ABSTRACT

At present, organic food quality is defined solely according to single food constituents. This has yielded significant differences compared to conventionally produced products; however, the impact of these differences on human health remains largely unknown. Organic and biodynamic agriculture take a systemic approach, aiming towards resilient plants and animals. Consequently, the question is whether these differences in levels of compounds can be regarded as indicators of the qualitative traits that organic and biodynamic agriculture aim for. The method of copper chloride crystallisation with additives, or in short the crystallisation fingerprint method, aims to address this question. The method is based on the generation and subsequent evaluation of dendritic crystallisation patterns (i.e. ‘fingerprints’), which emerge when an aqueous cupric chloride solution is crystallised on a glass plate in the presence of a water-soluble additive (the sample). The characteristics of the crystallisation patterns are evaluated by human visual evaluation using defined criteria, developed according to adapted ISO norms for sensory analysis, and/or by computer-based multivariate image analysis. Several articles have been published demonstrating the potential of this method to study the effect of processing, the feeding regime and farming system in a broad range of agricultural products. Trained panels were able to correctly assign encoded samples to the farming system from which they came (conventional, organic, biodynamic) based on the degree of decomposition perceived in the crystallisation patterns. Conceptually, this relates to estimating the samples’ degree of self-organisation in the sense of ‘resilience’ (its elasticity, capacity to cope with challenges) in response to the controlled ageing of the sample.