The farm-to-table trend has exploded recently. Across the country, menus proudly boast chickens bought from local farmers, pork from heritage breed pigs, vegetables grown from heirloom varieties. These restaurants are catering to diners who increasingly want to know where their food comes from — and that it is ethically, sustainably sourced.

But are these eateries just serving up lies?

Laura Reiley, the food critic for the Tampa Bay Times, wanted to find out. So she undertook a rigorous two-month investigation of Tampa’s farm-to-table restaurants, tracking down their sourcing claims. Many off them turned out to be bogus.

Reiley spoke with NPR’s Ari Shapiro about her investigation. An edited transcript of their conversation is below.

You fact-checked dozens of these menus. You called the farms. And what did you find?

Many of those local greens misted with unicorn tears are something else entirely.

I think that there’s a powerful incentive to tell a story. We all want that story — it’s a big part of why we go out to eat. If a restaurant can give you that story about that pork chop that lived a happy and delightful life from the beginning to its very last minute, that’s great. And sometimes they’re actually serving you commodity pork.

And it’s not just that — it’s like, what claims to be Florida blue crab actually coming from India.

We did some DNA testing. It’s always illuminating when you do that. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to do that on seafood than it is on meat.

And there’s no way of testing if someone says these are organic , local heirloom tomatoes, and actually they’re Mexican tomatoes, irradiated. There are no genetic markers or tests that will tell you that.

What got me interested in this topic is I’ve done a lot of agriculture writing in the past couple of years in Florida, and met with a lot of farmers. And they’ve all groused about this a little bit. That they’re used as billboards at these restaurants. A restaurant may buy from them once or twice and then phase them out but keep them on the chalkboard or on the menu.

You talked to one pork producer who walked you through the finances of raising a hog, slaughtering it for meat. And the price of that pork chop on the plate would have been something like $40.

I think that we as Americans have really come to expect inexpensive food. We spend a very small amount of our disposable income on food and restaurateurs have to cope with that. They have to figure out how to offer food to us at a price we will pay, while buying the best ingredients that they can. And often, as in any other business, it’s buy low and sell high.

You confronted a lot of chefs about this and a lot of them gave you the same answer.

[They said:] “I guess that should come off the chalkboard.”

There were plenty of people who were honestly surprised to find something was still on the chalkboard or still on their menu many months after they’d purchased that product, and many others that were just caught red-handed.

Your reporting was all done in Tampa, but is there any reason to believe that this problem is limited to this part of Florida?

Oh, I’m sure it’s a widespread phenomenon.

And I think it is a kind of arms escalation. In some ways, it may go back to the fact that maybe 10 years ago, when we started getting real farmers markets, we as consumers started being able to buy great produce and great heritage meats and those kinds of things. So it’s almost like restaurants needed to up the ante and claim even more extravagant boutique products on their menus — things that we, as consumers, couldn’t buy ourselves. So I understand why some of these claims are being made.

So if I, as a consumer, want to dine out responsibly and want to support local agriculture without a huge carbon footprint — what should I do?

You’ve got to ask questions. I mean, I don’t know how comfortable I’d feel at a restaurant asking to see their invoices. But I think we’re going to have to move in that direction where … there’s a little more consumer activism in terms of demanding more transparency in the provenance of where we’re getting our food.

When you see those claims on the menu — naturally raised, or heritage breeds — I think that they should raise a red flag, and you should feel free to ask more questions.

Is there a way to do it without being that obnoxious kind of diner who is straight out of the Portlandia sketch?

I think price point should definitely be an indicator — if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. If you see that $10 lobster roll, something is fishy.

You’re pretty open in this article about the fact that you’ve written favorable restaurant reviews for some of these places that claimed farm-to-table philosophy and didn’t stick to it. Is this reporting in a way a mea culpa?

Absolutely. I’m embarrassed. Some of the places I’ve given the highest review in the past year and kind of swooned over their farm-to-table stuff — I feel duped.

If I went into it with the idea that I was paying a premium for a particular local food or a sustainably-raised food and I got something else, it really doesn’t matter how it tasted.

One of the things that surprised me in this article is that a lot of the chefs who really do adhere to the farm-to-table ethos don’t wear it on their sleeves.

I think there’s a lot of farm-to-table fatigue among chefs. You know, it’s like the term foodie itself. it starts to take on a kind of bankrupt, yucky demeanor after so many people have misused it.

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The leaking of more than 11 million documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca earlier this month cast new light on the arcane world of offshore shell companies, long a favorite hiding place for the very rich.

But actually setting up a shell corporation turns out to be something that any average Joe can do. In fact, you can do it in just a little more time than it takes to open an email account, with the help of one of the army of law firms and financial advisers that specialize in them.

“You can do it over the phone. You can do it over the Internet. It’s relatively easy to do, depending on where you are and what you want to set up,” says Tom Cardamone, managing director of Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit research group that looks for ways to stop illicit financial flows.

“It can be a matter of just a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars. You can set up an anonymous shell company in Delaware the same day,” he says.

The ease with which such accounts can be established is one reason more and more money is pouring into them each year.

“A growing fraction of the world’s wealth, and particularly of the wealth in tax havens, is owned via shell companies, so it’s obviously a business that is booming and is doing extremely well,” says Gabriel Zucman, assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations.

Because the industry is shrouded in secrecy, any estimates of its size are at best an educated guess, Zucman says. But he estimates that 60 percent of the money held in accounts in Swiss banks is under the names of shell corporations.

For those with money to hide, the lures of a shell corporation are many.

In most places you don’t have to attach your name to a shell corporation, making it virtually impossible for tax authorities or law enforcement officials to tell who owns it. But if you really want to cover your tracks, you can set up interlocking shell companies in different places, such as the British Virgin Islands or Bermuda, Cardamone says.

“You can create an anonymous shell in one jurisdiction that controls an anonymous trust in a completely different country that also controls a bank account in a third country,” Cardamone says.

Once your shell company is up and running, you can use it to stash any spare millions you may have lying around.

“Now you’re the owner of a company that can open, for instance, bank accounts all over the world. Or that can buy real estate all over the world. It makes it easy for you to hide your identity and to be an anonymous owner of wealth all over the world,” Zucman says.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all is that establishing a shell corporation — at least by itself — doesn’t technically violate any law, Cardamone says.

“There’s nothing illegal about setting up such a corporation. It’s what happens after that that can cause the problem, whether it’s tax evasion or money laundering,” he says.

In other words, it’s not having a secret shell corporation that can get you in trouble. It’s how you use it.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of firms offer help setting up shell companies, often as part of a set of financial and legal services, and many are located in the United States.

Most of these firms don’t actually process the transaction themselves but farm it out to a much larger firm that specializes in them, such as Mossack Fonseca. The Panamanian law firm is considered one of the largest such firms in the world.

With so much money pouring into these companies, big investors such as private equity firms have been eager to get a part of them. For example, the Carlyle Group was an early investor in one of the biggest firms, Hong Kong-based Offshore Incorporations Limited, but sold its share to a Scandinavian firm in 2011.

“I think they saw this as a growth industry, obviously something that particularly was experiencing strong growth from the developing world, particularly China. And it was kind of a new industry that hadn’t attracted much attention from outsiders before,” says Jason Sharman, professor of political science at Australia’s Griffith University.

As the use of shell corporations has grown, the United States and other developed countries have attempted to crack down on them. They increasingly require banks to turn over more information about accounts held by their own citizens.

As the Mossack Fonseca case has shown, major banks such as Deutsche Bank and UBS have in the past played roles in helping their clients set up offshore bank accounts.

Regulators say such efforts are making a dent in stopping tax evasion. They’ve made it much harder for many citizens of the United States and Europe to hide their money. (The rules don’t apply to people from China, Russia and Brazil, where much of the newest money comes from.)

But Zucman isn’t sure the major banks are really ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

“After all, for decades they’ve been exactly the opposite,” Zucman says. “They’ve been helping their clients evade taxes, hiding them behind shell companies, and so we can ask ourselves: Is it just enough to now ask these very same individuals and these very same institutions to now play the taxman’s job?”

“Up to this point there hasn’t been the political will to address the issue of anonymous shell companies,” Cardamone says. “These things have been in place for decades. This is not something that’s been created recently. So there’s also the issue of changing the way business has always been done. No matter what the issue is, changing something that’s been happening for decades is always difficult to do.”

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In its first-ever transparency report, Uber has revealed that it has given federal and local U.S. agencies information on more than 12 million riders and drivers between July and December 2015.

This kind of report is not uncommon in the tech industry, but this particular one does something extra: It uses the report to take regulators to task for what Uber sees as excessive data sharing, making a case that it frequently tries to narrow the scope of requested information.

During this six-month period in 2015, Uber says it shared trip data with regulatory agencies, airport authorities and law enforcement agencies. Regulators received the majority of the data, which the report says involved 11.6 million riders and 583,000 drivers. The data Uber shared with airport authorities involved 1.6 million riders and 156,000 drivers.

Uber writes in a post on Medium:

“And while this kind of trip data doesn’t include personal information, it can reveal patterns of behavior — and is more than regulators need to do their jobs. It’s why Uber frequently tries to narrow the scope of these demands, though our efforts are typically rebuffed.”

This report encapsulates Uber’s ongoing fight with regulators. In January, the California Public Utilities Commission fined Uber $7.6 million for the company’s “failure to fully and timely comply” with the commission’s reporting requirements.

Uber does not specify how many riders and drivers were affected by disclosures to law enforcement officials, but the company says the government requested data related to a total of 613 rider and driver accounts. Of those requests, Uber’s report shows it “fully” complied with 31.8 percent of the requests and produced some data for 84.8 percent of the cases.

Uber says “a large number” of law enforcement requests were related to investigations of fraud and stolen credit cards. The report does not specify how many of these cases were related to rape and sexual assault. Uber has been under scrutiny for its role in protecting passengers from these kinds of attacks.

An Uber spokesman told Fortune that the company will now be releasing a transparency report every six months. The ride-hailing service joins more than 60 companies — including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple — that regularly release such reports.

“There seems to be much more sharing of personal data for a less important purpose, which raises privacy flags for me,” Jim Harper, senior fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, tells the Verge.

In its report, Uber also specifies that the company has not been compelled by the FBI to disclose data on an issue of national security, nor has it received any court orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Uber writes on Medium: “We hope our Transparency Report will lead to a public debate about the types and amounts of information regulated services should be required to provide to their regulators, and under what circumstances.”

Naomi LaChance is a business news intern at NPR.

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