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

A wonderful learning experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I learned a lot about the "food" I do eat and what I want to be eating. It will definitely have an impact on my future shopping, cooking, and eating. I listened to the audio version and will be using the ebook version for future reference. Some details from prior chapters are used throughout for comparative reference which at times seemed too repetitive. If you care about your health, read this book. If you love food, read this book.

jaw dropping information

I feel like I need a PHD in many different areas to go grocery shopping...

A frightening motivator to shop carefully

It's a rare book to make me consider plowing under my yard in favor of becoming my own farmer, but this book has nearly done it. Larry Olmsted outlines a world of faux food, imported poisons, and scams available in supermarkets and restaurants near you, everything from cheeses to wines and on into non-foods sold as food.

Olmsted begins by showing the painstaking craftsmanship behind some of the finest foods, opening with the creation of true Parmigiano-Reggiano from the Parma region of Italy. Milk taken directly from the farm to the cheese maker, with no milk taken older than 12 hours. The cheese begun almost immediately in molds that have to be specially made to foil counterfeiters, kept in storage and turned for years until it reaches perfection. The American answer has been to create cheeses that are more wood pulp than milk, put it in cans, and sell it as Parmesan cheese.  It's done with little regard for either the consumer or the farmers and craftsmen whose families have been making a phenomenal (and pricey) cheese for centuries.

And this is one of the less frustrating stories in the book, which is filled with reports of "olive oil" that is often no more than flavored and dyed peanut oil (he quotes and mentions the book Extra-Virginity which tells of some oils so poor that they should be used for lubricating hinges rather than food), of shrimp sold as lobster, of poisonous fugu sold as monkfish. 

These horror stories don't even touch on the downright thefts in the marketplace. Whatever is being sold as red snapper at your store is 94% likely to be another fish. White tuna is almost as bad. He details restaurants and meat companies marketing Kobe beef from Japan, even during periods when it was illegal to import any beef from that country. 

He also goes into detail on how wines like true champagne require grapes and growing areas that are controlled by the French government. Nonetheless the US government has refused to sign or follow economic treaties, allowing some companies to sell a sparkling wine from different grapes and using different processes but still labeling their wine as Champagne. 

Some of the problems come from our government, including the FDA and USDA using careless or nonexistent inspection procedures. Some are international bait-and-switch artists who may export contaminated foods to the US, moving their operations to a different country if they are caught.

It's a frightening story, but Olmsted does offer some solutions. Don't by some things, check labels on others, buy from some responsible vendors that he specifies in the book. It's worth the frustrations of the reports to get a sense of just what is passing as food and for the motivation to do some careful label research on the items you find in the store.

An eye opener on the food industry.

I have no doubts that the rise of fake food coincides with the rise of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, obesity and many others. It is time to take actions and return to wholesome foods and especially foods that are non GMO.

Enlightening and eye opening

I've always understood that there are many foods that are fake. This book opened my eyes to the fact that most of the foods I've been eating or fake. I enjoyed this book and I thought it was very interesting and had a lot of excellent information. I would recommend this book.

Good but Scary Info

Damn! I'm glad I never bought a "Kobe steak". I had wagyu once, but I had no idea what wagyu meant. The one I had probably wasn't real. Thank you for educating me!