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MAY 26, 2011 | WWW.PRODUCER.COM | THE WESTERN PRODUCER
NEWS
RESEARCH TRENDS | FOOD INSPECTION
Food purity detective keeps watch Forensic investigation on food | Food authenticity expert helps ensure consumers get what they pay for BY BRIAN CROSS SASKATOON NEWSROOM
The North American food industry has a reputation for producing pure, healthy, nutritious food at a relatively low cost. But how can North American consumers be sure that the products on supermarket shelves are what they claim? Do hamburger patties claiming to contain 100 percent Canadian ground beef actually contain 100 percent Canadian ground beef? And who ensures that the pure, unsweetened orange juice on supermarket shelves is pure and unsweetened? University of Saskatchewan professor Nick Low has spent the last 25 years seeking answers to these types of questions. “Canadians are an incredibly lucky group of people,” said Low, a professor of food chemistry in the agriculture college’s food and bioproduct sciences department. “When we walk into a grocery store, there’s more than 20,000 items to choose from and the percentage of our disposable income spent on food is one of the lowest, if not the lowest in the world,” he said. “We have a tremendous amount of choice … but according to studies … anywhere from five to 10 percent of the food that’s in the marketplace is not what it declares itself to be. It has been adulterated in one way or another.” Since the mid-1980s, Low has developed a reputation as one the world’s leading experts on food authenticity, traceability and adulteration. He said research designed to detect food adulteration is primarily aimed at exposing economic fraud rather than saving human lives. Adulterated food sold in North America is almost always safe and nutritious and in most cases doesn’t pose a threat to human health. Nonetheless, it is not what it appears to be. Low used orange juice as an example. In the early 1980s, when he was doing graduate work in chemistry at the University of Alberta, Low read a journal article that described the adulteration of Florida orange juice. At the time, Florida’s citrus department was offering a reward of $50,000 US for a process that could quickly and accurately identify impurities in orange juice. Florida authorities suspected that some orange juice sold in the United States was being altered, but they didn’t have a method to prove it. Low, who was conducting research in medicinal chemistry at the time, made a mental note of the article. A few years later, after he moved to Saskatoon and took a position at the U of S, he remembered the article, contacted the department of citrus and inquired about the reward. The $50,000 reward was no longer up for grabs but the problem still existed and the industry was still looking for a solution. access=subscriber section=news,none,none
FILE PHOTO
If you consciously choose to pay more money because you want a 100 percent pure juice, then that’s what you should get.” NICK LOW FOOD CHEMIST
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN PHOTO
Low, an expert in carbohydrates and enzymes, submitted a one-page research proposal and received a $9,000 grant. In less than a year, he and a graduate student had developed a method to detect foreign material in orange juice. Florida authorities soon began cracking down on fraudulent operators who were putting low-cost additives in orange juice and costing the state’s citrus industry hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. “What you’ll find is that with products like fruit juice, honey and maple syrup, they’re mainly (adulterating with) a carbohydrate solution,” Low said. “Fruit juices, for example, are more than 95 percent carbohydrate, so if you’re going to adulterate orange juice or fr uit juice, you’re probably adulterating with a carbohydrate syrup and there are many of those in the marketplace that are commonly used to sweeten soft drinks and other products. “They (the carbohydrate syrups) are not harmful but their cost differential is huge when you compare pure orange juice versus high fructose corn syrup or beet sugar or any of these other materials.” The coffee and meat industries
RESEARCH TRENDS / FOOD INSPECTION Research Trends is a Western Producer series exploring agricultural research at the University of Saskatchewan and other publicly funded research institutions in Western Canada. have also been affected. Coffee sold in North American supermarkets sometimes contains not only ground coffee beans but also ground husks, stems and leaves or foreign material such as chicory. Ground beef may contain a percentage of ground chicken, ground pork or ground horse. Adulterated Canadian products include honey, maple syrup, meat and durum that is blended with lower-value bread wheat. “There are many kinds of adulteration out there,” said Low. “Cheeses that are made with non-dairy protein, goat’s milk that actually contains goat and cow’s milk. All of these are examples of what we call debasing.” Low views his work in food authenticity research as a form of forensic investigation. His reputation as a food authentic-
ity expert has become widely known. He has analyzed food samples for such high profile clients as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the European Union and Coca Cola. “We’ve been very fortunate over the last 25 years to develop analytical methods that detect adulteration in a variety of foods and those methods have been used by government, they’ve been used by industry … and they’ve been used in courts of law.” He recently began conducting research for the tequila industry to determine if tequila manufacturers are using low-value ingredients. Like any sleuth, much of Low’s expertise hinges on his understanding of motive. In the case of food adulteration, the motive is almost always economic. In some instances, food suppliers who have signed a production contract will debase a pure product in an effort to stretch limited supplies of a scarce commodity and meet their contractual obligations. This type of adulteration is common when production shortages or crop failures occur. At other times, companies simply want to boost profits and improve
their bottom lines by selling food that contains fillers and less expensive substitutes. Those substitute products may not pose a threat to consumers’ health, but their nutritional characteristics are not what consumers expect. “When you go into a supermarket, you have a choice as a consumer between real fruit juice and fruit drinks containing a percentage of real fruit juice,” said Low. “If you consciously choose to pay more money because you want a100 percent pure juice, then that’s what you should get.” Adulteration schemes are becoming more complex as food monitoring efforts increase and methods of detecting adulterated products become more sophisticated. “In orange juice, you have three main carbohydrates and they are fructose, glucose and sucrose and their ratio is 1:1:2,” Low said. “Initially they would adulterate with a product that didn’t match that ratio and it was kind of easy to detect. But now, they’re starting to adulterate with blended syrups that absolutely match that ratio.” FOR A STORY ON A NEW MOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM, SEE PAGE 28