Detection of Chemical Contaminations in Food via Raman Spectroscopy

Recently, global warming has led to a change in weather patterns and an increase in natural disasters. However, these causes lead to pesticides and heavy metals directly contaminating the environment and toxic foods eventually being absorbed by the human body. These toxic residues are composed of highly contaminated ingredients and can pose a serious problem to human health even at low concentrations. Early detection of these toxic contaminants in the food supply chain is critical to ensure our safety. Presently, conventional detection methods such as liquid or gas chromatography combined with mass spectroscopy are widely used for food protection. However, these techniques have several drawbacks, such as the high time required for sample preparation and purification steps, high cost, low sensitivity, and the fact that the equipment is usually not portable. Recently, technological innovations such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy have been promoted to design an alternative detection method. The SERS technique meets the requirement of portability, sensitivity, and selectivity and can be performed as a cost-effective candidate for the qualitative detection of chemical contaminations in food samples.