Food quality and safety has become one of the focuses of global attention. Judging from the irregular spot checks on food quality by relevant departments, the common food quality problems in China are mainly in three aspects: first, the hygiene index exceeds the standard, the total number of colonies and coliforms seriously exceed the national mandatory standard, and some even exceed the national standard many times; Second, excessive use of food additives or the use of food additives that have been explicitly prohibited, such as excessive benzoic acid and sorbic acid, and illegal use of artificial synthetic pigments such as clenbuterol, melamine and sodium formaldehyde sulfoxylate; Third, food packaging and labeling are not standardized, and there are many artificial frauds such as false labeling and shoddy.
The factors of food insecurity come from every link of human food chain, that is, the whole process from raw material production, processing, storage and transportation, sales to consumption, including all kinds of pollution brought by agricultural and industrial development, as well as artificial factors such as counterfeiting caused by low spiritual civilization quality or insufficient understanding of food safety. At present, the main problems in food safety are:
(1), biological hazard source
Diseases caused by biological pollution include food-borne diseases caused by microorganisms and potential threats to health caused by metabolic toxins. Food-borne diseases are the most important factors affecting food safety and endangering public health in China, mainly caused by bacteria and viruses. Microbial pollution includes bacterial pollution, viruses and fungi and their toxins. At present, China has not yet established a complete food-borne disease reporting system. According to the World Health Organization, the underreporting rate of foodborne diseases in developing countries is over 95%. Therefore, in China, microbial pollution has become the chief culprit affecting food safety in China. Bacteria pollute food through the following ways: first, they pollute food raw materials: there are many varieties and sources of food raw materials, and different varieties and sources have different degrees of bacterial pollution; The second is the pollution of food processing; The third is the pollution caused by food storage, transportation and sales.
(2) Environmental pollution of agricultural and sideline products
Chemicals discharged from chemical plants, soot dust and acid rain are all atmospheric pollution sources; Due to the discharge of industrial wastewater and domestic sewage, water pollution is becoming more and more serious, threatening the safety of fishery and agricultural products.
(3) Chemical fertilizer and pesticide residues
Excessive application of nitrogen fertilizer makes a lot of nitrate accumulate in crops, which is harmless to crops themselves, but harmful to people and animals. For example, ammonia water produced by waste gas from coking plant has high phenol content, which causes phenol pollution in soil, reduces the quality of agricultural products and makes food smell; In addition to phosphorus, phosphate rock also contains arsenic, cadmium, chromium, fluorine, mercury, lead and so on. And long-term use will also cause pollution. Excessive use of pesticides beyond the scope increases pesticide residues in food, which is more harmful.
(4) Abuse of antibiotics and synthetic hormones
The chemicals in animal food mainly come from feed additives. Antibiotics are commonly used as feed additives in livestock and poultry breeding. If overused or misused, they can be transmitted to humans by eating meat, eggs and milk. Hormones used to stimulate the growth of plants and livestock and poultry in recent years
(5), food processing links
Illegal use of additives, food contains toxic and harmful substances. Some enterprises or individuals engaged in food production and sales illegally use preservatives, pigments and additives due to their weak awareness of safety, hygiene and law. In production, production and processing, in order to reduce production costs, profiteering, and lay hidden dangers for food safety. For example, flour whitening agent is made of "sodium formaldehyde sulfoxylate", edible oil is replaced by industrial paraffin wax in Bengbu melon seeds, dichlorvos is added to Jinhua ham, and industrial dyes and sodium formaldehyde sulfoxylate are added. , too numerous to mention [6]. Using inferior raw materials, the food lacks nutrition. In order to reduce costs, some enterprises use cheap raw materials to produce products with almost no nutrition, which makes consumers suffer greatly. Fuyang inferior milk powder incident is an important example. The main raw materials in inferior milk powder include light milk powder, sucrose, maltodextrin, refined vegetable oil and trace elements such as calcium, zinc and iron. Among these raw materials, light milk powder made of fresh milk is the most expensive. Some manufacturers give up using light milk powder as raw material or a small amount as supplement, and instead add starch with different nutritional values. Although this product contains no toxic ingredients, it has killed many babies. Experts predict that inferior milk powder is just the tip of the iceberg, and food counters may be full of "empty shell food".