ABSTRACT
Adulteration is a term that refers to a food product that fails to meet the legal standards. One form of adulteration is to add another substance to a food item in order to increase the quantity of the food item in raw form or prepared form, which may result in the loss of actual quality of the food item. These substances may be either available food items or non-food items. Additionally, substances are added to food items to enhance their texture, size, shape, color, and odor. Howsoever contemporary it may appear, deliberate adulteration of food items is in existence since the establishment of food production and food processing industries. Globalization and robust export/import of adulterated food items can have far-reaching and lethal consequences. Proliferative economical gains have peddled this practice, impacting human health adversely. This practice in particular to acquire lucrative gains also underlines food security, bioterrorism, and climate change. It thus represents an imperative issue in food science to be dealt with seriously. Screening techniques should be implemented in food industries to identify even the minute quantities of adulterants in food items. Food fingerprinting delivers robust and high throughput screening for analysis of various food items. Various food fingerprinting methods for detection of food adulteration and contamination include vibrational spectroscopies: near-infrared, mid-infrared, Raman; NMR spectroscopy; chromatographic fingerprinting; electrophoretic fingerprinting, and a range of mass spectrometry (MS) techniques.
