Recent developments in food characterization and adulteration detection: technique-oriented perspectives.

This review covers mainly publications that appeared in Analytical Abstracts (Royal Society of Chemistry) from January 1990 to February 2001. The number of publications on this topic continues to grow, and during the past three years (1998-2000) about 150 reviews and/or overviews have been published in the area of food. Numerous techniques and food matrices or chemical components are presented and discussed in these reviews. The present review is intentionally limited to eight techniques or classes of techniques and intends to be a "technique by technique" presentation of "what was used" or "what is used" to characterize food products and to detect their possible adulteration. The present review focuses on the following techniques: microscopic analysis; HPLC; GC, GC-(MS, FTIR); UV-visible spectrophotometry; AAS/AES, ICP-(AES, MS); IRMS, GC-IRMS, GC-C-IRMS; DSC; IR, mid-IR, and NMR (202 references). Emphasis is placed as much as possible on chemometrical treatment of analytical data, which are commonly used to achieve the final objective, either food characterization or adulteration detection. Finally, a brief description is given of the new generation of analytical systems that combine powerful analytical techniques and powerful computer software for a best extraction of the information from analytical data.