A recall a number of news items from a few years ago which talked about how some olive oil vendors were adulterating their products with other oils. If this phenomenon could be better understood maybe there would be a rapid, optical/spectroscopic way to characterize olive oil purity.
The simpler, cheaper, and faster you make the test... the more quickly it will be defeated by the adulterators. Much like spam filters and SEO, leaking anything about how you defend against an attack just makes the attackers marginally improve their game.
Simple amine/nitrogen tests for protein is how we got poisonous melamine in fake milk and wheat gluten killing babies, dogs, and cats.
That’s not entirely true. The domain within which the cheating can occur shrinks by eg checking certain properties, tho the problem you’re talking about happens when only a few properties are checked because then of course only those properties need to be gamed/manipulated. It’s about how much coverage your tests have over the properties of what you’re testing
You test at least moderately close to the actual target and you punish those who are breaking the rules brutally (it is actually food safety!). Instead we allow Olive oil that isn't and Fish that aren't because, nobody has died yet? Allergies are possible even at very low levels.
My real point wasn't the simplicity or cheapness, but often the biproduct of those is that it's a test you already have that doesn't measure what you want (nitrogen rather than protein). In the case of Olive oil, if what we cared about was it's fluoresced color rather than the material in it, that would be great.
If what we care about is components, random GC/IR spectroscopy (perhaps after centrifuging) to see the actual compounds with consequences would be a better choice than the cheapest thing they can just add another weird chemical to defeat.
A funny version of this is Manuka honey. It's not easy to define and it's slowly turned into an NZ versus Australia thing. There have been examples where bees that only gave Manuka to feed on are making honey that doesn't meet the standard, and bees that weren't thought to be feeding on Manuka have been making Manuka honey.
I have seen recipes for making non compliant honey into compliant honey (to be clear, the input honey is Manuka, but the lab test wasn't being being passed). It's about blending various types of honey.
It's a bit dumb in my view and needs a better test. As you say, it's meeting the test, not the objective of the test.
Yes, if only. I continually hear that much olive is not what it is supposed to be and it seems that authorities empowered to do something about this don't do much to stop it or perhaps they're fighting an uphill battle. In general the higher the price, the more likely the product is 100% genuine. The logic here might be that there's not that much profit in adulterating pricey oil selling rather limited quantities.
It'd be nice to see some real testing and verification. I've resorted to buying only California olive oil because I have more trust in the regulation of domestic products than I do in the regulation of imports.
It's interesting to note that California Olive Ranch's 100% domestic olive oil costs quite a bit more than their 'world blend.' I'm guessing that world blend includes imported not-really-olive-oil.
