Real Food, Fake Food

Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It

By: Larry Olmsted

Narrated by: Jonathan Yen

Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

You've seen the headlines: Parmesan cheese made from sawdust. Lobster rolls containing no lobster at all. Extra-virgin olive oil that isn't. Fake foods are in our supermarkets, our restaurants, and our kitchen cabinets. Award-winning food journalist and travel writer Larry Olmsted exposes this pervasive and dangerous fraud perpetrated on unsuspecting Americans.

Real Food, Fake Food brings listeners into the unregulated food industry, revealing that this shocking deception extends from high-end foods like olive oil, wine, and Kobe beef to everyday staples such as coffee, honey, juice, and cheese. It's a massive bait and switch where counterfeiting is rampant and where the consumer ultimately pays the price.

But Olmsted does more than show us what foods to avoid. A bona fide gourmand, he travels to the sources of the real stuff to help us recognize what to look for, eat, and savor: genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy, fresh-caught grouper from Florida, authentic port from Portugal. Real foods that are grown, raised, produced, and prepared with care by masters of their crafts.

©2016 Larry Olmsted (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Narrator Jonathan Yen's conversational, expressive style makes it easy for listeners to absorb the sometimes surprising information about the food they think they're purchasing.... Yen deftly handles the required accents as author Olmsted travels around the world...." ( AudioFile)

I'm going to buy several of this book to give to friends

Wow, so much I didn't know in here! I'm grateful the author gave some tips and alternatives, otherwise it would have been pretty bleak. Overall, riveting and informative.

If you can get past the narrator...

Any additional comments?

I have to disagree with those who enjoyed this narration. Maybe it’s just a personal thing, but to me he Over. Emphasized. EV-ER-Y-THING! Every utterance of the word “delicious” was stretched out to 4 or 5 syllables. Every sentence seemed to end with an exclamation point. This was exhausting to listen to; it was harder to root out any emphasis intended by the author, because EVERYTHING was emphasized, and so nothing was. (This was one of the few times I found myself wondering if this would have been better read by the author.) If the excellent “Parmesan” chapter hadn’t come so early in the book, I might not have persevered.

The book itself gets a little repetitious, and spends a lot of time on foods I cannot currently eat, let alone afford; but that doesn’t mean I don’t like learning about them. And some of its points could perhaps have been explained more clearly. But it’s hard to say for sure, because I found the narration so obnoxious. Imagine being read to by someone who assumes you don’t speak English very well, or are hard of hearing, or are very stupid. And the attempts at accents (especially Australian) were just unfortunate… especially since they foist that overenthusiastic style of speaking onto every person quoted. It was jarring.

There is important information here, if you’re the type to care about what you’re eating. One begins to wonder just what they DO get done on the food side at the FDA, and what the USDA is even there for. It’s disheartening to realize I’ll have to read labels even more carefully now. But I’m also looking forward to visiting the cheese counter soon.

A note on those who found the book elitist, because so many of the “real” foods are too pricey for most of us to afford: I think they’re missing the point, or maybe just don’t care that much about whether something is what it says it is. In one enlightening but too-short bit, the author mentions the sad case of bologna (rare and special in Italy, “punishment” food in the US, all because its name was so successfully coopted and devalued). Those people can enjoy their crappy Korbel “champagne” at New Years. I’ll take water if those are my only choices.

Also, the author states (in the conclusion, so perhaps too late for some) that he is not wealthy himself and only aspires to someday reach “upper middle class”. Food is obviously a priority for him, and he’ll save up for the good stuff, or the best he can afford. I certainly can’t begrudge him that, though I may envy him his trips to Italy and Japan.

Very good information

I loved this audio book! I spent 30 minutes in my local supermarket and left with only olive oil.

fascinating and educational

Any additional comments?

This is part travel book, part foody book, part health book, but all enjoyable. See my full review at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfr9p5KhEX8

For gourmet foodies, not the health conscious

As a person who is trying to pay more attention to my health, I purchased this book expecting to hear about things like fillers in my hamburger meat, hidden chemicals lurking in my produce, and carcinogens in my lunch meat. That's not what this book is about at all. Instead, it is a lengthy and nauseatingly detailed description of cheap "imposter" foods masquerading as the more expensive real thing. While this subject may be of great concern to gourmet food fanatics, it is of little practical value to someone like me, who would never consider spending my entire paycheck on 4 ounces of sliced Kobe beef in the first place.

After a brief teaser of counterfeit food facts, the author launches into a tedious and hyper-detailed description of how real Parmesan cheese, Balsamic vinegar, and Prosciutto ham are made. It is not until 1 hour & 10 minutes into this 12-hour book that he gets anywhere near a point. I am somewhat interested in the subject of "food fraud", but I don't need a detailed history of the creation of the real food items to appreciate this, and I wish the author had made more efficient use of his time to delve more deeply into the facts of the counterfeit food industry

The author spends each one+ hour chapter discussing the history and creation process of a single food item such as olive oil, Kobe beef, or Champagne before ever getting around to explaining how to find the real thing.

I am a simple, working class person and as such I do not have unlimited income to fly to the Parma region of Italy to sample their cheeses or hams. Nor have I been to the burgundy region of France to experience the real wines of that region. Since I have never had the pleasure of tasting any of these expensive gourmet food items, I don't really share the author's obvious outrage at the existence of imitations and fakery. In fact, fakes are my only realistic chance of ever experiencing even a hint of what these foods are supposed to taste like. Though the information presented in this book may help me to make better choices, I stand about as much chance of ever tasting these unique and famous delicacies as I do of owning my own private mega-yacht .

Imagine you are meeting your pretentious friend at a coffee shop, and while you're rummaging in your pockets to scrape together a few dollars to pay for your drink, your friend is complaining that the Learjet he just purchased for his own private use turned out to be an imitation. A mere "common" jet. How many tears would you shed in sympathy for your poor friend's suffering? That's about my level of empathy for the author's outrage over counterfeit foods. I don't begrudge his right to pay $3000 for an excellent bottle of wine, I just can't quite identify with his problems.

On a positive note, I did appreciate the author's willingness to point fingers and name names of offending companies and brands. Likewise, he also names specific brands and places where you can obtain the real thing.

Overall, my biggest disappointment with this book is the amount of time the author devotes to each individual food product. Had he spent a mere 30 minutes discussing each item instead of more than an hour, he could have covered twice as much information without sounding so much like an arrogant over-privileged elitist.

Felt like a yoyo reading this

Overall I recommend this informative book even though it had me loving it one minute and saying "p u l e e z e!" the next. This I think had something to do with the narrator's way of putting a supercilious laugh in his tone that was annoying. Especially with the wines. I'll admit I'm a 2 Buck Chuck fan and have never had Dom in my life (my loss, I guess).

I love anecdotes and concrete examples, but enough is enough. This overabundance didn't elicit a "puleeze" from me, but rather a Move on already! punch of the fast forward.

Notwithstanding the above, I felt the book is worthy enough to have a hard copy version, which I ordered mid-way through because there seemed to be some recommendations worth writing down or highlighting.

The bottom line for me is frustrating because there are so many ways companies worldwide take advantage of consumers. My answer to that is I will continue to check labels ... but marketing is so sneaky ... and will definitely shop my all-time favorite big box store, even though it is 60 miles away from where I live now and hope they continue what seems like an honest and vigilant attempt to monitor their suppliers.

Informative if verbose

This book was informative, though somewhat long winded. While the author’s stories about cooking and eating real food were interesting, I would have preferred he exclude many of them in order to make the book more accessible. If you bought the audio book version as I did, be prepared to scribble down notes regarding legit certifications for food products, meaningless food label phrases, etc.. Near the end of each chapter you can find a summary of recommendations, which is helpful considering you’ll likely be somewhat depressed by the time you get there.
Happy eating!

Learned a lot

Great book, has changed how I will buy food from now on. There is a lot of good info in this book, things I had no idea about but some I did just explained more ion depth. I now won't trust the FDA, and will won't look at paying more for higher quality food as a luxury .

was not crazy about the narrator at first

because I wasn't sure I like the narrator at first I wasn't sure about continuing with the book but then the information that it had about the food we eat and food fraud was so interesting I was having my husband listen to parts of it when he got home from work. amazing how much crud we eat

informative

a little redundant at times. but good info. makes me hate usda and fda and definitely changes my outlook on seafood