From the archive: Food fraud and counterfeit cotton: the detectives untangling the global supply chain

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  This is The Guardian. The Guardian Archive Long Read.

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  Hi, this is Saman Subramanian.

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  I'm here to introduce Food Fraud and Counterfeit Cotton,

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  The Detectives Untangling the Global Supply Chain, which was a Guardian long read published in 2021.

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  Somewhere in the daily press or maybe in a business paper,

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  I'd read about this company called Oritain,

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  a company that was based in New Zealand and that was testing organic food materials,

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  organic textiles, anything that was made from nature or grown locally anywhere.

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  They were testing these products.

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  for their chemical composition.

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  And apparently these tests have grown so advanced over the last 20 years that you can determine virtually to within a square kilometer where a particular grape was grown or where coffee comes from.

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  And that got me thinking why there was this need in the first place to test these products,

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  why companies and governments and nonprofits wanted to test these products and why provenance matters so much.

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  We value provenance a lot in other kinds of domains.

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  We value provenance in art

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  because we want to know who's held a particular artwork or who has sold it and bought it in the past.

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  But we rarely think about provenance except in the case of very obvious food materials.

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  You know, Parmesan cheese should come from Parma, for example.

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  But there's a whole ecosystem out there now.

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  that values provenance so much for various other reasons,

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