Do you really know how safe your food is?
How long food remains safe to eat and nutritious depends on many factors and processes that are involved in how food is gathered, stored and delivered. Unfortunately, 25% of all globally produced foods is unsafe to consume and lost to spoilage. Temperature, moisture, and preparations in packaging, shipping, delivering, storage, purchasing, and cooking all play a role in the growth rate of bacteria that causes food spoilage. The struggle to mitigate the situation is a continuous one.
Food spoilage by chemical oxidation represents one of the major problems in food waste. On average, the shelf-life of an opened refrigerated product is three to five days. The presence of oxygen within food packaging is very critical as it can lead to oxidative rancidity, mold and growth of microorganisms.
Typically, an exposure of a food or beverage to oxygen would trigger a chain of chemical reactions involving proteins, pigments, fatty acids, and lipids, producing other compounds with undesirable biochemical properties including toxicity, as well as undesirable taste, smell, and color. Many of these processes occur via free radical mechanisms and involve chain reactions.
According to the 2017 article by Leonardo Petruzzi, Anotonio Bevilacqua, et al in The Microbiological Quality of Food, exact total economic losses due to food spoilage are unknown. However, “it is clear that it constitutes an enormous financial burden (Blackburn, 2006) estimated at 1.3 billion tons per year by FAO (Cichello, 2015). According to the USDA Economic Research Service estimates, about 96 billion pounds of food, or more than a quarter of the 356 billion pounds of edible food available for human consumption in the United States, were lost to human use at three marketing stages: retail, foodservice, and consumers.” These numbers are separate and apart from the additional losses caused by health issues which add another layer of unanticipated costs.
Until changes are made on every level, these statistics will remain steady and consumers and industry specialists will be at risk. To make better and healthier choices, consumers need to be armed with knowledge. Industry specialists need to look to technological advances that help eliminate waste, increase productivity, and provide safety to all. Regulators also need to be more involved and institute better standards.
Today, United States regulations surrounding food packaging and shelf-life, however, are relaxed. At the federal level, there are no uniform shelf-life dating systems other than a “use-by” date for infant formula and some baby foods as mandated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety & Inspection Service. Additionally, only twenty states require food dating by law. Some manufacturers voluntarily include arbitrary “use by” dates to: (1) ensure consumption during the point of highest quality; and (2) serve as a warning to consumers and industry specialists in the event that spoilage occurs. In addition to a general lack of uniformity in shelf-life regulation, food waste in the United States totals approximately $161 billion each year. With its new technology, 3BP intends to provide the food industry with a more accurate way to determine whether food products are safe to consume, potentially resulting in a decrease of food waste as an ancillary benefit. Please comment and share your feedback on this issue.
