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GOURMET NEWS MAY 2016 www.gourmetnews.com FROM THE PUBLISHER 4 As we go to print with the May issues of Gourmet News and Kitchenware News, the internet is buzzing with the news of Tampa Bay Times food critic Laura Reiley's in- vestigation into rampant food fraud at some of Tampa Bay's finest restaurants and even local farmers markets. Reiley found tilapia being sold as grouper, whiting and pollock being sold as lobster, swimming blue crab from the Pacific Ocean marketed as locally sourced Florida blue crab and strawber- ries marketed as if they'd been grown on an obviously defunct local hydroponic farm. Reiley's investigation involved some fancy DNA testing as well as a lot of the kind of regular reportorial detective work that anyone with a telephone, and internet connection and a whole lot of time can do, but she points out that more information resources for curious consumers are either available now or soon will be. She points to foodwaze.com, which appears to be a development-stage digital guide to locat- ing and verifying sustainable food sources, and programs to trace seafood back to the boat with which it was caught. These efforts to provide greater trans- parency for our food system are clearly just in their incubation stages, but they do point in a direction, and that is that con- sumers are ever more hungry for informa- tion about their food and where it comes from. The folks who are making claims about the food they're selling, and these include words like "local," which means precisely nothing because it's not a regu- lated term, as well as words like "organic," which have a very specific definition, all know that their customers are eager to buy food that they think is fresh, local, sustainably grown and high quality. That's why they're using those words in their marketing. Many of the restaurateurs named in the article seem to be assuming that it's more or less okay to use those words to sell their food even when they aren't exactly true, and some of those who are using false terms to describe the food they're selling seem to believe that it's okay to do that even when those terms are demonstrably wildly untrue. The big problem for all of us now is that this story casts the shadow of suspicion over the guilty and the innocent alike. That's not the fault of the writer, who is diligent in pointing out examples of food producers and sellers who are strictly on the up and up and who are having diffi- culty competing with those who aren't. The real problem illustrated here is that we've now learned that our trust in the people from whom we buy food might easily be misplaced. It's worth noting here that one of the defining characteristics of the Millennial generation is that they don't trust easily – and of course, disclosures like Reiley's story are a big part of the rea- son for that. This story, therefore, is best taken as a warning that transparency is a value whose time seems to have come, and our food system isn't really ready to deal with that. And of course, it's also a warning that if the food you're selling isn't local, just don't say that it is. If it's not organic, don't say it is. It only takes one determined snoop to uncover a lie and spread it all over the internet, where it will live for the best part of forever. GN — Lee M. Oser Publisher WWW.GOURMETNEWS.COM PUBLISHER Lee M. 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