Adulteration exists in most of the food products like edible oils, ghee, spices and
medicines. Mustard oil is found adulterated with cheap argemone oil which causes dropsy
disease. Its symptoms include swelling of the whole body, especially legs and
gastrointestinal problems such as vomiting, diarrhoea and loss of appetite. Many
instances have been reported when unscrupulous traders mixed oil of reputed brands with
ordinary palm oil or other cheap oils. Therefore, there is an urgent need to address the
problem of detection and quantification of these adulterants at affordable cost so that
industry can absorb the technology and benefited by the same. Therefore, there is a need
for quality monitoring of ghee and edible oils as well as affordable, portable systems
are needed at different stages from manufacturing to the final consumer. In a nutshell,
the following low cost technological solutions are needed for detection of adulteration
in these foods.
• Electronic Detection of adulterants in ghee
• Low cost system for detection of adulteration in edible oils
Edible oils such as mustard, soyabean, rice bran, canola, linseed etc. are mainly composed of unsaturated fat. Such fat is primarily responsible for their sensory and desirable qualities in an oil such as texture, structure, mouth feel, flavor and colour. Unsaturated fats are chemically unstable in food and prone to oxidation through free-radical chain reactions. This may cause deterioration of the lipids resulting in rancid off flavours such as card board or soapy flavor due to the increase in level of short chain aldehydes (pentanal, hexanal, heptanal, octanal and nonanal) and long storage. Generally, lipid oxidation and rancidity are the main factors determining the shelf life of lipid-containing foods. Instrumentation techniques, such as gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry coupled with gas chromatography (GC- MS) have been used for quantification of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in cashews which demands thorough sample preparation and is time consuming. CSIR-CSIO has studied the correlations between the volatiles and the rancidity of cashew nuts in an earlier project which has indicated hexanal as a rancidity marker.
