Real Food Fake Food with Larry Olmsted

: Episode 654 – Larry Olmsted, journalist and author of a great new book Real Food Fake Food joins Anna & Vinnie to talk about the prevalence of food fraud in labeling. From scallops to Kobe beef to truffle oil to Parmesan cheese, there is significant fraud in the food industry.

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• Anna’s cookbook
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LARRY OLMSTED

• Buy his book here!
  • Real Food/Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do about It
    
• Check out his website here!
• Award-winning journalist
• Has written for many big magazines and newspapers all over the world
• From New York

REAL FOOD FAKE FOOD

• Larry has always been writing on food and travel topics
• Everyone eats whenever they travel, so Larry likes to focus on food
• He tried to eat locally and regionally when traveling, and in doing that he started finding that all of what he made here that he originally ate overseas was bad quality and could not be recreated
  • This is because here in America, lots of what we consume and are sold is fake
• We are being misled
• How is it legal to label incorrectly?
  • People have been doing it for 20+ years
  • The government allows for a large margin of error
    • The big food companies take full advantage of margin of error and even go overboard
• Different categories in the book
  • Legal, illegal, gray area, immoral but legal
  • Illegal = substituting one seafood for another
    • Nobody is policing
  • In lots of cases there are no rules from FDA
• Defining ‘organic’ is the biggest step we’ve made in the modern area for labeling
• The FDA has intentionally chosen not to define ‘natural’
  • ‘Natural’ means nothing
    • Uranium is natural, too
• FDA ignores a lot of their own policies and they ignore, when it comes to seafood, congressional mandate
  • The Obama administration has made it so seafood fraud is finally getting checked up on, and looks like the fraud will lessen