Issue #55 | Plant Toxins That Kill | Environmental Impact Calcs | Bad Chocolate and Good Eggs |
2022-09-12
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Tropane alkaloids, a plant toxin that kills
Calculating the environmental impact of processed foods
Good eggs and bad chocolate
News and Resources Roundup + Food fraud incidents, updates and emerging issues
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Hi,
Welcome to Issue #55 of The Rotten Apple. If you’re new, thanks for joining me. I’m here to save you time, by bringing you only the most relevant, interesting and promotion-free content from around the world each week.
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Last week’s email was all about allergens, inspired by the tragic and preventable death of an allergic consumer in the United Kingdom. The inquest has continued this week, and it heard that a starch supplier knew their ingredient could contain dairy contaminants and said they passed that information to their customer.
In an eerily similar scenario, public health alerts have been issued in the USA for foods containing corn starch after it was found to be contaminated with milk. Find a link to both these items in this week’s news roundup.
Plant toxins! After 12 Canadians were sickened from a restaurant dish contaminated with a toxin from the plant aconite (see last week’s news), I thought I would share another plant toxin story this week. This was the largest documented outbreak from tropane alkaloids and it killed five people in 2019. Researchers allege that fraud in the supply chain contributed to the deaths.
Also this week, the difficult task of assigning an environmental impact rating to processed foods, plus carbon-neutral eggs and not neutral chocolate.
As always, this issue ends with food fraud incidents and horizon scanning news, below the paywall.
Thanks for being part of our community.
Karen
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Cover image by Michael Pirrello distributed under a Creative Commons Licence 4.0
Tropane Alkaloids: Plant Toxins That Kill
It’s Uganda, March 2019. Five people are dead, hundreds more are in hospital. The cause is a deadly foodborne illness.
Investigators discover that the food source is ‘Super Cereal’ a nutrient-dense fortified soy and corn product, distributed by the World Food Programme, that is used to combat malnutrition among vulnerable populations in developing countries.
The World Food Programme suspends deliveries of Super Cereal worldwide, leaving tens of thousands of people without enough nutrition. They call on the expertise of scientists from Queens University Belfast (QUB) who discover that the Super Cereal contained the DNA of jimsonweed (Datura stramonium), a plant in the poisonous nightshade family.
Jimsonweed seeds contain tropane alkaloids, a deadly plant toxin.
Tropane alkaloids are a class of chemical compound, which includes the chemicals atropine and scopolamine, the tropane alkaloids most commonly found in foods. They are relatively heat-stable and can survive cooking processes.
From “Tropane alkaloids in food: Poisoning incidents”
A large number of wild and cultured plants produce secondary metabolites that can be toxic to humans and animals… Poisonings of humans by tropane alkaloids occur as unintended ingestions (contamination, mislabelling: thirteen reports; mistaken identity: eleven reports) or intended ingestions (overdoses: nine reports). Contamination of food occurs when toxic plant (parts) are accidentally mixed with edible plants during harvest or processing. Concentrations are usually highest in roots and seeds. Intended ingestions can be the result of consumption for recreational purposes (hallucinogenic effects) or for medical properties (e.g. treatment of arthritis, use as anaesthetic), or homicides and suicides. The toxic doses are often not clear due to the lack of analytical data in the cases reported. Human foods that potentially contain tropane alkaloids are herbal teas, herbal preparations, blue or black berries and edible flowers. Contamination has also been found in beans, buckwheat, soybean and linseed.
How did the toxin end up in Super Cereal, a product made from soy and maize?
Queens University has one of the worlds leading food fraud research groups. To discover how jimsonweed got into the food product, they started by mapping its supply chain.
They traced the contaminated batch of food right back to its place of origin; the country of Turkey, where the food was made. And there they found the source of the contamination: jimsonweed is an invasive species that can grow among crops. The seed had accidentally entered the soy supply chain.
It seemed that just one batch of Super Cereal was affected, the source had been identified, the contaminated batch had been withdrawn from distribution. Problem solved.
But it wasn’t over yet
Five months after the first food poisoning outbreak, a second outbreak occurred, in a completely different part of Uganda.
The people who got sick had also consumed Super Cereal, but from a completely different supply chain from a completely different source.
How could that happen? Food from the contaminated batch had been withdrawn, it should have been destroyed, never to be eaten by anyone else.
The weird thing is, when the Queens University scientists tested the second lot of Super Cereal, their analyses showed it had an identical chemical fingerprint to the food that had caused the first outbreak. The researchers concluded that the second outbreak was caused by cereal from the same batch as the first.
This shouldn’t have happened. Food from the contaminated batch had been withdrawn.
Food fraud as well?
QUB researchers suspected foul play. They suspect that batch identifiers on the bags of Super Cereal were altered, and documents accompanying the food were forged or faked to make it seem like it was from a different – clean - batch. If these allegations prove correct this is an example of food fraud as well as food poisoning from tropane alkaloids. At the very least it was a horrible mix up with batch numbers.
Other cases
In July 2022 a number of brands of corn chips were withdrawn and recalled in Europe due to tropane alkaloid contamination. It is not known if any people were harmed.
Whole cumin seeds, teas and herbal infusions have been contaminated with tropane alkaloids. Spinach leaves have been inadvertently mixed with leaves from Datura species, leading to poisoning, according to this source.
Preventing tropane alkaloid contamination
Contamination prevention needs to happen at the farm and grain processing stages of food production. Ugandan scientists who investigated the 2019 outbreak said that jimsonweed favours growth in fields of leguminous crops and that “physically, jimsonweed seeds are similar to some varieties of soy seeds in colour and size, making it possibly difficult to separate the two during processing.”
Farmers need to keep toxin-containing weeds away from crops including grain and leafy crops. Grain handlers must use separation techniques that are effective against contamination with seeds and leaves that could contain tropane alkaloids.
Food manufacturers need to ensure that their incoming grain products have been subject to separation activities that prevent seed and leaf contamination in the grains - this should be part of vendor risk assessment processes.
In the case of the Super Cereal manufacturing, I read somewhere (sorry, I can no longer locate the source), that the facility responsible for manufacturing the jimsonweed-contaminated products for the World Food Programme had serious defects in the design and implementation of its quality management system. It was suggested that incoming soy was not subject to any screening or separation activities which would have removed the jimsonweed seeds. A properly designed and implemented system would have prevented the contamination and provided accurate batch identification on the sacks of food.
For at-risk foods and ingredients such as grains, soy beans, teas and herbs, monitoring for the presence of tropane alkaloids should be considered.
Sources
🍏 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956713520305648#!
🍏 https://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/11/3/407/htm
🍏 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-12854-1
Calculating the Environmental Impacts of Fifty-Seven Thousand Food Products
It’s hard to estimate the environmental impact of any food, but processed foods are particularly difficult, because of the number of ingredients they contain.
A group of researchers from the University of Oxford created an algorithm to estimate the exact proportion of ingredients in 57,000 foods, and calculate four separate environmental impacts for each to give a combined environmental impact score for the food. It’s big data at its best.
What did they find? They were analysing foods from British supermarkets. In their model, high-water-content foods like soft drinks had the lowest environmental impact, while beef and lamb foods had the highest impact. They also compared the nutritional value of each food with its environmental impact, discovering that, on the whole, the foods with the least environmental impact were – generally – more nutritious.
Environmental Impacts? Greenhouses Gasses or Biodiversity or… ?
In this study, the overall environmental impact of each food was calculated by combining the scores from four environmental indicators:
greenhouse gas emissions,
scarcity weighted water use,
land use, and
aquatic eutrophication potential.
Super-disappointing (for me) is that the four impacts were each given an equal weighting to provide the overall score for a food. I don’t think those four impacts have an equal “value” to the human race.
Yes, water use, land use and aquatic eutrophication (= too many nutrients in a body of water leading to harmful algal blooms and dead fish) are important elements of sustainability. But I would argue that from a global perspective they are not as important as greenhouse gas emissions. For example, in some countries, a food with a high land use score would be very damaging, in others not so much. Whereas greenhouse gas emissions have the ability to impact us all, no matter where we live.
As the researchers themselves said…
“For example, almond production results in relatively few greenhouse gas emissions but typically results in high levels of water stress, whereas fishery-caught crustaceans can result in high amounts of greenhouse gas emissions but require little to no land use.”
I would argue that this should put aquaculture prawns on the “bad” list, rather than scoring them as low-impact because of their negligible land-use requirements.
Despite that, the work is incredibly valuable, and the authors are also making the individual scores for the four indicators available in their public datasets.
What will we do with this data?
The datasets created by this team will be useful for food companies wishing to understand the environmental impacts of complex ingredients and products. The raw data could also form part of the evidence used to make sustainability claims and “green label” claims on complex food products.
🍏 Find the paper here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2120584119 🍏
Good Eggs and Bad Chocolate
Staying with the environmental impact theme, let’s talk about carbon neutral eggs. A large supermarket chain in the United Kingdom has launched carbon neutral eggs that are raised on insects.
The egg farm is powered by wind and solar. They use a carbon sequestration program to offset remaining emissions. One-fifth of the farm’s land is planted with trees. The hens are fed insects, which themselves have been fed on leftovers from the supermarket’s waste; fruit, veg and bakery waste.
A competitor’s carbon-neutral eggs are fed with field beans, rather than insects.
🍏 Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/carbon-neutral-eggs-climate-food/ 🍏
Bad Chocolate
Chocolate has both serious environmental impacts, particularly as related to land use, and human labour violations issues, including child labour and slavery allegations. It’s also the most greenhouse gas-intensive food, behind beef.
Ethical-certified chocolate is ‘better’ than chocolate with no certification (see Issue #13) but certification is not one hundred percent effective.
Worse still, ‘ethical’ cocoa is particularly vulnerable to food fraud: farmers can lie about their labour practices (a significant proportion of cocoa ethical certification assessments rely on self-assessment processes), commodity buyers can lie about which farms they buy from, certification suppliers can operate in a misleading manner, auditors and inspectors can act corruptly….
For an intelligent, balanced and well-researched discussion of the ethics of chocolate, check out the article below from Liam Moore of Off The Shelf. He has inspired me to review my chocolate purchasing choices.
News and Resources
Our news and resources section is expertly curated (by me 😏) and free from filler, fluff and promotional junk. Click the preview box below to access it.
What you missed in last week’s email
· Why we care about food allergens, and how things go wrong
· What (exactly) is an allergen recall and what are the main causes of allergen recalls
· Allergen recalls global stats for 2022
· Allergen tools, e-books and webinars
Below for paying subscribers: Food fraud news, incident reports, and emerging issues, plus an 🎧 audio version 🎧 (so you can give your eyeballs a rest)
📌 Food Fraud News 📌
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