Recent food scares have increased consumer awareness on all aspects of food quality. Consumers have developed preferences with respect to agricultural practices and geographical origin. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform promotes production systems that support environmentally friendly and high quality products. The Commission has recently adopted a European Action Plan for organic food and farming, which contains proposals for future initiatives aimed to enhance the development of this sector.
Research is still needed in this field, for instance to clarify the relationships between agricultural management and nutritional quality and food safety. Many claims on labels that relate to the expected/anticipated added value are rarely supported by analytical data, leaving regulators to rely solely on paper auditing procedures when monitoring compliance.
IRMM is investigating the potential of a number of analytical methods for distinguishing between organic and conventional foodstuffs. Methods like gene and protein expression profiling, based on the regulation of some genes by nitrate-mediated signalling are being investigated. The possibility of using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for antioxidant determination, and radionuclide and stable isotope measurements to authenticate organic food is also being explored. While carrying out this work, IRMM has compiled scientific information about production and analysis of organic foods and reviewed the analytical methods available for comparing organic and conventional food products.
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M. Szulc, A. Maquet. Extraction protocol for winter wheat whole grain proteins compatible with two-dimensional fluorescence difference gel electrophoresis (2D DIGE). Cereal Chemistry 86 (2009) 692-694