The last thing I would wish to be accused of is that this blog promotes a ‘garbled’ message on the role of science in food safety. It was with some surprise, then, that I discovered the term ‘garbler’ actually has positive origins. (Late Middle English garbelen – toremove refuse from spices; Old Italian garbellare –tosift.)
From the middle ages to the introduction of the first Adulteration of Food and Drink Act in 1860, food was commonly padded out with all manner of dangerous substances – from plaster of Paris to poison.
By the mid-Victorian era you were lucky if your grocer was honest and employed a ‘garbler’. These people checked if products such as pepper had been adulterated with gravel, leaves, clove dust or twigs. However, the checks were visual and relied on good eyesight; good eyesight couldn’t detect bone ash, chalk or sand in bread, or lethal lead salts added to wine to clarify the liquid.
We’ve travelled a long way since then, and science is now very much at the centre of food safety. Recently for example, five DNA methods (identifying fish species, meat and exotic meat species, bushmeat species, Basmati rice, and orange juice adulteration with mandarin juice) increased the toolkit available to UK Public Analyst Official Control Laboratories for detecting mislabelling and food fraud.
Fish species identification has been particularly successful, resulting in prosecutions of fraudulent activity.
What isn’t widely known is that the deployment of DNA-based methods into official control laboratories has required significant knowledge-transfer, because most of the labs are typically staffed by analytical chemists rather than molecular biologists.
A paper by Woolfe, Gurung and Walker, entitled ‘Can analytical chemists do molecular biology? A survey of the up-skilling of the UK official food control system in DNA food authenticity techniques,’ reviewed knowledge-transfer funded by the FSA’s Food Authenticity Programme (now transferred to Defra).
The paper, which was published in Food Control, 33, 385-392 and is now on the Defra website, suggests that competence in molecular biology in official control laboratories rose from 22% to 69% after the knowledge-transfer based on embedding a suite of DNA methods in 11 out of 16 eligible laboratories.
As a result of this Government-funded knowledge-transfer activity, these labs are now much better placed to check that food labelling is complying with the law. Indeed, this DNA technology was at the heart of testing during the recent horse meat incident.
You could say that 160 years ago the people at the ‘cutting edge’ of food fraud were those cutting the chalk and plaster of Paris into flour. Now it is food safety scientists – experts in Defra, the FSA and in the field – with food safety rather than fraud as their aim.
More on the garblers and the Adulteration of Food Act can be found in the Association of Public Analysts’bookletcelebrating 150 years of the act.