We will tell you how to distinguish a fake and what you need to be especially vigilant about.
They say a fake is the best compliment to the author. However, when it comes to selling counterfeit goods in grocery stores, we don’t need such “compliments” for nothing. Just as counterfeiters counterfeit the largest and most widespread banknotes, so dishonest manufacturers slip surrogates for the most expensive and popular products to the consumer. We have compiled here a list of food items that you need to be especially vigilant about when buying.
The imagination of the producers of “linden” honey is limitless. Honey is diluted with fructose syrups, the old candied one is heated to sell it as a young transparent one, starch and molasses are added to it. Indiscriminate beekeepers feed the bees with sugar syrup during the nectar harvest, and they make “empty” honey.
But all these are trifles, because the main supplier of fake honey to the world market is China. The buyers themselves are to blame for a lot, they are glad to be deceived, believing that there is chocolate or, for example, cherry honey – all this is a sweet concoction of sugar syrup, starch and fragrances. Beekeepers warn: there is no rosehip, corn, poppy, chamomile, hazel, strawberry or blueberry honey.
How to check?
There are a lot of ways to check the naturalness and quality of honey: wind it on a spoon (the real one lays down in layers and does not drain for a long time), add a drop of iodine (the product will turn blue to give out starch), try a little – it should tickle in the throat. But the best way to protect yourself from fake honey is to buy it from friends, trusted beekeepers and take the usual, familiar – lime, buckwheat, and not with exotic names.
The more expensive the cheese is, the more readily it is counterfeited. For example, a popular variety of hard cheese Parmesan – dishonest manufacturers would gladly add palm oil to it, as in cheap varieties, but it would make the cheese treacherously soft. Therefore, false Parmesan is flavored with cellulose, that is, a wood processing product.
Real Parmesan is almost impossible to cut, it crumbles. There are almost no holes in it, crystals are visible on the fracture.
How to check?
Read the ingredients: the correct cheese contains only milk, rennet and sourdough. A long list of preservatives, stabilizers and milk powder is the wolf ticket for cheese. If you drop iodine on a slice of cheese and it turns blue, it means that the composition contains starch, and this is already a cheese product, not cheese. Light a piece of cheese on a lighter: an expensive product will melt well and give off a distinct smell of burnt milk. The fake will burn.
Fans of Mediterranean cuisine in the know: you need to take olive oil in a dark glass or tin can and determine the first cold pressing by the extra virgin mark. Manufacturers, eager for unrighteous money, chuckle, pouring sunflower, corn or soybean oil with dyes and flavors into containers with the correct labels.
How to check?
Put the glass container with oil in the refrigerator. This product thickens and produces a sludge. Only very sophisticated experts can determine the quality of oil by taste.
The whole essence, all the salt, all the charm and meaning of chocolate is in cocoa butter. From him and the taste. Aroma, joy and benefit, because natural cocoa contains antioxidants, polyphenols and alkaloids.
Nowadays, cocoa butter in chocolate is replaced with other vegetable oils, for example, palm or rapeseed, or even synthetic emulsifiers, which is a very hellish option.
According to the modern GOST, there should be no more than 5% of such substitutes in a delicacy, and if more, then this should already be called a confectionery tile, and not chocolate.
How to check?
Read the composition on the wrapper and pay attention to the composition of the oils. Inspect the bar: good chocolate is shiny, smooth and does not feel like plasticine in tactile sensations. “Palm” tiles break without a sound, and a quality product – with a dull click. Hold a piece of chocolate in your fingers: a good one will melt quickly and stain your fingers.
Singe vodka is a Russian fake champion. It is in great demand, which is why it is actively forged. The amount of counterfeit vodka in Russia tends to be half of the total volume sold.
Wine is most often counterfeited red. Moreover, buying wine in “boxes”, there are more chances to get “bodyagu”. Fraudsters spoil the reputation of elite brands by counterfeiting rum, whiskey, cognacs and liqueurs.
How to check?
Experts advise buying alcohol only in large and well-known retail chains, as well as in alcohol boutiques. Examine the packaging carefully – the “linden” will speak for itself. Labels and excise stamps must be glued evenly, all labels on the bottle must be clear.
Dyed salmon or trout meat in chunks is now a classic. Whole fish also does not guarantee anything: salmonids are bred on farms, where they add paint directly to their feed.
The real color of red fish is not so red, rather even grayish with a slight pink tint. And you can even paint a herring – packed in a jar, you can’t tell it from a red one.
And there is little good news about smoked fish either. The “liquid smoke” flavoring agent, this confident carcinogen, turns defrosted fish into an appetizing golden and smoky smell in a day.
How to check?
A good fish of the salmon family has long fins (this means that it grew in the sea, and not on a farm), with bright-colored scales, light, not cloudy eyes, grayish-pink flesh, which has white veins. If a slice of fish stains the oil on the sandwich orange, it is dyed and will not be useful. Fish soaked in “liquid smoke” have a very pungent smoking smell (natural – delicate), rough surface and uneven color.
In the era of the USSR, in the program “Around Laughter”, humorists more than once castigated negligent trade workers, who – oh, horror! – dilute sour cream with milk. We would now have that sour cream instead of the current bright false jars with a mixture of vegetable fats thickened with starch.
And some people write “milk” and “curd” on products that are not at all. Sometimes somewhere on the package you can find an inscription in small letters: “milk drink” or “curd product”. But they hide so bashfully that you don’t always see them.
How to check?
Dip a spoonful of sour cream in boiling water. Natural everything will dissolve in water and dissolve, and if there is soy protein in the composition, it will lie on the bottom in the form of a sediment.
Cottage cheese with herbal additives or cheap oil, when heated, this very oil releases, fizzes and splashes. But you can’t check milk. Is that subjective – tasty or not.
It is more difficult to counterfeit coffee beans, so the scammers play out on instant coffee. Manufacturing defects in the form of burnt coffee beans, chicory, burnt sugar, barley, soybeans – all this has nothing to do with the noble drink, but is sold in packages labeled “Coffee”.
How to check?
Not worth it. Better to buy decent coffee beans and grind yourself.
Pepper, cinnamon, vanilla and especially saffron because it is very expensive. In the spice market, clever people have been selling counterfeits since the Middle Ages.
But if earlier they put foreign objects in bags and cadis with spices, now they are even more cynical. Ash instead of black pepper, crushed brick instead of red and paprika, marigold seeds and dried beets instead of saffron – these are our days.
How to check?
Buy, if possible, not ground, but whole spices from a trusted manufacturer. It is worth remembering the signs of real spices. For example, a real cinnamon stick has two folds, rather than one spiral like cassia. A regular pea of black pepper crumbles into large pieces when crushed, and its core is slightly oily. White pepper is actually yellowish, unless it has been bleached, of course.
Suspicious powders from sachets can be tested on water: crushed brick will precipitate, starch will muddy the water.
Of course, this is not a product for every day, it is too expensive. And this makes it even more offensive to run into a fake, spending a lot of money on a treat for the festive table. Natural red and black caviar is a treasure trove of useful things. But only natural.
Fake sturgeon and salmon caviar is made from algae, gelatin and dyes. Sometimes the view is flawless, indistinguishable from the real one. Real eggs burst on the tongue, and do not chew like jelly. There is very little liquid in a natural product.
How to check?
Throw a few eggs into boiling water: the real ones will leave a whitish plume in the water and will not lose their shape, they will just cook. Artificial eggs will deform and dissolve in water.
By the way
Butter is also very often counterfeited. Given that many mothers buy this product for babies, you need to be very careful in choosing. For example, a year and a half ago, experts checked 37 brands – producers of butter. Almost all were rejected: only six of them turned out to be really safe, tasty and natural. In the rest, there was nothing: milk fats were exchanged for vegetable and animal fats (for example, beef), misleading buyers and posing a threat to their health. And also – flavors, bacteria, signs that the oil is made from low-quality raw materials. You can read more about the research HERE.