Toxic tastings: contaminants in food
Science on the Menu: A Food Safety Podcast by EFSA
European Food Safety Authority
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2023
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
Contaminants can enter our food through various pathways, including cooking and processing methods, pollution from human activities and naturally occurring sources. At EFSA we assess the risk posed by all these types of contaminants and give recommendations to policy makers or consumers on how to reduce risks. In this episode our expert, Mary Gilsenan, guides us through these considerations together with ECHA’s scientist Bastian Zeiger, who features a cameo on PFAS.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Science on the menu, a podcast by the European Food Safety Authority. |
| 0:19.4 | Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of EFSA's podcast series Science on the |
| 0:25.7 | menu. My name is James Ramsey. I'm the head of communications here at EFSA and today we're |
| 0:31.1 | going to be talking about contaminants in food. And to do that and to join me in the studio we have Mary Gilsenon. |
| 0:39.3 | Mary is the head of our unit for feed and contaminants. |
| 0:44.3 | A very warm welcome to you, Mary. How are you? |
| 0:46.3 | Thank you, James. I'm good. Thank you. |
| 0:48.3 | Great. Let's start with the basics. So what do we mean when we're talking about contaminants in food? Just give us a bit of |
| 0:56.9 | context to help us understand. Okay. So, I mean, there are different types of food contaminants. |
| 1:05.8 | We have the classic ones like when we microbial contaminants when we eat salmonella or Listeria, for example, |
| 1:14.8 | and we get sick the next day. |
| 1:16.4 | We know all about those. |
| 1:18.6 | But there's also... |
| 1:20.6 | They're more like microbial contaminants. |
| 1:23.8 | But what we're going to talk about today is more on chemical contaminants. |
| 1:29.5 | And these are a whole vast array of chemical substances that are present in our food supply, |
| 1:39.6 | unintentionally present. |
| 1:40.9 | They're not deliberately added, like pesticides, for example. They're |
| 1:46.1 | unintentionally present for different reasons and generally present at low doses, but if we consume |
| 1:54.4 | them over a long period, they could have harmful effects on health. Okay. So you mentioned they're not intentionally added. |
| 2:03.3 | How might they enter into the food supply then? |
| 2:06.9 | What are the different kind of roots for contaminants to come into our food? |
... |
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