The investigators say they have a duty to defend Italy’s national interests, and so they spend their days in a discreetly marked government office, scanning the internet for dubious activity, trying to thwart one threat after the next. In other words, they are on the lookout for fake cheese.

“This looks like the fishiest thing ever,” one of the food investigators, Domenico Vona, said this month after some internet sleuthing led him to an “Italian parmesan” made in Ukraine. Vona studied the product details of the deep yellow vacuum-packed hunks. “This is blatant,” he said as he filed a complaint to the online marketplace, Alibaba, where it was being sold. “This is definitely not Parmigiano.”