Assessing Safety of Market-Sold Fresh Fish: Tracking Fish Origins and Toxic Chemical Origins

Increasing global and domestic food
trade and required logistics
create uncertainties in food safety inspection due to uncertainties
in food origins and extensive trade activities. Modern blockchain
techniques have been developed to inform consumers of food origins
but do not provide food safety information in many cases. A novel
food safety tracking and modeling framework for quantifying toxic
chemical levels in the food and the food origins was developed. By
integrating chemicals’ multimedia environment exchange, food
web, and source tracking systems, the framework was implemented to
identify short-chain chlorinated paraffin (SCCP) contamination of
fresh hairtail fish sold by a Walmart supermarket in Xi’an,
northwestern China, and sourced in Eastern China Sea coastal waters.
The framework was shown to successfully predict SCCP level with a
mean of 17.8 ng g–1 in Walmart-sold hairtails, which
was comparable to lab-analyzed 21.9 ng g–1 in Walmart-sold
hairtails. The framework provides an alternative and cost-effective
approach for safe food inspection compared to traditional food safety
inspection techniques. These encouraging results suggest that the
approach and rationale reported here could add additional information
to the food origin tracking system to enhance transparency and consumers’
confidence in the traded food they consumed.