ABSTRACT
Foods are majorly prone to contamination throughout the food chain, becoming a potential hindrance to attaining food safety and security. Synonymously, food spoilage and adulteration are forms of alterations in raw or finished food constituents, and hence, the quality of the food available for consumption. The mechanisms, approach and intention towards these two menaces serve as discriminating factors. Food spoilage and adulteration deteriorate the safety of food, especially processed food, and expose the consumer to life-threatening risks as well as create economical and statutory problems to the food industry, resulting in significant global economic loss. Preservation is quite sometimes mis-applied in the form of adulteration of food, as it results in food alterations; whereas the original goal of preservation is not only to increases the longevity of shelf-life, but also to maintain and enhance the nutritional value of food to impede spoilage, and may offer health benefits at little or no cost or lost to the consumer, thus improving the economy of the food industry. Preservation has, since time immemorial, been the redeeming factor that minimizes loss of essential foodstuffs to spoilage resulting from either physical, chemical or biological activity. Major causes of spoilage, types of adulteration, health-related consequences of food spoilage and adulteration, traditional and more advanced techniques applied for detection of spoilage and adulteration in foods are included in this review. Conventional methods of food preservation, including drying, chilling, freezing, pasteurization, fermentation and the modern and promising methods such as high-pressure (HP) process, high-pressure thermal (HPT) process, cool-plasma process, pulse electric-field (PEF) process are reported. A clear-cut difference that depends on the main purpose exists between adulteration and preservation, in that the former creates problem, while the latter is a problem-solving practice. However, government intervention with legal control and surveillance is urgently needed to avert the threat of food insecurity.
