Horsemeat got your goat? Try the sublime and scandalous world of olive oil...
Whilst everyone gets uppity about horsemeat, it's worth reflecting that burgers are not the first and won't be the last consumable to fall foul of food fraud. Olive oil's modern story is inseparable from the rise of the mafia...
Olive oil naturally attracts crime. Even the Romans experienced a measure of it. Yet in preventing oil fraud, as in so many other areas of life, the Romans had a system. Many amphora fragments bear tituli picti, stamped inscriptions or handwritten notes in black or red ink that record information such as where the oil was produced, the weight and quality of the oil when the amphora was sealed, and the name of the merchant who imported it. Other annotations record the name of the imperial functionary who confirmed this information when the amphora was reopened at its destination in Rome.
The purpose of this vast bureaucratic apparatus and of the detailed, explicit labelling of each amphora was to ensure that none of the middlemen in the long supply chain linking the olive groves in Spain and Africa to the imperial oil warehouses in Rome siphoned off oil, or substituted an inferior product.
That fight continues in Italy today, although the methods and results are less impressive. The enormous popularity of the 'made in Italy' label worldwide makes it an appetising target for food fraudsters, who earn an estimated EUR60bn a year selling counterfeit or adulterated Italian foods. In some of these crimes, mafia syndicates and other criminal networks sell substandard or unsafe products at huge profits.
