14/10/2013 Inside Out East

eating? Tonight, food writer Jay Rayner is

on the road with the food police. Reports of fraud are up - so how

well protected are we? There's always somebody, particularly in

times of austerity, prepared to cut corners and take hard-earned money

from consumers' pockets. He'll be finding out how new tests

are being developed that will tell us exactly where our food comes

from. Hopefully through forensics, we'll be able to look at my honey

and say, yes, that honey came from Saffron Walden.

And we join the restaurant bosses of the future, at the country's first

hotel school, in Essex. Revealing the stories that matter

closer to home, this is Inside Out East.

Tonight, we are in Ely in Cambridgeshire. The Fens are often

referred to as the breadbasket of the country because so much of our

food is harvested from around here, but how confident can we be that the

full report on our tables is what it says it is? Jay has uncovered that

reports of fraud are up, and at the same time budget cuts mean fewer

checks on our food. -- Jay Rayner.

Spaghetti bolognese is one of the nation's favourite dishes, and what

could be better than some lovely beef simmered in some extra virgin

olive oil served over pasta made with free range eggs? But what if

the beef is some old pony that should be racing at Kempton, and a

free range eggs are captured in a cage, and the olive oil is rather

less innocent than it claims? All of these items have been the subject of

food fraud over the years. So how confident can we be in our food, and

how can we be certain there will not be under the horse meat scandal, how

can we be sure that our food does what it says on the tin?

What we have seen our failings in the system, with more fraud and less

testing of our food. And a report just published by the National Audit

Office has underlined the problems. It says the Government failed to

spot the possibility of horse being passed off as beef earlier this

year. There is confusion over the role of the Food Standards Agency,

and it says that detection of fraud is falling short of what we as

consumers should expect. It is our local Trading Standards

who are the food police on the ground doing the checks. Drastic

cuts to their budgets are putting the whole system of detecting food

fraud at risk. To understand the challenges Trading

Standards face, I am spending the day with food enforcement Officer

Ayesha Singh. We are visiting an award-winning yoghurt factory in

Suffolk. 220 grams. Is the packaging only four micrograms? I thought it

was 12 grams. This is the sheet they have got out. They have the wrong

sheet out. You have noticed something I have

not. The consumer needs to know exactly

what they are getting, and what they are looking at here is a discrepancy

between weights. It looks like it is just an oversight, but they have to

get it right so the consumer knows what they are getting.

Ayesha's team have had two successful prosecutions recently.

They found out that consumers were getting ripped off by companies

selling jam and source. But the problem is there are no fewer

officers in England on the hunt for a dodgy food. Reports of fraud are

rising. In the first six months of this year

812 incidents of food fraud have been reported, and that is an in

Greece -- an increase of a third. Trading Standards are also reporting

an increase, and yet their budgets nationally are said to be down one

side, and the number of samples sent for testing done by almost one

quarter. There is a crisis in the regulatory services. We have lost a

third of our inspectors, talking to colleagues recently they are

expected to slash by a further 50% in some cases. In some cases

throughout the UK, we will have no Trading Standards service in three

years' time. With local authorities reporting cases of fraud by two

thirds last year, and limited resources, Trading Standards have to

try and predict problems. Back at the dairy, they are taking a sample

of milk for routine testing. One sample is going to be sent off for

testing, one will be retained by the business. Poor weather has meant

milk yields are down this year. Dairies across the county are being

tested to make sure milk is not being watered down. Recession also

makes for a more attractive, so officers are very busy, and so is

the Food Standards Agency. It is in overall charge of our food safety.

Therefore a branch has never been busier.

The FSA has been repeatedly criticised as being not fit for

purpose. It was accused of acting too slowly during the horse bit

scandal. So is the current system is tough enough? -- the horse meat

scandal. In the prior year there were more than 90,000 samples

collected. There were more than 20,000 authenticity tests. There

have been several areas where we have been targeting for a number of

years. So I don't think the incident was actually a wake up call, this is

an area in terms of food authenticity but we have been

working on for many, many years. This incident is one that has raised

the public awareness about authenticity and about thinking what

is in your food. But a former head of authenticity at the FSA told us

we are no less well equipped to uncover fraud. Dr Mark Woolfe spent

nine years in charge and he believes budget cuts are undermining the

system. The FSA relied basically on local authority results, and

obviously local authorities now are under financial pressure, and

therefore the amount of sampling that they are doing has been quite

severely reduced, so I think the whole system is really quite

severely weakened. It is challenging in the current financial environment

for local authorities to do the work they need to do. But the FSA has

invested more in this area in the last year to boost their resources

and efforts, and it is clear that the system is detecting problems,

but it will be challenging in the future because the threats will keep

evolving. The service is there to protect consumers will also evolve.

Two weeks after our visit to the dairy, the samples have been tested.

Everything was OK, but I did discover another problem in the

system. The number of public testing laboratories has shrunk dramatically

over the past decade, down from 20 to just nine. It is another sign

that less testing of our food is taking place, but food fraud has

never been left -- more attractive to criminals.

And FSA report lists all the products it thinks could be have

been the subject of fraud, and it is quite a list.

Honey, wine, fridges, spices, olive oil, but should all testing the paid

for by both public purse? What about the supermarkets, we buy all our

food -- most of our fruit from them. Tesco were found to be selling

products containing horse meat. -- our food.

You have thousands of products in Tesco. How do you decide what to

test? We hurt we take a balanced view of

where the biggest risk might be that something could go wrong.

We could be telling consumers there was chicken in a product, and we

have to make sure it is chicken and not psyche. That is when we DNA

test, and we do this test frequently. -- Turkey. Since horse

meat was found in some of the products, Tesco say they now carry

out eight times more DNA testing. Crystal ball moment, do you think

the horse meat scandal could happen again? Our sole objective in giving

our customers the best confidence we can in the products we produce is to

ensure that that kind of activity, if it were there, we would catch it,

and because our supply chains are shorter and we understand them

better, and the testing is stronger than ever before, that that fraud

should not happen again. While Tesco are confident they have

learned lessons, the rest of the food surveillance system is and is

-- considerable pressure. Can it cope? In my view the horse meat

scandal could happen again. There is always somebody prepared to cut

corners and when we are faced with a system that is creaking and is

fragmented, that is an opportunity for somebody to exploit those

conditions and take hard earned money from consumers' pockets.

Whilst the majority of our food is safe and what it says it is, food

fraud is an established crime. It is all about money, and where there is

money to be made, no criminals will be attracted to food fraud. The

trouble is the food system is hard to police.

And if there's something you think we should be looking into here on

the programme, you can send me an e-mail. Or I'm on Twitter. You're

with Inside Out East here on BBC One. Coming up, things are getting

hot in the kitchen, as we're with the hotel bosses of the future.

Competitive? Yeah, bloody right we're competitive.

There's a lot of money to be made from premium foods. Products made in

a certain part of the country, or in a certain way, attract a higher

price tag. But how do you know what you're buying is, say, locally

produced? Criminals are making a lot of money by faking this food, and

we're paying the price for it. But now science is fighting back.

Thanks to recent scandals, more and more of us are preferring to buy

fresh produce from local suppliers. But even with a seemingly unbroken

link from the field to the shopping bag, there's still room for fraud.

Now of course, this is an apple. Looks like an apple, and it tastes

like an apple. And we probably choose to buy it because not only do

we like a particular variety, but we also like where it comes from.

But how can we be sure that the fruit we're buying comes from the

Norfolk orchards, or that the meat IS from Essex farms? Now, thanks to

pioneering tests developed in Norwich, we'll eventually know

exactly where all of our food comes from. Alison Johnson is the

scientist behind this new technology.

Why has food traceability become so important?

There have been a lot of high-profile cases, does what you

are doing goes some way to prevent this? Yes, we are using a technique

of environmental fingerprinting to determine and validate where a

product was grown and where it originated. Who are you doing this

work for? Ultimately everyone benefits but the main customer is

three people dashed Dutch growers like these who want to make sure

their product does not get time-limited, you have got

processors who are using raw materials and want to be sure they

are using the right product, and indeed retailers who up to date have

been the victims of a lot of these food frauds. Because food has a

unique fingerprint depending on where it is grown, Alison is

developing tests for every sort. She travels the country to collect local

samples. These form the reference database. We need to know what a

local environmental footprint looks like in this area, we want to prove

the provenance of genuine tomatoes. If we test these and then we have

samples brought in from another source, we are able to detect

whether or not they are likely to have come from here or not using

these as a reference. Food forensics is leading the way in developing

traceability tests. It started 18 months ago using equipment more

commonly used to detect illegal drugs but now they have adapted the

science to test all kinds of food and drink and I am going to see how

it works. It looks like you have setup a conundrum for me. We have

two sets of tomatoes, three different apples and three punnets

of strawberries. Where are they from? That is the challenge for you.

These look slightly bigger than these, but I have no idea. These

apples look identical. They haven't got a flag on, have they? No, I

guess that is the point. It is just guesswork. That is why the testing

is so important. Depending on where it is grown, every plant and food

will have a different pattern of something called isotopes. It is

this that Alison and her team need to measure. Samples save the unique

isotope can be seen. The technique is very specific to the

temperature, rainfall, prevailing weather, the nutrients in the soil,

the fertiliser it has been fed. So right on the coast of the prevailing

weather you get the heavy isotopes. Further inland into higher altitudes

you get lighter isotopes. So using that as an example, the tomato

growing right down on the south-west coast will have a heavier isotopic

composition than one grown in Scotland and the mountains and that

is information we need to be able to determine where they come from.

There is no shortage of demand for Alison's tests, she has already

developed tests for some meats, fruit and veg for a leading

supermarket. Now she is working on honey. Even this pure of products is

susceptible to fraud. A few years ago local beekeepers had the

reputation of their honey undermined by tubs of Chinese and Argentinian

honey labelled and sold as Norfolk honey. Because of high profile cases

of honey fraud, food forensics scientists are making a honey map of

the country to pinpoint exactly where the bees have been to collect

their nectar. They have invited beekeepers to submit samples for

analysis. One such group is the Essex Beekeepers' Association who

have been eager to have their products authenticated. Customers

will pay a premium for good local honey. Jars will taste different due

to where and on what the bees have foraged. When they gather the

nectar, the foragers bring it back to the hive and pass it to another

worker within the colony, and the nectar gets passed between the bees

and in doing so they add enzymes from glands which they have in their

heads and in their mouths and these enzymes start to convert the nectar

into honey. And it is that honey which provides many health benefits.

The confusion for us however is that we are confronted with a vast array

of varieties all claiming to be local, but you can't tell the

difference just by looking. This range of Essex honeys here just

indicates the wide range of forage crops that we have in the county.

This honey here, which is probably borage with some lime in it, when

you look at it alongside this honey here, they are both Essex honeys but

they are vastly different. The forage crops that you would find in

there could be grown in several places around the UK. How do you

know it is Essex honey? I don't know. Hopefully food forensics, when

they have finished their work, will be able to look at my honey and say,

yes, that came from our locality. This year's poor spring weather has

devastated honey yields by as much as 72%. As a result, honey prices

are set to rise, opening the door for fraudsters to cash in. Testing

couldn't come quick enough for genuine honey makers. How does this

fake honey get passed off as the real thing? Honey is an interesting

product, there are three different ways you can fraudulently sell

honey, I suppose. One is using imported honeys and selling it as

labelled as British when it is clearly not. You can also mix honey

with corn syrup, there have been a lot of reports of honey detected

with a blend of corn syrup and honey, so it is actually a mixture.

The third way is actually just feeding bees sugar syrup, which

creates a kind of honey like substance but it has no pollen in

it. Those are the three key ways and this testing enables us to identify

each of those. Alison hopes to have the honey map ready by next season.

There are opportunities for fraud in every food and drink that we buy.

Our job is to develop tests to give the consumer reassurance that the

product they are buying is authentic, it is as it is labelled,

and it is safe to eat. If we can achieve that, we have done our job.

The Mark Forrest show on BBC local radio will be asking if you have

lost trust in what you are eating, that is at eight o'clock. Now we're

off to a hotel. The guests demand good food and good service, but

they're being served by students, who are hoping for a career in the

hospitality business. It is the country's first hotel school and it

is in Colchester. We are now running probably 25 minutes behind schedule

so we will have to push, push, push. The tiniest thing that you didn't

even notice, they will be like, "why did you not clean that properly?"!

Every meal that we do we want to go, I did that and I'm proud of that.

Wivenhoe House is a luxury hotel. Behind the curtains, some of the

finest rooms anywhere. But it's no ordinary hotel. Can I top up

anyone's champagne? It's run by students. The Edge Hotel School is

the first of its kind in the UK. The students are doing a degree in hotel

management and are taught by top industry pros like former Essex Chef

of the Year Paul Boorman. The pros and students work side by side and

the paying guests shouldn't be able tell the difference. There are two

big events looming and student Emily can't wait. There's a rock weekend,

and a black tie dinner. Emily is from Dubai. She works at a world

famous five star hotel run by her parents, but they've sent her here.

The UK has now obviously picked up on the fact that it is a huge

moneymaker, the service industry. If you want to be a manager, you need

to be able to walk around the hotel, and look at something and know that

it is not done right. You need to be able to pick up on little things and

if you have never done it, you will never know. I feel it is so

important to be doing the degree and to be doing the experience at the

same time. In two years we are coming out with both. It's the

weekend of rock and roll, 17 bands over two days. It would be handy if

we did have the fish wire. There's also a wedding party in the main

hotel. It's full on. Is this the glamorous end of the

business? Is there a glamorous end? I work in the kitchen, I don't do

become a bit. -- don't do the glamour bit. The students are

surprised to learn that one of the artists is Lloyd Grossman. It's a

warm up gig Glastonbury and the famous food expert is equally

surprised to learn that the hotel is run by students. For a long time in

this country, hospitality was regarded as a pretty low level

service job and in this country for all sorts of social and historical

reasons, we tend to think that service is servile when in fact it

is not. Service is very important, especially in the world today with

the tourism industry of such international importance. The ethos

is learning by doing. The students want to manage at the world's top

hotels, but that means cleaning toilets, and making beds along the

way. The food is amazing but sometimes smelling it is enough! I

like serving people, I like making people smile and talking to people

because it is always little touches like somebody doing that little bit

extra to you that would make a difference to your experience, make

you remember it and come again. This is a pioneering course at the

University of Essex, a BA Honours degree in hotel management in two

years. We have just got to find the opportunity to create something that

will really rock the boat and be different, and that I think is what

we have achieved. It needs to be seen as being an intellectually

challenging aspiration career and that part of it we are doing here as

well. If we stick to our jobs, we should be fine. Smile at everybody

and it will be fine. The courses backed by an industry with a dire

skills shortage at the top end, by chefs like Raymond Blanc and five

star hoteliers like Hilton, Marriott, and Exclusive. They even

sponsor the rooms. The Hilton Room for example is a carbon copy from

the bed linen to the grouting between the bathroom tiles. It's the

best rooms in the world, all in one hotel. It's the day of the gala

dinner and the hotel is full. Heather from Hertfordshire and Emily

from Milton Keynes are up against it. You have to make it looked like

a room where nobody has ever slept, nobody has ever turned the shower

on. Can you take these ones over? In the kitchen, Chef is planning a

seven course meal. The students will be under the most pressure they've

faced yet. It will be fine. If you are going to do something, do it.

The guys here, we are not interested in taking short cuts. If you are

going to do a meal, do a meal. Competitive? Bloody right we are

competitive. It's a few hours before the gala dinner for 250 guests

including former world snooker champion Steve Davis. It's black

tie, so Emily is learning how to turn a napkin into a dress shirt.

Because it is student run and we are learning to become managers, we care

so much more. If you go to any other hotel, there will be staff there who

don't want to be there, just working for the money but we are here to

learn so in the long run this hotel will be one of the best. Are you all

feeling pressure? ! I think we just wanted to go to plan really. We all

want it to work and we all just have to have good communication between

each other and work well together. The good thing is that we work

together on a daily basis so we are quite close-knit. As guests arrive

and take champagne, they are unaware of a crisis developing. We need to

find Stephen. The generator has failed - there's a fuel leak. No

lights, no music, no power to the kitchen or tills. No wonder everyone

is worried. With the gala dinner hanging by a

thread, ten minutes before service, the generator is working, but will

it hold? It is my pleasure to welcome new. If you would like to

make your way through to the marquee, dinner is about to be

served. Thank you. Because of the issue with the

generator earlier on breaking down, we are now running probably 25

minutes behind schedule. I have to have this shutdown by about 11

o'clock because of the licence for the outside area. We are going to

have to rush. Tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, they'll do it

all over again. Learning by doing. Doing it to perfection.

The training looks like really hard work. That is it for this week. If

there is something you think we should be looking into, you can send

an e-mail. Or I am on Twitter. I will see you next week when I will

be revealing these stories from the east. I take a trip along the A14 to

find out what tolling could mean for us. And see the very latest on Ash

die back and the battle to save our woodland.