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In just a few weeks, from April 6 to June 6, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agriculture specialists assigned to the Los Angeles/Long Beach Seaport, intercepted 19,555 pounds of prohibited pork, chicken, beef and duck products arriving from China.

In the first five months of fiscal year 2020, the interception of prohibited meats from China at the LA/Long Beach Seaport has increased 70% compared with the same period the year before.

Most of the unmanifiested animal products were commingled in boxes of headphones, door locks, kitchenware, LCD tablets, trash bags, swim fins, cell phone covers, plastic cases and household goods in a clear attempt to smuggle the prohibited meats.

According to USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, China is a country affected by African swine fever, classical swine fever, Newcastle disease, foot-and-mouth disease, highly pathogenic avian influenza and swine vesicular disease.

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Food adulteration is a growing concern worldwide. The collation and analysis of food adulteration cases is of immense significance for food safety regulation and research.

Research led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected 961 cases of food adulteration between 1998 and 2019 from the literature reports and announcements released by the Chinese government. Critical molecules were manually annotated in food adulteration substances as determined by food chemists, to build the first food adulteration database in China (http://www.rxnfinder.org/FADB-China/). This database is also the first molecular-level food adulteration database worldwide.

Additionally, the researchers propose an in silico method for predicting potentially illegal food additives on the basis of molecular fingerprints and similarity algorithms. Using this algorithm, we predict 1,919 chemicals that may be illegally added to food; these predictions can effectively assist in the discovery and prevention of emerging food adulteration.

The publication of this research has been published in Food Chemistry, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2020.127010   

The FADB-CHINA database has been added to the 'Services' page of the Food Fraud Mitigation section.

In a move that customers have labelled very fishy, the Chinese government has ruled that rainbow trout can now be labelled and sold as salmon.

The seemingly bizarre move comes after complaints earlier this year that rainbow trout was being mislabelled.

In May, media reported that much of what was sold as salmon in China was actually rainbow trout, to widespread consternation from fish-buyers.

But instead of banning vendors from deceiving their customers, the China Aquatic Products Processing and Marketing Alliance (CAPPMA), which falls under the Chinese ministry of agriculture, has ruled that all salmonidae fish can now be sold under the umbrella name of “salmon”, reports the Global Times.

Rainbow trout and salmon are both salmonidae fish and look quite similar when filleted. However, salmon live in salt water and rainbow trout live in fresh water.

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