Safety in Fish, Fruits and Vegetables Jennylynd James - H. Allan Bremner

Fish is an exceptionally important component of the human diet and an enormous industry exists to provide a huge variety of consumer products in which fish is a major component. These offerings range from whole fish, large and small, to pieces of fish such as cuts and fillets, to canned fish in a multitude of forms, to dried and cured products, to fish oils and extracts, to frozen portions and complete meals through to reformed and gelled products. The list is enormous, the variety even within one product type is extensive and the range of species used as food runs well into the thousands. Each of these variations and combinations presents a huge matrix of possibilities, opportunities and problems.

Over the last 80 or so years, fish technologists and scientists have been endeavouring to draw some general rules from observation and experimentation on fish and fish products to control and predict their properties under a vast variety of circumstances. The two main driving themes for these efforts have been in safety and quality – expressed mostly in terms of measurable properties...

Scientists recommend that everyone eat five to nine servings of fruit and vegetables every day in order to promote good health. The improved availability of fresh produce year round and increased choices of items on the supermarket shelves should certainly help consumers to meet this target of fresh produce consumption.

Raw fruit and vegetables, however, have the potential of becoming contaminated with microorganisms, including human pathogens. Several widely publicized foodborne outbreaks in recent years have been associated with sprouted seeds, minimally processed produce, unpasteurized vegetable and fruit juices, as well as intact products. However, the proportion of fresh-produce-related outbreaks is low when compared to the number of foodborne outbreaks per year...