This article provides a behind-the-scenes look at the National Measurement Institute in Port Melbourne, Australia, revealing the rigorous processes involved in food testing.
There’s a peculiar smell in the bowels of a Port Melbourne building.We’re in the stinkiest room of the microbiology wing at the National Measurement Institute, a government body responsible for ensuring measurements – of food, pharmaceutical goods and more – are accurate and recognised. The smell is agar, which is used by microbiologists to grow bacteria, including salmonella.
“We actually had samples from victims’ freezers,” said Tim Stobaus, general manager of the institute’s analytical services branch. The institute’s Melbourne laboratories receive, prepare, extract and then measure about 30,000 samples a year, predominantly testing food for nutritional value, allergens, safety or place of origin. This includes testing for 26 allergens ranging from peanuts to mustard, molluscs to rye and barley. Listeria and salmonella tests now take only 24 hours, down from five to six days, which speeds up the identification and containment of outbreaks. “It is a load of crap,” said Stobaus. “You can’t put a sample item into a machine and get a read-out of all the different bits in there. It just doesn’t work like that; it’s actually quite complex.”But in Port Melbourne, we learn some hard truths about the nutritional panels on food that show how much salt, sugar and protein, for example, a manufactured food has.“Even under the very best condition of perfect sampling, perfect preparation, perfect extraction and perfect measurement, we have a concept called measurement uncertainty, which is imprecision that’s inherent in the process,” Stobaus said. “Sometimes you’ve got to think, ‘Well, OK, that packet says it’s got 5.6 grams of fat.’ Well, probably anywhere between 5.3 and 5.9.” For food testing to be meaningful, staff start with a representative portion of the product. This is trickier than it sounds. “You can’t just grab an apple from a tree. You’ve got to systematically take apple samples from across your orchard,” Stobaus said
FOOD SAFETY TESTING LABORATORY AUSTRALIA MEASUREMENTS
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