Source: www.schneier.com – Author: Bruce Schneier
Comments
Ted •
Will the real Parmigiano Reggiano please stand up?
With a $2bn (£1.6bn) counterfeit cheese market, I’m curious about the claims that the “p-Chip microtransponders are virtually impossible to duplicate or counterfeit.”
modem phonemes •
“The cheese, which can trace its history back to the middle ages …”
Now that’s aged cheese.
Clive Robinson •
Hmm,
Cheese and chips…
And it’s not even Friday or Tuesday…
But more seriously, there has not yet been an anti-tamper device that’s even close to 100% except where there is something totally and uniquely random, and with a fully verifiable and secure authentication channel.
But one thing that does concern me,
“The microchips are food-safe, but are unlikely to be eaten, given their location in the cheese’s hard skin, which is made from the milk protein casein.”
That “hard skin” is actually boiled slowly to make a “stock base” for soups and sauces. Not sure how “food safe” it would be after that and a set of closely meshing molars chomping and grinding…
Newberry •
… no real problem for consumers — the “non-genuine” cheese often tastes about the same as the much more expensive stuff.
If consumers could REALLY taste a substantial quality difference in those cheeses … that would be sufficieni to identify the ‘Trademarked’ stuff, without microships.
in U.S., all cheese is generally way over-priced.
SocraticGadfly •
@Jon:
Now do olive oil from one country in the Middle East to make sure the labels on the back are correct.
Puppers •
I swear, if I break a tooth on your friggen cheese DRM… aught to leave this world behind
Winter •
@Newberry
no real problem for consumers — the “non-genuine” cheese often tastes about the same as the much more expensive stuff.
I don’t know about parmesan, but for other cheese, the difference is palpable. But if you only can discover that after you bought it, you are in a lemon market. In a lemon market good products fail as no one knows how to find the good stuff among the fake.
in U.S., all cheese is generally way over-priced.
US cheese is only edible when grilled. Good cheese is imported into the US but still tastes substandard because it has to be produced from pasteurized milk.
Newberry •
@Winteri
difficult to discern good quality cheese and supposed top quality cheeses — but easy to recognize low quality products.
And the many subtle Flavor variations mask one’s perception of basic quality.
As with wine, objective tests consistently show that the supposed taste experts cannot routinely identify the good quality stuff from the alleged top quality stuff.
…same with olive oil
Dusty Daniel •
… no real problem for consumers — the “non-genuine” cheese often tastes about the same as the much more expensive stuff.
The E.U.’s “protected designation of origin” rules seem quite weird to outsiders. Cheese can only be sold as “parmesan” if it’s made in a particular area of Italy, and passes inspection. The “non-genuine” cheese could, in fact, be the exact same thing made elsewhere, or be a non-aesthetically-pleasing wheel from an otherwise-“genuine” batch. If it tastes the same, that’s probably because it is the same. (Cheddar, despite being named after a village formerly in the E.U., never had such a status: the village couldn’t possibly produce the necessary volume of cheese to make that practical.)
I have my doubts about these being “virtually impossible to duplicate or counterfeit”. But, unless the tags are checked (by customers or stores) at the time of sale, I don’t see anything to stop criminals walking into grocery stores, surreptitiously extracting valid tags from cheese, and maybe melting something to fill the shallow hole. Then the tags could be embedded into parmesan-but-not-legally-parmesan wheels and sold into the parts of the supply chain that check the tags, which presumably pay more than those that don’t.
Also keep in mind that this cheese sells for about a thousand U.S. dollars per wheel. Therefore, individual consumers tend to buy wedges, most of which will never have had a chip. And if small chipped wedges are ever left in customer-accessible fridges, they’ll be obvious targets for outright theft.
ͲimH •
A sneaky feature of EVOO is that a bottle marked Made in Italy may legally contain oil from Greek olives.
Always look for the acidity percentage. Under 0.5% is difficult to find.
Winter •
@Newberry
As with wine, objective tests consistently show that the supposed taste experts cannot routinely identify the good quality stuff from the alleged top quality stuff.
That is true for “quality” products. But fake “Feta” made from cow milk looks like real Feta made from sheep milk. However, it does not taste at all like it. The same for Roquefort and Gorgonzola versus Danish cow milk blue cheese. Gouda cheese might look like the yellow stuff sold in the US, but it tastes completely different. And if you ever have been near a Limburgian red-mold cheese, you will have no doubts about its origin (there are no fake Limburgian cheeses).
Making real cheese is difficult [1] and the fungi needed for the French and Italian cheeses are very peculiar. The differences are far from subtle. But the real point is that you cannot see taste and smell from the outside. I cannot see the difference between real and fake Feta, but the difference in taste between sheep milk and cow milk cheese is very large.
[1] Gouda requires raw milk and an enzyme from the stomach of calves that have not been fed anything but milk. It also has to rest for months under controlled conditions. These are not luxuries and taking shortcuts is what makes American cheese a plastic goo that has to be grilled before consumption.
yet another bruce •
@Clive
Thank you for the fascinating cheddar exposition.
@Dusty, @all
I suspect that the Guardian article may have lost the thread. I believe the real anti-counterfeiting technology is the system that tracks individual wheels of cheese through the supply chain. The RFID tag is just there to facilitate the tracking. Even if you were to clone, spoof, or recycle an RFID tag the tracking system would still throw an error either because of a missing record or because of a duplicate transaction.
Something similar is done to track beef carcasses through the supply chain in the US. In the case of beef, the issue is more food safety and less counterfeiting.
see for example https://www.nifa.usda.gov/sites/default/files/resource/How%20traceability%20is%20used%20in%20beef%20carcass%20processing%2007.pdf
Clive Robinson •
@ Newberry, ALL,
Re : Taste is the least worry.
You must be new here, as I’ve mentioned this all before…
When you say,
“the “non-genuine” cheese often tastes about the same as the much more expensive stuff.”
Whilst true have you wondered why?
A few bits of info for you,
Yes “tastes about the same” is also true of highly toxic lead salts that are called “lead sugar” for that very reason (and used to be made with urine).
Lye added to sour milk breaks down the buterate and makes it smell and taste creamy not like the rancid butter it did before the adulteration so as used to happen in Victorian London bad milk could be made poisonus just to keep selling it long after what we would call it’s “shelf life”.
There are many many more examples of poisons being added to food stuffs. And it still goes on, look up the Chinese baby milk scandle. Where the Sanlu Group’s milk and infant formula along with other food materials and components were adulterated with the chemical melamine. The Chinese courts sentanced a number of those involved to death and atleast two from memory were executed.
As for US baby/infant formular, you might remember the recent scandle and deaths. Well it also threw up the fact that the FDA along with the US baby formular manufactures “rigged the market” to keep out competition from abroad and keep profits high. It also came out as to why other countries baby formular is not compliant, and is not for very good reason, which is why slightly more clued up US mums get their formular from abroad.
In Europe you are not alowed to use GMO products in foods or feedstuff, but in the US “Franken Foods” as some call them are the norm and don’t need to be mentioned as such on product lables thanks to the lobbying of the likes of Monsanto.
Then there are chickens with extra added chlorine and similar compounds to significantly increase shelf life. Other “washes” are used to keep “red meat red” and suppress the smell of fish (fresh fish do not smell fishy by the way).
As for charcuterie, we all should know that excessive use of nitrates is extreamly harmful[1]. But… Excessive use makes fake “cured meats” in days rather than months or years and also removes all the losses that other traditional curing methods risk. The con in the US is to imply the nitrates used are celery[2] thus no mention of artificial chemicals such as sodium nitrate need be put on the lable… A cardiologist I know only half jokingly says “American’s get their angina meds[3] for free with their fast food”.
Oh fun fact do you know the difference between an “addative” and a “processing agent”?
Well an additive has to be found one way or another on the label, processing agents do not.
Which is why nitric acid turns up in certain cartons of citrus juices. Likeeise silicon oil you might lubricate a machine with turns up in bread. As does chemically modified animal hair and feathers but being addatives they get hidden behind “E” numbers and similar.
And don’t get me started on chemically modified pig and cow skin injected into chickens, added to meat pies and used to retain upto 50% by weight water (see “York Ham” and also why most bacon sizzels and ruines frying pans).
I could go on at considerable length, but I’d probably scare you into growing a second head in your nightmares…
[1] Originaly nitrates were collected as crystals from middens (rotting waste) and dung (human and animal excrement) later they were made by fermenting and putrifing urine and later still extracted from mined bird excrement centuries if not millennium old.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_salt
[3] One well known angina medication is ISBN another GTN also called nitro glycerin (yup “blasting oil” foind in Dynamite etc). The N in both names is for the nitrate components in the chemicals. Nearly all nitrates you injest via meds or food have an effect on your blood vessels, so easing blood flow to the heart, but also giving “NG headaches”.
Dusty Daniel •
Clive, re: cheddar cheese, Wikipedia claims, with citation, that it’s named after the village. As far as I can tell, the verb “to cheddar” is etymologically derived from that name, not vice-versa as you suggest. None of these sources look very definitive, though. (Also, the process of cheddaring looks like it could be applied to various types of cheese; but at least in North America, “cheddar cheese” is expected to have a certain taste, not just to have had some technical process applied.)
In any case, “cheddar” is not a protected term, while “parmesan” is (for some reason—any discerning consumer should actually be looking for “Parmigiano Reggiano”). So, a cheese could be chemically indistinguishable from the protected type, assuming one could find the right bacteria, and still not be allowed to use the name. Or, sure, could have been adulterated with questionable substances to save money, but I don’t think cheese being not-legally-parmesan is much of a red flag by itself. And if food regulators let harmful substances get into our food, being strict only about one type of cheese probably isn’t a sufficient precaution.
“yet another bruce”, your explanation makes sense, but depends on a trustworthy supply chain. I wonder whether the big grocery chains care enough to insist on that. I kind of doubt it. We can’t even reliably get romaine lettuce that’s free of E. coli, or dehumidifiers that won’t burn our homes down. Find the point of the supply chain at which people “stop caring” (stop scanning those chips), and that’s where opportunities for fraud appear.
lurker •
@Clive Robinson, All
Rhetorical question: why would anyone add melamine to milk powder, or processed pig skin to chicken or pies?
Because it gives an apparently higher protein content under current laboratory tests for protein. For this reason cheese was added to meat pies in NZ, and was clearly marked on the label. Govt regulations required a minimum protein content, and the test could not distinguish between milk or meat protein. The cheese used is offcuts, vat ends and stuff that doesn’t meet export quality standards, which might previously have gone to pig food, and is certainly cheaper than real beef. The “Steak and Cheese” pie is now claimed as a NZ Classic. It’s certainly not parmesan in those pies.
JonKnowsNothing •
@lurker, all
re: alternate sourced ingredients
A very good point about the practice of mixing ingredients to bump some aspect of food value. It’s done with cattle feed and to lesser extents other animals feeds.
For cattle feed the manure is collected from the feed yards and processed; one component is urea (1). Urea and the cleaned organic waste can be fed back to the cattle in specific portions. Cattle and other ruminants have a different digestive process than simple stomach animals like humans. Their systems can process food types that are indigestible by humans. It’s direct recycling of nutrients.
It can also be hazardous by introducing disease pathogens.
Pigs used to be fed “kitchen garbage or dinner waste”. There was a pail for food scraps and perhaps a second pail for old milk product. This went into the feed trough as-is. It caused a lot of disease outbreaks. The outbreaks were reduced by boiling the garbage before feeding it. However, we have modern pathogens that are not so easily destroyed and feeding boiled garbage is done by small farms or people with only a few pigs. Large industrial farms feed Pig-Hog Ration as mixed by Big Agra like Purina.
Getting the right mix of ingredients for a species is important. Dogs eat cereal and protein. Cats eat only protein. The ratios are different.
Currently many pets have digestive issues with the mix of food ingredients. Big Ag has responded by creating a number of versions of feed. Wheat, Corn, Soy, Oats may not be tolerated so there are feeds without them.
One of the problems with modern food ingredients is not only the GMO and allergy problems but there are religious prohibitions on some foods or combinations. In past eras, Friday was a Fish Day for Catholics globally. Everyone knew what would be on the table Friday night. Other prohibitions make ingredient assumptions problematic. Hindus do not eat meat or beef. Jello (or Jelly in UK) is made from gelatin (2) which is a processed by product of animal slaughter.
We don’t always know what’s in the food. We don’t always know how we will react to the same dish, because we never know when an ingredient from one source is swapped for the same item from a different source. It may all look the same on the outside but it may not go down or stay down once it’s on the inside.
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1)
ht tps://en.wikipedia.o r g/wiki/Urea
- Urea serves an important role in the metabolism of nitrogen-containing compounds by animals and is the main nitrogen-containing substance in the urine of mammals.
- More than 90% of world industrial production of urea is destined for use as a nitrogen-release fertilizer.[9] Urea has the highest nitrogen content of all solid nitrogenous fertilizers in common use. Therefore, it has a low transportation cost per unit of nitrogen nutrient.
2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatin
- The worldwide demand of gelatin was about 620,000 tonnes (1.4×109 lb) in 2019.[35] On a commercial scale, gelatin is made from by-products of the meat and leather industries. Most gelatin is derived from pork skins, pork and cattle bones, or split cattle hides. Gelatin made from fish by-products avoids some of the religious objections to gelatin consumption.
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- The 10th-century Kitab al-Tabikh includes a recipe for a fish aspic, made by boiling fish heads.[39]
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- A recipe for jelled meat broth is found in Le Viandier, written in or around 1375.[40]
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- In 15th century Britain, cattle hooves were boiled to produce a gel.
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Winter •
@JonKnowsNothing
It caused a lot of disease outbreaks.
Feeding offal to cows produced mad cow disease after “deregulation” of the processing requirements by the then ruling conservative government.
JonKnowsNothing •
@Winter
re: Feeding offal to cows produced mad cow disease
It is a bit more complicated than this but it was the primary vector for it entering the human food chain and the result was the discovery of distorted proteins which have chemical bonds so strong they could not be broken.
There is a disease called Scrapie in sheep. (1) In open pasturage where sheep and cows co-mingle there was the rare potential for cattle to become infected.
The problem occurred with the method of disposing of diseased animals. At that time and currently, there are rules and regulations of how a sick animal maybe disposed of but it was amply proven that these rules and restrictions were often ignored when processing live but sick animals. Processing carcasses of dead animals has a different set of regulations. (2)
Sick animals and animals not yet showing overt signs of BSE sickness were processed into animal feeds as protein supplements. As we all know from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, it doesn’t take much to kill a lot.
Humans with a particular genetic trait are more susceptible to the fatal disease known as variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD).
While there were super strict rules for a relatively long time, they are now not so strict and regular mini outbreaks happen. Quick slaughter and better disposal of the infected animal reduces the impact.
There is still a large push from ranchers to have sick animals accepted for slaughter. Each adult animal is worth several thousand USD. The loss of revenue is significant. Some governments regularly compensate ranchers and farmers for the forced cull of their herds and flocks. Not all compensation schemes are sufficient to cover the costs of Lost Investment, Cost to Sanitize and Sterilize the Environment (where possible) and the Purchase of Replacement Stock.
In the USA in California, the carcasses of animals that are euthanized by a veterinarian cannot be sent to rendering plants. It has been decided that the residue of the injections given by the vet are no longer wanted in any form. The carcasses of these animals are sent to a special location in the local landfills.
iirc(badly) In EU many localities eat horse meat and rather than euthanize a horse that can no longer be of service, they are sold to the abattoir, where they are slaughtered like any other livestock. In California, it is prohibited to eat horse meat or to send horses out of state or to Canada for slaughter. Horses in California are euthanized and are not part of the food chain.
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1)
ht tps://en.wikipedia.o r g/wiki/Scrapie
- Scrapie is a fatal, degenerative disease affecting the nervous systems of sheep and goats.[1] It is one of several transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), and as such it is thought to be caused by a prion. Scrapie has been known since at least 1732 and does not appear to be transmissible to humans. However, it has been found to be experimentally transmissible to humanised transgenic mice and non-human primates.
2)
ht tps://en.wikipedia.o r g/wiki/Rendering_(animal_products)
- Rendering is a process that converts waste animal tissue into stable, usable materials. Rendering can refer to any processing of animal products into more useful materials, or, more narrowly, to the rendering of whole animal fatty tissue into purified fats like lard or tallow. Rendering can be carried out on an industrial, farm, or kitchen scale. It can also be applied to non-animal products that are rendered down to pulp. The rendering process simultaneously dries the material and separates the fat from the bone and protein, yielding a fat commodity and a protein meal.
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Original Post URL: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/parmesan-anti-forgery-protection.html
Category & Tags: Uncategorized,authentication,forgery – Uncategorized,authentication,forgery
