Take a look at the basmati rice in your local shop. Are you sure it is the fine, flavoursome grain the name suggests ? Was it really grown in those green northern Indian paddy fields that the picture on the packet shows? Perhaps not. In 2002 the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) carried out the first DNA survey of basmati rice sold in the UK. It found that only 54 per cent of the bags labelled as such contained pure basmati rice - defined as a particular species of grain grown in the plains around the Ganges in northern India and east Pakistan. All the other samples had been diluted with inferior varieties - some by more than 60 per cent. One FSA official calculated that the fraud swindled consumers out of over £5 million that year alone.
展开▼
