Food Authentication in the 21st Century: The Power of Analytical Methods Combined with Big Data Analysis.

Abstract

Most people love a good mystery or suspense story, as is evident from the success of television series such as Law & Order. A crime has been committed, and the facts behind the story are slowly revealed in a way that captivates the viewer. The food industry has its own form of criminal activities and crime scene investigations with the problem of food adulteration. According to Wikipedia, “Adulteration is a legal term meaning that a food product fails to meet legal standards” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adulterated_food). Food adulteration has been around for centuries as demonstrated in the 1820 published book – “A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons, exhibiting the fraudulent sophistications of bread, beer, wine, spirituous liquors, tea, coffee, cream, confectionery, vinegar, mustard, pepper, cheese, olive oil, pickles, and other articles employed in domestic economy. And methods of detecting them,” by Fredrick Accum. He states in the “Preliminary Observations” that “To such perfection of ingenuity has this system of adulterating of food arrived, that spurious articles of various kinds are every where to be found, made up so skillfully as to baffle the discrimination of the most experienced judges.” The factors driving the desire to adulterate food have not changed considerably since the time of Fredrick Accum – mainly being economic benefits gained from extending the amount of material, hiding spoilage, or claiming a false identity. A modern take on addressing food adulteration is the area of Food Authentication. As described by Danezis, Tsagkaris, Camin, Brusic, and Georgiou (2016), “Food authentication is the process that verifies that a food is in compliance with its label description. This may include, among others, the origin…production method…or processing technologies.” Food authentication would have been an impossible task for Fredrick Accum in 1820, but luckily for us in 2018, we have chemometrics on our side. As stated by Granato et al. (2018), “The term chemometrics describes the statistical and mathematical approaches used to optimize the design of experiments and extract useful information from large and complex datasets (Varmuza & Filzmoser, 2009).” In other words, it combines our increasingly accurate and sensitive analytical methods to detect and characterize compounds with equally advancing statistical approaches to analyze big data. Daniel Granato et al. (2018) have recently published an article in Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety titled “Trends in Chemometrics: Food Authentication, Microbiology, and Effects of Processing.” Food Authentication, including composition, specific plant or animal source, and agricultural regions of production, is important to products such as wine, honey, and meats. Granato et al. (2018) state that “In the period from 2000 to December 2017, more than 8,100 papers dealing with food authenticity have been recorded in the Science Direct database…,” hence the need for chemometrics. The world of science, especially biological science, is benefiting greatly from our growing ability to 1) generate large data sets such as genomes, proteomes, and metabolomes and then 2) analyze the data via the combination of advanced statistical techniques and computer power. The article by Granato et al. (2018) shows several ways the food science community is using this approach. While a television show depicting the process to establish that a jar of so-called Mānuka honey is indeed a fraud and actually just ordinary honey will probably not captivate the audience as a murder mystery would, society should be glad that we are developing a scientific foundation to assure that those who commit food fraud and adulteration can be brought to justice. Who knows, Food Authenticators may be the next television hit coming our way! Sincerely,