to an immigrant population accustomed to more exotic fare.

State regulators have responded by stepping up enforcement, confiscating 65 percent more food through September than they did in all of 2005.

Confiscating more food does not mean they are getting a higher percentage of the food, though. Nevermind the details, it makes for a good story on how immigrants threaten the food safety system with misleading labels and failing to comply with complex regulations.

In a city filled with clusters of people hailing from all over the world, these rules can get lost in translation.

The problem is particularly acute in the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City, where newly arrived and enterprising immigrants open up food shops, stocking their shelves with savory favorites relished in their native lands.

Those people just don’t understand the rules, right? Or maybe being a newcomer is not the problem…

I then read this other AP story that argues people in general seem clueless when it comes to authenticity of food and many have a history of stealing ideas and cheating their way to success:

Gary Litman, vice president for European affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it’s too late to rename imitation Italian products that are already firmly established. “You cannot change history that easily,” he said.

The problem is particularly widespread in the case of Parmesan cheese, which has spawned countless imitations worldwide.

Authentic Parmesan, called Parmigiano Reggiano in Italy, is produced solely in and around the northern town of Parma. It uses unpasteurized milk with no additives and the cows are fed specific fodder.

“The presence of the Parmesan product — especially grated — is absolutely massive in the United States. And the production process has nothing to do with ours,” said Giorgio Bocedi, a lawyer for the Parmigiano Reggiano cheese consortium.

Makers of Parmigiano Reggiano sold 112,000 tons of cheese in 2005 — a fraction of the estimated 600,000 tons of imitations worldwide, the consortium says.

Litman said most American buyers probably don’t care whether the cheese was made in Parma. “No one thinks it’s coming from Parma. They don’t even know where Parma is. They couldn’t find it on a map.”

Dumb Americans, eh? Fortunately for them they can claim they have been wrong for so long they can now say they are right, not to mention that it appears most Americans don’t care what ends up in their mouth.

Next time I hear someone complain that the Chinese are “copying” American products, I might just pull out a bag of noodles or block of cheese and say, “right, no copying issues here, eh?” The latter AP article suggests some strange exceptions and rules to food labels are notable:

Bocedi said part of the problem is geographic trademarks are not protected in most countries outside Europe, including the United States, with the only exceptions being wine and spirits. So anyone can use the name Parmesan, which in the U.S. is considered generic.

I guess the point is that you can’t name your product after your town/region and expect it to be protected in America. Hmm, that might come as a surprise to some American companies. Santa Cruz Bicycles comes to mind. Can you imagine a Chinese bicycle maker claiming “we consider the name Santa Cruz generic”?

Litman noted U.S. law requires products to state exactly where they were produced, which the European Union does not.

But the EU has long granted protection within Europe to the names of dozens of what it terms “high quality” goods known by the region where they are produced, such as Parmesan cheese, Feta cheese and Bordeaux wine.

I’m still amazed that the real Czech Bud company was unable to get Budweiser to relinquish its name. It just seems wrong that they have to sell under “Budvar” when they clearly were ripped-off by immigrants who came to America and used their name.

Budweiser is the name of a pilsner-style beer from the city of České Budějovice in Bohemia (Czech Republic), brewed since 1265. Its name is derived from the German name for the town, Budweis (something from Budweis being a Budweiser).

Tell this to Litman and I’m sure he would say “They don’t even know where Budweis is. They couldn’t find it on a map.” So, without the influx of immigrants America might never have the pleasure of real food from overseas like Budweiser and Parmesan, let alone benefit from the more well-known cheap domestically produced immitations.

Oh well. Food security, let alone immigration, is such a complex and emotional problem for people, computer security sometimes seems simple by comparison.

EDITED TO ADD (5 Dec 2006): It turns out that the Czechs are now allowed use the name Budweiser in the Czech Republic. Budweiser U.S. actually sued in order to prevent them from using the Budweiser name in their own country but the EU determined that the Czechs had the right to use the name after all, at least in the EU. So pub signs in the Czech Republic now list the beer as Budweiser/Budvar. Of course in the US the Czech Budweiser still has to be called Czechvar. That means the real company had to fight to use their own name in their own country after hundreds of years because some enterprising Americans managed to make a great deal of money in a short time by copying the taste and brand. I guess the Czech Republic is lucky they were not sued by Budweiser for rights to the city. Can you imagine a beer company landing troops and staking a claim to foreign territory on the principle of trademark issues and licensing? To be fair, the US Budweiser company claimed that the Budweiser label was first “marketed” by their founders at the end of the 1800s for very specific reasons and thus they should have exclusive global rights. A little research uncovered a claim that they picked the name because it was “German-sounding and would appeal to other German immigrants”. No kidding? They actually blame immigrant consumers for their name? It is even more ironic then that the US Budweiser recipe violates the actual German Reinheitsgebot regulations on beer ingredients. I haven’t found anything yet, but could they blame immigrants for that as well?