Deliberate Chemical Contamination and Processing Contamination

This chapter focuses on deliberate and processing contamination. In the introduction section, examples of recent food scares where deliberate chemical contamination has been used for financial gain as well as processing contamination are discussed. This section also describes the current EU and US legislation around these types of contamination. In the following sections, the different types of contaminations are split into three sections covering heat induced food processing contaminants, packaging migrants, and malicious contamination of food. In each of the sections, specific examples of the application of appropriate rapid techniques such as GC/MS and in the majority of cases LC/MS are discussed. Examples of contamination include among others packaging migrants such as phthalates, BPA, and Badge as well as examples of malicious contamination such as the adulteration of food with Sudan dyes and melamine. In each example, details of the chemical structures for the compound classes as well as details of chromatographic conditions used and detection techniques employed are given.