FOOD CHANNEL PHYSICS NEWS
Making foie gras without force-feeding
Authors patent recipe using existing fats after harvest to improve animal welfare for luxury dish.
American Institute of Physics
image:
A stress test of the researchers’ foie gras pâté, which is created without the need for force-feeding.
view moreCredit: Thomas A. Vilgis
WASHINGTON, March 25, 2025 — Foie gras is a unique delicacy made from the liver of a duck or goose. While it can be an acquired taste, the buttery, fatty dish is an indulgent cuisine prized in many parts of the world.
Foie gras is distinct from regular fowl liver thanks to its high fat content, which is traditionally achieved by force-feeding the ducks and geese beyond their normal diets. Researcher Thomas Vilgis is a lover of foie gras, but he wondered if there was a more ethical way to enjoy the dish.
In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, Vilgis, as well as researchers from Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and the University of Southern Denmark, created a process to replicate the delicious dish without force-feeding.
“It was always a dream to make foie gras more accessible and better for animal welfare,” Vilgis said. “It’s good to stop these force-feeding practices — or at least reduce them.”
To Vilgis and his team, it was important not to add external ingredients or additives to the foie gras. They tried adding cooked collagen from the bird’s skin and bones to the liver and fat emulsion after it was harvested, but that didn’t leave them with the correct consistency.
They then came up with the idea of trying to treat the fat with the bird’s own lipases, which are enzymes that help digest fat in the body, mimicking the activities that occur naturally in the duck’s body.
“At the end of the process, it allows the fat to recrystallize into the large crystals which form aggregates like the ones we see in the original foie gras,” Vilgis said.
The recipe is extremely simple and elegant — the liver and fat are harvested from the duck or goose, the fat is treated with lipases, both are mixed and sterilized, and it’s good to go.
However, while the structure of the foie gras looked correct with noninvasive laser microscopy — and even smelled like the original foie gras — Vilgis and his team needed to confirm the physical properties of the dish. By doing stress-deformation tests, they found that the treated foie gras had a similar mouthfeel to the original, due to its mechanical properties.
“We could really see that the influence of these large fat particles, which we call in the paper percolating clusters,” Vilgis said. “At the beginning of the ‘bite,’ these large clusters have a high resistance, creating a similar mouthfeel of elasticity without being too rubbery as after the collagen or gelatin addition.”
Vilgis has already filed a patent for the recipe, and he hopes to partner with companies interested in helping scale up the production. He also wants to work with sensory scientists who can help refine the taste smell of the foie gras.
“Everything in our process is controlled, which is a positive thing,” Vilgis said. “We never considered adding anything additional to the foie gras, because we wanted pure duck — nothing else.”
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The article “Foie gras pâté without force-feeding” is authored by Mathias Baechle, Arlete M.L. Marques, Matias A. Via, Mathias P. Clausen, and Thomas A. Vilgis. It will appear in Physics of Fluids on March 25, 2025 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0255813). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0255813.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Physics of Fluids is devoted to the publication of original theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions to the dynamics of gases, liquids, and complex fluids. See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof.
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Journal
Physics of Fluids
Article Title
Foie gras pâté without force-feeding
Article Publication Date
25-Mar-2025
The best butter for a vegan shortbread
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Scottish shortbread, one of the region’s most well-known desserts, served as the perfect testing ground to explore the effects of fat content in vegan butter alternatives. Credit: Avery Thompson/AIP
view moreCredit: Avery Thompson/AIP
WASHINGTON, March 25, 2025 – Butter is a key ingredient in many baked goods, but for those who are lactose intolerant, finding a good alternative can be a challenge. Vegan butters can sometimes have the wrong consistency, or produce bakes that are not quite right, leaving bakers frustrated or unwilling to try dairy-free alternatives.
In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Strathclyde examined the properties of several vegan or dairy-free butter alternatives inside one of the region’s most well-known snacks: Scottish shortbread.
“We have a Ph.D. student in the group who is a vegan, and he turns all of our baking habits upside down,” said author Juliane Simmchen. “One day I bought some vegan butter alternatives, and I thought, ‘This doesn't look anything like it should.’”
Perplexed by the difference in consistency, Simmchen and her colleagues decided to test these alternatives using the equipment in their lab. They selected three types of vegan butter substitutes with different levels of fat and compared their consistencies and responses to heat. Following those experiments, they moved on to taste testing with actual biscuits.
The researchers gathered a few dozen volunteers to sample shortbread cookies baked with dairy butter and the vegan alternatives. Their goal was to find the vegan butter that produced a biscuit closest to the traditional shortbread, and here there was a clear winner.
“When comparing the vegan alternatives, the one with the highest fat content gave the most positive results from the testers,” said Simmchen. “It behaved very similar to butter, which also has a high fat content. The one with the lowest fat content made a very different dough. It didn't bake that well, and was more doughy and less crumbly. Many people strongly disliked it.”
Butter typically has a fat content around 80%, and Simmchen recommends choosing a vegan butter with a similar consistency.
As for why people should bake vegan cookies in the first place, Simmchen believes that baked goods are better when they can be shared with everyone. If she has a choice, she now prefers vegan bakes.
“I really like the traditional Scottish shortbread, but I'm adapting my recipes with vegan options because they’re more inclusive,” said Simmchen. “If I can make something of a similar quality and have more people participate, then I go for the vegan option.”
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Journal
Physics of Fluids
Article Title
Rheology and sensorial properties in traditional and plant-based (vegan) shortbread
Article Publication Date
25-Mar-2025
Advances to prevent food fraud in the consumption of virgin olive oil and pine nuts
How can the authenticity of virgin olive oil be guaranteed?
image:
From left to right, experts Alba Tres, Berta Torres and Stefania Vichi.
view moreCredit: UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA
Food fraud occurs when products that do not meet consumer expectations reach the market and, in extreme cases, this can lead to health problems. To combat this misleading and critical practice in the food sector, a team from the University of Barcelona has published new studies presenting technologies to verify the geographical origin of two food products: virgin olive oil — emblematic of the Mediterranean diet — and pine nuts, the most expensive nuts on the market.
Professors Stefania Vichi and Alba Tres lead the study that is part of the doctoral thesis conducted by researcher Berta Torres, from the UB’s Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences, the Nutrition and Food Safety Research Institute (INSA) and the UB’s Torribera Food Campus.
How can the authenticity of virgin olive oil be guaranteed?
Knowing the country of origin of products such as olive oil significantly influences consumers’ purchasing decisions and affects the market price. The virgin olive oil supply chain is particularly vulnerable to fraud, and falsification of the declaration of origin is especially difficult to detect. This is because, despite European regulations on mandatory declaration of origin, there is still no official method to verify this information and this opens a critical gap in the food chain.
To address an issue that urgently requires effective solutions, a number of fast, cost-effective and efficient authentication techniques have been developed and presented to identify frauds entering the market. But, which method has the highest level of reliability? An article published in the journal Food Chemistry compares, for the first time, the two most promising methods between specific and non-specific techniques to authenticate the geographical origin of virgin olive oil: stable isotope analysis and sesquiterpene fingerprinting.
The study, carried out in collaboration between the UB, the Research and Innovation Centre of the Fondazione Edmund Mach (Italy) and the University of Perugia (Italy), highlights the great potential of sesquiterpene fingerprinting to verify the geographical authentication of virgin olive oil. “The results indicated that the sesquiterpene fingerprinting method outperformed isotopic methods in reliability in several aspects, such as classification accuracy, sensitivity and selectivity”, note the authors, members of the UB’s Department of Nutrition, Food Science and Gastronomy.
The study also identifies the need to increase the transferability of this biochemical technique to ensure its global application and thus more effectively combat counterfeiting in the food chain.
Determining the region of origin of the pine nuts
In a second paper, also published in the journal Food Chemistry, the team adapts the above analytical strategy to make progress in an area where reliable verification methods are still lacking: ensuring the authenticity of the geographical and botanical origin of pine nuts for consumption.
“The traits and price of pine nuts vary according to the pine species and the region of origin. In this context, Mediterranean pine nuts get much higher prices than Asian pine nuts, which encourages fraudulent counterfeiting”, researchers explain.
The study, carried out in collaboration with the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA), indicates that monoterpene and sesquiterpene fingerprinting analysed with solid-phase microextraction and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry — combined with chemometrics — is a fast and highly efficient system.
“With almost no sample preparation, the methodology reveals 100% accuracy in distinguishing between pine nuts originating in the country and those from abroad. In addition, it reaches 99% in the ability to differentiate stone pine (Pinus pinea) from different regions of Spain. This powerful and automatable tool represents a breakthrough in the fight against fraud and counterfeiting in the sector”, concludes the team.
Journal
Food Chemistry
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Ground-breaking comparison of target stable isotope ratios vs. emerging sesquiterpene fingerprinting for authenticating virgin olive oil origin
Article Publication Date
25-Mar-2025
How ancient stone kitchens preserve food secrets
Microscopic plant residues recovered from bedrock metates reveal insights into the diets and traditions of the West’s ancient Indigenous communities
University of Utah
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Anthropologist Lisbeth Loutderback extracting plant residues from a metate at an archaeological site on public land in southcentral Oregon.
view moreCredit: Stefania Wilks, University of Utah
The mortar, pestle and cutting board in your kitchen are modern versions of manos and metates—ancient cooking implements found in archaeological sites around the world. A mano is a hand-held stone tool used with a metate to grind and pulverize food materials from plants and animals. The metate is a large, flat piece of stone or a depression ground into a bedrock surface. These bedrock metates, also known as open-air metates, are particularly common at archaeological sites, with the oldest dating as far back as 15,500 years.
Now, researchers at the Natural History Museum of Utah are using new techniques to extract microscopic plant residues preserved within the cracks and crevices of bedrock metates to learn more about the people who put them there. Their latest findings were published last month in the journal American Antiquity.
“People have lived here for time immemorial and have been processing native plants on ground stone tools for a long time too,” said archaeobotanist Stefania Wilks, a NHMU research assistant and University of Utah graduate student, referring to the Western U.S. where she conducts her research. That research includes studying plants that people used for food and medicine to learn about traditional lifeways and how the landscapes have changed over time.
Currently, Wilks is working with NHMU’s Curator of Archaeology Lisbeth Louderback, a U of U professor anthropology, to recover plant residues from metates across western North America. Not just any piece of plant matter, though. Wilks and Louderback work specifically with starch granules, tiny structures within a plant cell used to store energy in the form of carbohydrates. And those granules are itty-bitty: Even the largest granules are smaller than a tenth of a millimeter.
The granules’ small size means scientists can’t see them with their naked eye. They have to extract them from surfaces where people have processed plants, such as ground stone, pottery and basketry. Louderback suspected that an untapped source of starch granules could be bedrock metates. Although the surface of the rock is exposed to outside elements that would sweep away the granules or degrade them over time, she suspected that small crevices in the rock could be hiding plant residue.
[caption id="attachment_111978" align="alignright" width="239"] Stefania Wilks[/caption]
“Through their actions of grinding and mashing, people would have forced these starches down deeper into the stone,” Wilks explained.
Bedrock metates can be obvious or cryptic, and their appearance depends on the type of rock and how it was ground. In Utah, for example, the exposed bedrock is typically sandstone, and the metates are often shaped as an oblong groove. Other bedrock metates are a circular, dish shape, and some are deep and round, like a modern-day mortar. Regardless of their shape, the metates tend to appear in groups, or lined up in a row. “They aren’t sexy like an arrowhead,” Wilks said, “…but they still contain valuable information about what plants people processed in the past.”
Multiple bedrock metates occur along basalt outcrops in the uplands of southern Oregon and are associated with thousands of petroglyph panels. Also occurring among these archaeological features are large populations of culturally significant plants, especially geophytes (those with starchy underground storage organs like roots and tubers). Archaeologists once assumed people only ventured up to the uplands for hunting. “We were up there testing to see if the bedrock metate surfaces were actually being used to process plants,” Wilks said.
To do that, the team compared plant residues on the surface of the metates to those deep within the crevices. Using an electric toothbrush and water, they scrubbed material from the surface of the metate. Then, they added a deflocculant — a substance similar to laundry detergent - to break up clumped particles and release them from deep within the stone. They applied the electric toothbrush again and this time, the material they collected was whatever had been forced down into the stone’s crevices. They repeated this procedure on the surfaces of nearby rocks that weren’t used as metates, to serve as a control.
With samples in hand, the team turned to their microscopes to observe starch granules. Both the metate and control surfaces revealed virtually no granules. But the deeply-embedded samples contained hundreds.
“It increased our confidence that what we were seeing was direct evidence that different plant species with starchy organs were processed on the metate,” Wilks recalled.
Having proven that they could extract starch granules from the bedrock metates, the team then began to establish what plant species the granules came from. It was a time-consuming process: Wilks analyzed hundreds of starch granules from multiple plant species to study their morphological characteristics, then compared them to granules of plant species currently growing in the area. They were able to narrow down the plant family of many granules, and some could even be identified down to the genus level. For example, members of the carrot family were common, including a group of plants called biscuit root. They also found wild grasses — most likely wild rye — and plants belonging to the lily family. These are all plant taxa that were, and continue to be, important food sources for local Indigenous groups.
“Starch analysis is helpful in studying human diets of the past because some plant parts don’t preserve in the archaeological record,” Wilks said. Root vegetables, for example, will break down faster than seeds or grains. This new method of recovering starch granules provides researchers another way to study the role of plants in human diets. It also demonstrates how bedrock metates, often overlooked at archaeological sites, contain valuable information about past human lifeways.
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The research described in this article was published online Feb. 11 under the title, "Starch Granule Evidence for Biscuitroot (Lomatium spp.) Processing at Upland Rock Art Sites in Warner Valley, Oregon," in the journal American Antiquity.
The author of this piece, Jude Coleman, is an Oregon-based science journalist who writes about the environment, ecology, and humans — sometimes all three at once.
Ancient Native Americans used depressions in rock, called metates, like this one in Oregon's Warner Valley, to grind food.
Credit
Stefania Wilks, University of Utah
Usage Restrictions
Journal
American Antiquity
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Starch Granule Evidence for Biscuitroot (Lomatium spp.) Processing at Upland Rock Art Sites in Warner Valley, Oregon
Hunger shifts attention towards less healthy food options
A new study has revealed how hunger influences dietary decisions by shifting attention towards tastier, but less healthy, food options
image:
Illustration showing an eye ball and an array of healthy and unhealthy foods
view moreCredit: Jennifer March
New research suggests that when hungry, people focus more on the tastiness of food and tend to ignore nutritional information, which may contribute to poor dietary decisions.
The study, published as a revised Reviewed Preprint in eLife, is described as important by the eLife editors. They say the well-designed experiments – including choice behaviour, eye-tracking and state-of-the-art computational modelling – yield compelling evidence to support the conclusion that people who are hungry prioritise tastiness over healthiness in their food choices.
Despite existing public health initiatives, the prevalence of obesity has been steadily increasing in many countries. According to the World Health Organization, worldwide adult obesity has more than doubled since 1990, and adolescent obesity has quadrupled.* In 2022, 2.5 billion adults were overweight, and of these 890 million people were living with obesity – which can significantly increase the risk of developing serious health conditions, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and certain types of cancer.
Throughout a single day, we make several decisions about what to eat, and these choices are largely influenced by our environment. For example, it has been previously demonstrated that nutritional scores on food options can increase the likelihood of healthy choices. On the other hand, it has been shown that a hungry decision-maker is more likely to make unhealthy choices.
“A preference for energy-dense foods is likely an evolutionary adaptation to ensure survival under conditions of scarcity. However, as high caloric food options have become more easily available and affordable, this neurobiological mechanism to reward the consumption of calorie-dense foods is likely a contributing factor to the global surge in obesity rates,” says co-author Jennifer March, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology and Hamburg Center of Neuroscience, University of Hamburg, Germany. “Whilst we know that hunger can lead to more unhealthy food choices, we set out to better understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying this, by investigating the effect of hunger on attention and valuation processes in dietary choices.”
March served as the lead author of the paper alongside Sebastian Gluth, professor and Head of Cognitive Modelling & Decision Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology and Hamburg Center of Neuroscience, University of Hamburg.
March and Gluth recruited 70 adults from the University of Hamburg and surrounding area and asked them to complete a food choice experiment in both hungry and satiated states. In both conditions, participants underwent an overnight fast. In the satiated condition, they received a protein shake on the next morning at the start of the study, which matched their daily caloric needs. Participants also underwent a brief survey in order to define which foods they considered tasty, and how caloric they perceived them to be.
Using eye-tracking technology, they recorded where participants focused their attention when deciding between a healthier but less tasty option, and a tastier but less healthy one. Each food was labelled with a Nutri-Score – a standardised nutritional rating. To analyse how each participant's attention affected their food choices, the team utilised an advanced decision-making model known as the multi-attribute attentional drift diffusion model.
Although all participants showed a preference for tasty over the healthier options, regardless of hunger-state, the results confirmed that hunger significantly amplifies this preference. This aligns with previous research that says that hunger increases the perceived reward of calorie-dense foods. However, this work goes a step further by demonstrating that this effect is driven by visual attention patterns and the way information is weighted in the brain’s decision-making process.
In the hungry condition, participants focused more on the visual appeal of food options and less on the Nutri-Score compared to the satiated condition. They also made their choice more quickly when hungry. The author’s computational modelling revealed a two-fold effect: hunger increased the importance of taste in decision-making while also making participants less likely to factor in health information. In fact, hungry participants seemed to effectively ignore the Nutri-Score unless it was actively fixated on. This suggests that simply displaying nutritional information labels may not be sufficient to counteract hunger-driven food choices. The researchers suggest that interventions designed to promote healthy eating should focus on making health information more visually prominent or directing attention toward it.
The study focuses on immediate food choices in a controlled laboratory setting. Future research could explore how these findings translate to real-world settings, such as grocery stores or restaurants, where environmental cues and marketing tactics may further influence decision-making.
“The key takeaway is that hunger doesn’t just make unhealthy but tasty food seem more appealing, it also alters the decision-making process itself by shifting what information the brain prioritises,” says Gluth. “This has important implications for public health. If we can design interventions that help direct attention towards health information, we may be able to counteract the biological drive to choose calorie-dense foods when hungry and promote healthier eating habits.”
* https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight
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Media contacts
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eLife
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eLife
g.litchfield@elifesciences.org
About eLife
eLife transforms research communication to create a future where a diverse, global community of scientists and researchers produces open and trusted results for the benefit of all. Independent, not-for-profit and supported by funders, we improve the way science is practised and shared. In support of our goal, we introduced the eLife Model that ends the accept–reject decision after peer review. Instead, papers invited for review are published as Reviewed Preprints that contain public peer reviews and an eLife Assessment. We also continue to publish research that was accepted after peer review as part of our traditional process. eLife is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome. Learn more at https://elifesciences.org/about.
To read the latest Neuroscience research in eLife, visit https://elifesciences.org/subjects/neuroscience.
Journal
eLife
Article Title
The Hungry Lens: Hunger Shifts Attention and Attribute Weighting in Dietary Choice
Article Publication Date
25-Mar-2025
Blockchain is changing grocery shopping: new study reveals freshness transparency can cut food waste and boost profits
New study reveals how blockchain can reshape retail supply chains with smarter inventory management and fairer supplier contracts
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
New INFORMS Management Science Study Key Takeaways:
- Blockchain boosts profits and slashes food waste – Real-time freshness tracking helps grocers reduce spoilage and optimize inventory.
- Suppliers risk profits without adjustments – Greater transparency may lead retailers to order less, potentially squeezing supplier margins.
- Smart contracts create a win-win solution – Blockchain-based contracts can align incentives, ensuring fair supplier compensation while benefiting retailers.
BALTIMORE, MD, March 25, 2025 – As global food prices rise and reducing food waste remains a top priority, a groundbreaking new study in the INFORMS journal Management Science reveals how blockchain technology could revolutionize the grocery industry. By increasing transparency in food freshness, blockchain adoption could help retailers slash waste, maximize profits and reshape relationships with suppliers.
The study, “The Blockchain Newsvendor: Value of Freshness Transparency and Smart Contracts,” examines how grocery retailers can use blockchain-powered data to make smarter inventory decisions that reduce spoilage while improving their bottom line. However, while retailers stand to gain, suppliers may see declining profits unless smart contracts are introduced to adjust compensation based on freshness data.
How Blockchain Reshapes Food Supply Chains
Using real-world data and advanced modeling, the study found that blockchain-enabled freshness tracking is most valuable for perishable goods with stable demand, such as berries, lettuce, fish and beef. By better matching supply with demand, retailers can minimize food waste and increase efficiency.
However, such increased transparency could hurt suppliers if grocers order less to avoid spoilage. To create a win-win scenario for both grocers and suppliers, smart contracts can ensure fair pricing and compensation based on freshness data, maintaining a healthy supply chain.
“As inflation puts pressure on grocery prices and food waste remains a global crisis, blockchain technology offers a game-changing solution,” says N. Bora Keskin, one of the study’s authors and a professor at Duke University. “By providing real-time transparency on freshness, retailers can make smarter purchasing decisions – but suppliers may need new incentives to stay on board.”
“The use of smart contracts ensures fairness across the supply chain,” explains Chenghuai Li, study co-author, also from Duke University. “Retailers get the freshest products, suppliers get compensated fairly, and ultimately, consumers benefit from better quality and lower waste.”
Why This Matters: A Timely Solution for Rising Food Prices and Waste
The United Nations estimates that one-third of all food produced globally is wasted – a staggering problem that blockchain could help mitigate. Meanwhile, retailers are increasingly looking for tech-driven solutions to streamline supply chains, reduce waste and meet growing consumer demand for transparency.
“This isn’t just about technology – it’s about changing the way we handle food,” says Jing-Sheng Song, co-author and professor at Duke. “Blockchain-powered transparency can make fresh produce supply chains more efficient, more sustainable and more profitable for everyone involved.”
As grocery chains and policymakers explore ways to combat food waste and enhance supply chain efficiency, this research offers a compelling blueprint for leveraging blockchain technology in a way that benefits both businesses and consumers.
About INFORMS and Management Science
INFORMS is the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research, AI, analytics, data science and related disciplines, serving as a global authority in advancing cutting-edge practices and fostering an interdisciplinary community of innovation. Management Science, a leading peer-reviewed journal published by INFORMS, publishes quantitative research on management practices across organizations. INFORMS empowers its community to improve organizational performance and drive data-driven decision-making through its journals, conferences and resources. Learn more at www.informs.org or @informs.
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Journal
Management Science
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
The Blockchain Newsvendor: Value of Freshness Transparency and Smart Contracts
Good and bad bacteria: What microorganisms can do in our food
BfR organises three-day conference on food microbiology
What do cheese, sauerkraut and yeast dough have in common? Their production is only possible with the help of bacteria or fungi. The microorganisms initiate fermentation or maturing processes and thus create foods that have been on the human menu for, in some case, centuries. On the other hand, microorganisms contribute to the rotting and spoilage of food and can even make people ill, as outbreaks caused by pathogens in food have repeatedly shown, e.g. with Salmonella. "Food microbiology is a very multifaceted field of research," says Professor Andreas Hensel, President of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). "It investigates the properties of a wide variety of microorganisms and touches on topics from the fields of food technology, food safety, animal health and environmental and consumer protection." In order to discuss current research, the BfR, the German Society for Microbiology and Hygiene (DGHM) and the Association for General and Applied Microbiology (VAAM) are inviting researchers to the 19th Food Microbiology Conference in Berlin from 1 to 3 April.
The first day of the conference will focus on the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli) and its pathogenic properties. As an "indicator germ", E. coli indicates faecal contamination in food. The bacterium can also transfer antibiotic resistance and cause serious illnesses in humans. An introductory overview lecture will focus on the different virulence factors of the pathogen that contribute to its pathogenic properties. Another presentation will examine the development of antibiotic resistance rates in E. coli in pork and poultry ten years after the introduction of the antibiotic minimisation concept in Germany.
The second day of the conference will focus on bacterial contamination in the food chain and how it can be avoided. In food production, for example, bacteria such as Listeria monocytogenes can cause problems if they persistently survive in food-producing environments. This can lead to repeated contamination of the food produced and subsequently to infection of consumers. A second block of lectures will focus on the beneficial properties of bacteria, for example in the production of water kefir or the stabilisation of fruit preparations. The day will end with an excursion into sometimes exotic areas of food microbiology: for example, the question of whether eating raccoon meat can lead to Trichinella (threadworm) infections in humans or the significance of microbial contamination in insects that are to be used as food and feed will be discussed. This conference day is being organised jointly with the German "One Health Platform", an association of researchers from various disciplines. The intersection of the topics presented is the so-called One Health approach: in the search for sustainable solutions in the supply of food to the population, the focus is not only on human health, but also on aspects of animal health and environmental protection.
After further presentations on various topics, the last day of the conference will end with a panel discussion focussing on future challenges in food microbiology. A poster prize will also be awarded to young scientists.
You can find the complete programme here:
https://www.bfr-akademie.de/english/events/19lm-2025.html
Journalists are cordially invited to attend the conference. Please register in advance at pressestelle@bfr.bund.de. Please also send any requests for interviews on the topic to the press office.
Further information on food microbiology:
Topic page Assessment of microbial risks in foods
https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/assessment_of_microbial_risks_in_foods-739.html
National reference laboratory for Escherichia coli (NRL E. coli)
https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/national_reference_laboratory_for_escherichia_coli__nrl_e__coli_-10496.html
About the BfR
The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) is a scientifically independent institution within the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) in Germany. The BfR advises the Federal Government and the States (‘Laender’) on questions of food, chemicals and product safety. The BfR conducts independent research on topics that are closely linked to its assessment tasks.
This text version is a translation of the original German text, which is the only legally binding version.
