Take honey, for example. You’d think it’s a pretty straightforward product – bees make it, bears steal it from the bees, you eat it. Or something. But the truth is that pretty much all the major players in the industry knowingly buy their honey from dodgy sources in China – a country that, for instance, has no qualms in purveying pepper that is entirely made from mud.

For decades, the vast majority of our “fresh” chicken has been infused with a whole bunch of other substances, up to and including beef and pork waste. That’s bad news for Hindus, Muslims and anyone else who is choosing the chicken dish from the menu because contact with beef or pork is expressly forbidden by their religion.

There’s a substance in the meat industry‘s bag of tricks called “transglutaminase.” That’s an awful lot of syllables, so most people just call it by its nickname – meat glue. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Its intended purpose is for fancy chefs who sometimes need to stick different parts of a meal together after preparation (to make crab cakes and such), but it has another, shadier purpose among renegade butchers.

At least, that used to be how it worked. The salmon you eat today has never swum a single damn inch upstream. Instead of the Alaskan wilderness, today’s salmon only contain the spirit of the cramped, overcrowded salmon farms in which they spent their entire lives. Because the fish can’t move much and their diet consists entirely of aquarium pellets, the salmon that arrives at your local Safeway is as gray as a British winter.

Nowhere, that’s where. Every single restaurant and beef purveyor boasting Kobe beef is lying its ass off. You have never had real Kobe beef. Not in the U.S., not in Europe, not in Australia. Unless you actually flew to Japan and specifically sought it out, you haven’t had a shadow of a chance to even sniff a Kobe steak.

As crazy as it sounds, olive oil piracy is one of the Italian Mafia’s most lucrative enterprises, to the extent that it appears that most olive oil on the market is either greatly diluted or completely forged by a massive shadow industry that involves major names such as Bertolli.