How to secure the meat chain against toxicants?

• Published in: Innovative food science & emerging technologies Vol. 46; pp. 74 - 82
• Main Authors: Meurillon, Maïa, Ratel, Jérémy, Engel, Erwan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.04.2018; Elsevier
• Subjects: Bioaccessibility; Chemical safety; Food and Nutrition; Life Sciences; Micropollutants; Odor-active compounds; Process-induced toxicants; Toxicogenomics; Volatolomics; Micropollutants; Chemical safety; Bioaccessibility; Odor-active compounds; Process-induced toxicants; Toxicogenomics; Volatolomics; toxicogenomics; volatolomics; chemical safety; odor-active compounds; process-induced toxicants; micropollutants; bioaccessibility
• ISSN: 1466-8564; 1878-5522
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ifset.2017.10.004

Food safety is a growing concern for consumers, public authorities and food-chain stakeholders. Ensuring food safety is becoming increasingly important with regard to changing food habits and the globalization of food supply. This makes assessing chemical food safety a crucial issue, as food can be contaminated by various toxicants throughout the food chain. At farm level, raw materials can be contaminated by agrochemicals, including pesticides and veterinary drugs, as well as by environmental micropollutants such as POPs or heavy metals. Further chemical hazards associated to the occurrence of toxicants or to cross-contaminations can also arise during transport, processing or storage. This article presents and discusses recent advances in chemical food safety. Taking meat as a model, it gives an overview of promising novel approaches to better control the occurrence of chemical toxicants along the food chain, improve their risk assessment, and reduce their impact on human health by proposing novel mitigation strategies. As meat may be contaminated by various chemical toxicants, its chemical safety is a growing concern for public authorities, industrials and consumers. This paper gives the different toxic contaminants potentially found in meat products and the possible strategies for their detection, mitigation and health impact assessment. This knowledge would permit industrials to develop new distinctive labels for safe food as well as to produce new ready-to-eat foods free of process-induced toxicants or original recipes to add to dishes to reduce the health impact of these toxicants. Knowing the toxicant bioaccessibility would also permit industrials to target precise food product composition depending on the raw materials and the consumers' class. It finally proposes emerging analytical approaches to enable a more systematic control of meat chain. All the strategies developed herein on meat products could be transposable to other food chains of industrial interest and with products potentially contaminated from farm to fork. •Novel promising approaches to improve meat product chemical safety•Toxicogenomics and nanotechnology for a more systematic control of meat chain•Strategies to reduce meat process-induced toxicants while preserving aroma•Chemical risk assessment by quantification of toxicant bioaccessibility