This book discusses different aspects of contamination in Indian food products. Particular attention is given to the presence and analytical detection of detrimental substances such as pesticides, mycotoxins and other biologically-produced toxins, food chemicals and additives with natural or industrial origin. Furthermore, the book addresses the production and the commercial exploitation of native botanical ingredients, and the question if such ingredients should be regarded as foods or drugs. It also sheds light on chemical aspects of organic farming practices in India. Readers will also find information on pesticides and other detrimental chemicals detection in Indian farming. The authors present a useful opinion on how and why food contaminants can lead to border rejections during export, in particular to the European Union.

Food safety is a concern for scientists, policy-makers and consumers especially as food poisoning outbreaks are becoming more common and as particular concerns arise over genetically modified foods. This book covers recent developments in the chemistry, biochemistry and physiological effects of toxicants that might have an impact on human health and welfare.

Natural toxins are poisonous secondary metabolites produced by living organisms which are typically not harmful to the organisms themselves but can impact on human or animal health when consumed. Common sources of such toxins include poisonous plants, fungi, algae, and bacteria, and the diversity of these biological systems presents challenges to analytical chemists in identification in addition to wide-ranging food safety implications when present as contaminants in food commodities. The propensity for such toxins to be present in both animal feed and human food has led to the introduction of regulations for a small number of the most potent natural toxins, particularly mycotoxins. Implementation of these regulations necessitates the establishment of high-throughput analytical chemistry methods with increasingly lower limits of detection. The impacts of plant toxins are not limited to grazing livestock but can be carried through the food chain, with some toxins, such as indospicine, being demonstrated to accumulate in tissues of grazing animals, causing secondary poisoning in animals consuming meat from this livestock. This Special Issue focuses on the analysis of natural toxins and their incidence, from source organisms to food and feed commodities, in addition to their implications for food safety.

How many times have we thought with concern about the possible contamination of food? Pollution, agricultural treatments, technological treatments, and packaging are the best-known human sources of toxic substances as food contaminants. The present book contains 11 original research papers representing various approaches of identifying and measuring toxic residues in food materials. The analytical determination of food contaminants is an indispensable tool in characterizing the adverse effects and unexpected toxicity related to food intake. No risk assessment would be possible without data from the analysis of food contaminants. This Special Issue is an interesting overview of recent methods and is highly representative of a broad worldwide outline, collecting authors from ten different countries and four continents. Very different toxics are described, from volatile organic compounds to heavy metals and from highly polar chemicals to classical organic contaminants. A wide range of analytical techniques are portrayed, including sample preparation and clean-up methodologies, classical chromatographic and hyphenated spectroscopies, and the latest high-resolution mass spectrometry applications. The presented works consider a varied selection of foods: the studied matrices are meat, fishery products, fruits, and miscellaneous beverages.

This book contains contributions based on the proceedings of two symposia on food contamination held in London in April 1989 and May 1990, both of which were organised jointly by the Environment, Food Chemistry and Toxicology Groups of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The aim of these meetings was to assess the extraneous chemical contamination of food from two sources: firstly, food-chain contaminants - the presence of plant toxicants of fungal metabolites in food, or the contamination of food from environmental sources (airborne, aquatic and terrestrial); and secondly, food-production contaminants - contaminants of man-made origin brought about by a desire to facilitate food production and distribution. The contributors concentrate on the contamination of food by chemicals arising from environmental and food-production sources. Chapter 1 is concerned with food-chain contaminants present in food as natural components of the diet. This is followed by discussion of the chlorinated dioxins and furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Following an introduction to the control and surveillance of food-production contaminants, four areas of activity are described: migration from food contact materials with particular reference to plastics, the analysis and regulatory control of veterinary products, the analysis of pesticides in drinking water and finally the problem of food taints.

In the last decade an increased concern has been voiced against various environmental hazards, particularly chemicals that may cause harm to humans or animals. Numerous studies which have dealt with this subject invariably have focused on chemical contaminants of some component of a food chain. In contrast, much less attention has been paid to the potentially harmful substances that may occur in foodstuffs naturally. The purpose of this Handbook is to sensitize the reader to this problem and to provide a systematic overview of the most important naturally occurring food toxicants. The Handbook should be of interest to anybody who is concerned with nutritive and health aspects of food. Inasmuch as many of the discussed toxicants can be removed or destroyed by a suitable method of food rpocessing it should be of special value to food technologists.