Scrape off or throw away?
Knowledge about how consumers handle mouldy food products at home is limited. It is of interest to investigate these aspects more closely, since some moulds can produce mycotoxins and other secondary metabolites that could be harmful to human health. A mainly picture-based survey regarding how parti...
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| Formato: | Second cycle, A2E |
| Lenguaje: | sueco Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2021
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| Acceso en línea: | https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/16747/ |
| Sumario: | Knowledge about how consumers handle mouldy food products at home is limited. It is of interest to investigate these aspects more closely, since some moulds can produce mycotoxins and other secondary metabolites that could be harmful to human health. A mainly picture-based survey regarding how participants would handle a variety of mouldy foods was distributed through social media and email, with a target of collating answers from both genders and a range of age groups. The participants were presented with a photo of mouldy foods with numbers indicating where they would remove part of the product, alternatively if they would discard the whole mouldy product.
The survey generated 650 full answer-sets from people resident in Sweden. Participants were not evenly distributed by gender (84% women, 14% men), and this was treated in the statistical analysis of the results. About 39% of the participants agreed that if the mouldy part of the product was discarded, the rest of the product would be safe to eat. About 79% of the precipitants disagreed with the statement “mouldy food is not dangerous, and the mouldy food could be consumed”. When looking at the responses to the picture-based questions, products that the majority of participants would discard substantially or completely if mouldy were salsa, béarnaise sauce, liver pâté, crème fraiche, Turkish yoghurt and squash (cordial). Products which showed a greater range of opinions about how participants would handle them when mouldy were bread, peach, pear, carrot, cheese and apple sauce.
Mouldy food samples (n=31) from Swedish household were collected and the moulds present were identified according to two methods: traditional PCR-sequencing combined with morphology, and MALDI-TOF, to get a snapshot over which species were present in the food products. The 38 mould isolates and identified showed that the majority of the species were not known producers of the regulated mycotoxins. The exception was the mould that was identified from pear and apple, Penicillium expansum, which can produce the regulated mycotoxin, patulin. |
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