Food Crime: A Review of the UK Institutional Perception of Illicit Practices in the Food Sector

Abstract

<jats:p>Food offers highly profitable opportunities to criminal actors. Recent cases, from wine and meat adulteration to milk powder contaminations, have brought renewed attention to forms of harmful activities which have long occurred in the food sector. Despite several scandals over the last few decades, food has so far received scant criminological attention and the concept of food crime remains subject to different definitions. This article assesses regulations in the United Kingdom (UK) and UK authorities’ official reports published between 2013 and 2018 through a review of academic literature published in English. It charts the evolution of the food crime concept, its various meanings, and different harmful activities associated with food crime, which originate from unlawful acts and omissions. This article also points out that further criminological research needs to address the definitional issue of food crime and inform a more integrated policy approach by considering activities beyond food fraud and the protection of food safety.</jats:p>

The scope of food fraud revisited

“…The difference between these two concepts is diffuse and often interpreted differently by various authors (e.g. Leon & Ken, 2019, see also Rizzuti, 2020), and therefore warrants some consideration.…”

Fault lines of food fraud: key issues in research and policy

“…The extent and scale of food frauds are not binary issues, as related behaviours exist on spectrums of greater or lesser frequency, and greater or lesser severity and harm. Foregrounding of the exceptional and episodic, whether in the media, policy or research, is problematic as it normalises routine frauds that are considered not to be 'newsworthy' or deserving of policy attention due to their less severe or prominent nature and ensures policy, in the UK specifically, continues to foreground concepts of food safety and food authenticity [21]. We see this elsewhere, for instance, where concerns over adulterated avocado oils in the US [22], non-compliant raw drinking milk suppliers in New Zealand [23] and the closing of fraudulent ketchup factories by the Punjab Food Authority [24], receive notably less media or policy attention when compared to scandals such as the 2013 European horse meat incident.…”

“…), illegally imported, is missing required documentation, and so on. Thus, whilst academia and policy recognise a diverse array of behaviours that form food fraud (see also [21], for an overview of the evolution of the food crime/fraud concept), analytical testing can only be used to respond to a small segment of these. However, one implication of this narrow relevance of analytical testing is that such approaches nonetheless shape narratives around which foodstuffs are most susceptible to fraud (and consequently more frequently tested) making food fraud realities an artefact of testing regimes.…”

The Criminogenic Nature of Food Production Harm Responses: A Case Study of Anaerobic Digestion Technology Subsidies in Northern Ireland

“…The concept of food crime was introduced in 2007 (Croall 2007). Since then, criminologists have gained a better understanding of the criminal acts embedded in the food chain through the analysis food fraud (Corini and van der Meulen 2019;Flores Elizondo, Lord and Spencer 2018;Leon and Ivy 2017;Lord, Flores Elizondo and Spencer 2017;Rizzuti 2020;Spink and Moyer 2013;van Ruth et al 2018), food poisoning (Tombs and Whyte 2010), food mislabelling (Croall 2012), food safety (Leighton 2016), and trade practices and environmental law (Walters 2006). Additionally, harms stemming from food production have been explored through the empirical research of exploitation in food production (Hinch 2019;Tombs and Whyte 2007), cruelty to animals (Agnew 1998;Fitzgerald 2019;Schally 2017;Tourangeau and Fitzgerald 2020;Yates 2007), effect of pesticides on farmers (Del Prado-Lu 2019), links between technologies and food (Laestadius, Deckers and Baran 2019;Sun and Liu 2019;Walters 2019), and regulation of food waste (Long and Lynch 2019).…”