Chapter 9 – Food safety applications of nanoparticles

Abstract

There is a need to develop and implement more economical delivery approaches for multiple-hurdle antimicrobial interventions that can be applied to food matrices such as retail meats. Recently, potential opportunities have emerged to use nanoscience and nanoengineering principles to develop antimicrobial carriers for controlling the major foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella in meat and food preservation systems. The overall goal of this review is to explore the potential of nanoparticle-based composite systems for practical and economical antimicrobial interventions to inhibit and decontaminate such pathogens on cooked ready-to-eat (RTE) poultry and red-meat products. The opportunities for specific systems such as chitosan-nanoparticle-based nanocomposite systems containing ɛ-polylysine peptide dispersed in organic acids are discussed. A second focus of this chapter is the potential health hazards that arise from the use of nanoparticles.