We are generally trusting eaters. A server brings a dish: It must be what the menu says. But labels can lie, and when it comes down to it, can you really tell the difference between one whity flaky fish and the next? Whether you like it or not, food fraud is real, and it's probably happened to you.

The food fraud du jour is olive oil, thanks to an infographic in the New York Times last week that portrayed the problem as a clever, if vaguely sensationalist, cartoon. Food fraud can be a tough issue to garner sympathy for—along with wine and caviar, fancy olive oil is a luxury product; if you're willing to shell out that much money for something you can't even identify, aren't you just asking for it? Decidedly not, is our opinion. But you do need to do your homework.

So if you don't have a chromatography set in your pocket, can you ever eat without paralyzing uncertainty again? There are a few red flags to watch out for across the board. Number one: Read the ingredients . Words like aroma or essence should make you turn and run. Added sugar and sneakily suffixed ingredients (vanillin for vanilla, for example) are frequent offenders. Above all, buy whole foods whenever possible —because it's easy to add paprika extract to orange juice, but what could they possibly do to this orange? Well, actually... but that's another slideshow.