AMHERST, Mass. — Food recalls have been all over our newscast in recent months.
Researchers at the oldest and highest-ranked food science program in the country say the food we eat is largely safe, but they’ve made it their mission to make it even safer. Boston 25′s Catherine Parrotta got an inside look at the work being done at UMass Amherst.
The day began with Professor Lynne McLandsborough. She studies salmonella contamination in two foods many of us love: peanut butter, and chocolate. McLandsborough says roasting the peanuts and beans is designed to kill salmonella, and manufacturers routinely test for contamination.
She explained, “If you take 30 samples of food and look for salmonella and it’s all free, it doesn’t guarantee the rest of the batch, the rest of the 10,000 pounds doesn’t have salmonella.” To complicate matters, foods like peanut butter and chocolate can’t mix with water. So sanitizing manufacturing equipment is a challenge that can often stop production for a month.
But McLandsborough’s research may change that. “One way you can clean [peanut butter or chocolate manufacturing equipment] is to use something called an oil push, so what my lab has started doing is formulating oils to make them antimicrobial. And we’ve been successful with several formulations.”
McLandsborough recently won an award for this breakthrough, and she’s in talks with peanut butter and chocolate manufacturers as she prepares to do a scale-up study of her product.
Studying possible contamination solutions is one area of research here. Studying if those solutions might be practical in the real world is another. And much of that work is done in the pilot plant at UMass Amherst. That’s where Boston 25 found a modified washing machine being used as a spin dryer for leafy greens. As extension professor Amanda Kinchla explained, “Someone on the farm might freak out about seeing a washing machine or something on the farm. Like, what the heck is that? But the work that we found was that [...] no surprise when you clean and sanitize these units, the microbial risks go significantly down.”
Food producers may soon have an easier way to test their equipment for contamination right in the palm of their hand, thanks to the work of a student in a different lab on campus. Yuzhen Zhang believes the smartphone app she’s developing can be both reliable and fast.
Food producers would swab their equipment, and treat the sample with a solution.
A $30 smartphone microscope would capture a picture of the sample, which the app would analyze for the presence of bacteria. Five companies in Massachusetts are planning to test the system in the real world this spring.
All of this may leave you wondering if there’s a way to make the food on your table any safer. Catherine asked about washing raw produce...something that is sometimes recalled for contamination.
Researchers told her the best way to go about it is to first wash your hands, and then rinse produce under running water.
You can also use a brush if it’s a fruit or vegetable with a firm surface. But researchers say, don’t use soap, and no evidence produce rinses involving baking soda or vinegar really works.
Researchers also say there’s no reason to avoid any particular food over contamination concerns. They spend their lives studying food contamination, and they say recalls are still a fairly rare event.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.
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