Combining teaching chemometrics with attenuated total reflection-infrared spectroscopy and food authentication

Before all our food scientists leap to their Facebook and Twitter accounts to decry the breadth of the work done, it is worth reminding ourselves that this is an innovative approach to helping teach and embed understanding in students of some pretty complex and difficult topics. If we look into the literature, one of the interesting challenges in, for example, the area of fish labelling is that the common names for fish vary from location to location. FishBase^2,3 is a great source of information in this respect and, when searched, showed that "Cod" was used in the USA alone for six different species, only one of which is the same as used in Europe. Also, there is no species overlap between what you will be served in the USA and Europe and Australia where "Cod" may be two different species, one of which is a Perch.All in all, I was very impressed with the development of this particular project and its potential future use as a teaching tool for spectroscopic data handling and advanced analysis techniques. If you have similar examples which we can learn from please get in touch! a report on figures supplied by councils to the UK Food Standards Agency indicating that 41 of 303 checks on packaged frozen or chilled fish and in catering businesses did not meet labelling requirements.' They reported that in 27 cases the fish described as Cod was another species, such as Haddock, Whiting or Pollock. Other types of fish were also incorrectly described among other breaches of labelling rules. In Ireland, one DNA testing study.