Fraud in labelling is usually committed in the omissions. The art of labelling is not being caught at it.

I was put to write this article by BC Doan’s Switching to Organic Foods where she gives tips on how to read labels. Actually, writing or composing a label is an art form, it is also fraudulent. I will try to explain why in this article.

Years back, I was commissioned by a Swiss company to write the label texts for a product called Chlorella pyrenoidosa. I should get everything into four sentences in each German, French, and English, whereby the information content in all three languages had to be identical. I still think it was one of the hardest writings I have ever done.

The product was registered under the novel foods act in Switzerland, and therefore I had severe limitations into what I was allowed to say. E.g. words like vitamin or trace element were completely out of bounds, others like health severely limited. What it ran down to were four sentences to convey to the buyer that he bought a product with lots of vitamins and trace elements that were good for your health without saying it in so many words.

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As I had to do quite a lot of preliminary study, I came to several conclusions about labels, labelling, and information content of labels. For my own amusement, I also set up four categories of fraudulent labelling which I want to share with you.

Fraudulent labelling by law

This category is the one you will be thinking of when reading fraudulent labelling. It is, in my opinion, a capital crime and should be severely punished. As is, these people usually buy themselves free on the proceeds of the fraud.

Famous cases that I am able to remember without researching them were the German Kebab case, where three year old meat was relabelled as fresh and then sold to the Kebab producers; the Italian Mozzarella case, where parts of mice and other unsavoury ingredients where found in Mozzarella products of most producers; the Argentinean beef case, where beef was shipped from Poland to Argentina, was relabelled as Argentinean and then shipped to Germany.

I haven’t been comfortable eating either Kebab or Mozzarella since. The beef case had an added twist to it, as the Polish producers received money from the EU to export the meat so it would not come onto the European market. None of the persons concerned in either three cases ever went to prison. Just as obviously, these labels were just fraudulent and not artful.