Protecting our food: Can standard food safety analysis detect adulteration of food products with selected chemical agents?

摘要

The food we eat and water we drink is routinely tested for a range of biological and chemical contaminants, which can be hazardous to human health, as part of food safety legislative requirements. The vulnerability of the food industry to deliberate contamination events, rather than naturally occurring events, was explored as one aspect of the EU FP7 project EDEN (End-User Driven Demo for CBRNe). We wanted to investigate if routine food safety testing could detect deliberate contamination with three chemical contaminants and three matrices (cooked ham, sugar and water). The contaminants selected had to be hazardous to human health at levels in the final food product that could occur with a deliberate contamination event.