Some facts are proverbial bolts of lightening on a dark night, fully illuminating an otherwise hidden landscape. Much chicken in the poultry industry is bulked up with water, increasing its apparent weight by up to 35-40%. The water is held in place with dried animal protein, often beef or pork since they're the cheapest. The illuminating fact is what happens when this practice comes under scrutiny. It's actually legal to water-inflate chicken, as long as the label makes it clear that's happened. But - as a Panorama programme from 2003 revealed - DNA can be tampered with to make its origin undetectable.

Last friday, Radio 4's Today programme talked to Geoffrey Dovey, a poultry producer who has been campaigning for years on this. As far back as 1998 he had told the government about this practice. The issue is going to Brussels, but there's been an apparent lack of enthusiasm for action. The FSA, for instance, has been telling people: if you want to know, ask restaurants you buy from.

To get a look at the meat in question, jump to about the 45 minute mark in this BBC programme, "what's really in our food?" The same programme shows Panorama's undercover success in finding a company to help remove DNA from the protein powder, so normal PCR tests won't be able to detect the source of the proteins. New methods to detect protein sources are being invented, and it appears this practice of hiding the origin of protein powder is widespread, especially in the wholesale sector.

So it's an arms race between food producers and standards agencies. Illegality doesn't appear to be much of a deterent; as one man in that BBC prog says, "the only crime is getting caught." Feeding pork to people who's religion forbids it also wouldn't appear to be a problem: what they don't know won't hurt them.

Bona fide food science institutions and process analysts work to squeeze more efficiency out of each tiny step in the food chain. But making animal proteins undetectable? Who the hell is doing that? Some batshit crazy scientist under a volcano somewhere, stroking a protein-water-bloated cat and plotting the downfall of civilisation via a slow attrition of inferior-quality food products? It's easy to forget the incredible amount of innovation that goes into industrial food: the traumatic Our Daily Bread is the best source I've seen for demonstrating the truly unbelievable heights this reaches. One aspect running through that film is the seemingly arbitrary mix of machine and human in food processing. A Fordist meat factory will consist of a disassembly line where people pop up in the machine's process doing the oddest tasks - sorting offal or carefully placing fish the correct way round, for hours on end. Given the intricacy of the automated processes available, it's a clear indication of how minutely profit-driven those process choices are: people still work at this or that point because its cheaper than the machines currently available.

Dovey's campaign work stands a lot more chance of success now that 'provenance' is such an important concept to consumers. But it seems a very difficult problem to me. Again, the BBC programme above has a lovely example: they work with a PR firm to make a most unsavoury pie, and it ends up looking for all the world like it was made by your best friend. In a world where consumers still look for cognitive shortcuts, provenance is easily manipulated; the rapid increase of producers' smiling faces on food packets is testament to that. And the reverse holds: Scott's 'Seeing like a state' begins by talking about regulation of weights and measures. Regardless of whether the state's motivation was a more consistent, taxable resource, the effect was also meant to be better information for the buyer. 'Provenance' ostensibly does the same - food is meant to arrive 'embedded' with information about its origins. This is - so the theory goes - a benefit of localising food networks: closer proximity to the producer increases trust. History seems to suggest that's hardly guaranteed.

Lastly: the result of standards arms races is cheap food. One might argue that knee-jerk squeamishness to such visible cases is a figleaf for the fact that, really, we'd rather not look too closely - that we're happy for someone to do the dirty work on our behalf as long as little is demanded of our wallets.