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Ensuring good nutrition in the elderly is a real challenge

Make a better use of meat from culled or hardy animals

Applied research on Biltong

Good-quality cooked ham is a proud mainstay of French charcuterie

Several recent papers argue that low-molecular-weight or ‘volatile’ organic compounds are valuable candidate markers of exposure to chemical stressors in biological systems.

Understand, model, predict

Good-quality cooked ham is a proud mainstay of French charcuterie, but also a major challenge for the production chain, as up to 50% of cooked hams present a PSE-like destructuration defect at the slicer. If the industry is to understand and predict the mechanisms underpinning the PSE-like defect, it needs an authoritative characterization of the raw-source muscle tissue.

We demonstrated that human gut microbiota acutely exposed to different types of foodborne chemical contaminants changed its ‘volatolome’—the semiochemical volatile organic compound signature back-tracing microbial metabolism.

The methods currently used to guarantee the chemical safety of animal origin foods specifically target either the chemical contaminants or their residues. These methods may be powerful, but they are also terribly expensive and cannot viably serve for large-scale standard procedure system-wide food safety tests. Volatolomics, a branch of chemistry that studies the volatile organic compounds emitted by a biological system, raises promising prospects for a much cheaper, high-throughput screening solution to detect food-chain exposures to chemical contaminants.

Nutritional imperatives mean that makers of dry-cured ham need to reduce the amount of salt in their products. However, any over-strong drop in salt content will lead to excessive proteolysis, causing texture problems that can undermine slicing yields and create microbiological stability issues.