AU: Olives painted with copper sulphate top largest-ever Interpol-Europol list of fake food
The Age: Italian olives painted with copper sulphate solution, Sudanese sugar tainted with fertiliser, and hundreds of thousands of litres of bogus alcoholic drinks top Interpol’s annual tally of toxic and counterfeit food seized by police agencies across the world. The haul of bogus diet supplements, adulterated honey and formalin-drenched chicken guts makes for stomach-churning reading.
A statement by Interpol on Wednesday said a record 10,000 tonnes and 1 million litres of hazardous fake food and drink had been recovered across 57 countries, with Australia also making the list. False labelling proved Australia’s undoing when testing of 450 kilograms of honey revealed it had been blended or adulterated, and a consignment of peanuts had been repackaged and relabelled as pine nuts, posing a significant threat to allergy sufferers. Earlier this year, researchers claimed Australian honey was “contaminated”.