Quality and Traceability: Beware the Perils of Gutter Oil
In the current economic environment there are heightened gains for cheating. Everyone is asking about price … very few people ask about quality and traceability. Disreputable sellers are looking for ways to increase their margins, and they do this by mixing one product with another to reduce cost. An example of this is mixing pomace oil with sunflower oil and still claiming it is olive pomace oil, another common method is to mix extra virgin olive oil with cheaper oil and still call it olive oil.
The worst case I have heard of in the UK is people filtering waste oil and deodorizing it to make it smell like olive oil – this oil was being sold as pomace. When I saw the oil there were several tell tail signs, the bottle looked wrong, it had none of the legally required information on the label, the oil was very dark and not the usual golden colour of pomace. The oil smelt wrong, it smelt too olivey – a strange thing to say – but olive pomace should have a hint of traditional smell of olive oil – but it should not over power, after all remember what you use the product for. When I tasted the oil it tasted revolting – the overpowering taste was that the oil was burnt – all in all memorable for all the wrong reasons. This is of particular concern because we are being undercut by a product that is not what it is being sold as, and this is the worst example – more minor examples are olive pomace blend being sold as olive pomace – the tell tail tends to be the price. If is sounds too good to be true it probably is.
This brings me to gutter oil, whilst the market is a bit rough here in the UK it is nothing compared to China. Among the growing list of food safety scandals that have occurred throughout China in recent years which include; toxic infant formula, pesticide-tainted vegetables, exploding watermelons, lean meat powder and pork reconstituted as beef we can now add gutter oil to the nauseating list.
It involves, as the name implies, the resale of used cooking oil that has been scooped from sewers or bought from restaurants by criminals. As the result of an investigation that lasted six-months and targeted 14 provinces, the police broke up six illicit oil recyclers and arrested 32 suspects. The authorities recovered 100 tons of gutter oil they say was being processed for resale. As one might expect with China’s population and the heavy reliance on oil for the cooking of many staple dishes the proper disposal of waste cooking oil is a big problem. According to one source China consumes approximately 22.5 million tons of cooking oil annually, and they believe that as many as one out of every ten meals cooked in a restaurant are cooked in waste oil. He Dongping, a professor at Wuhan Polytechnic University, told the Chinese state media last year, that “there are serious health concerns associated with gutter oil. It can be contaminated with the fungus aflatoxin which can contribute to the risk of liver cancer.”
The gutter oil crackdown is just part of a broader effort to control China’s continuing food safety worries. Professor He Dongping believes that despite some significant success by the Chinese authorities it will take at least ten years before the country cleans up its gutter oil problem.
