Global Food‐Related Challenges: What Chemistry Has Achieved and What Remains to Be Done

Prof. Dr. Monika Pischetsrieder

The supply of sufficient healthy, safe, and pure food to a growing world population is certainly one of the most important challenges for the present and the future. Among the food‐related challenges, food security, which is the access to sufficient amounts of food, is particularly urgent and difficult to address.

• an important task for food chemists remains to develop tailor‐made solutions and innovative technologies for food preservation, processing, and packaging.
• The contamination remained undiscovered because the sophisticated analytical techniques used for food control generally work in a targeted mode. Consequently, we only find what we are looking for.
• Can a food chemist at a food control authority possibly foresee that melamine, a highly toxic industrial waste product, is used for the production of infant formulas to fake higher protein contents? Probably not, but we can only find what we were looking for. Therefore, similar to the detection of food contaminations, the detection of food fraud would greatly profit from the application of untargeted methods.
• 1H NMR could become a high‐throughput method to screen food products and categorize them as “different”, if prominent adulterants are present. The detected difference must then be identified by other methods.
• Comprehensive databases must be generated to decide if a “difference” in a sample is alarming or just a harmless variation of the normal situation. Thus, not the improvement of the technical parameters, but of data management will be necessary.
• The discovery of unknown food contaminants and adulterants that are not being searched for is still a long way away from routine food control; but it is crucial in order to avoid real and apparent food scandals and to provide safe and pure food for the consumer.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.201803504