Understanding Food Safety and Toxicology

Carl Winter: Hi! My name is Carl Winter. I'm a spokesperson for the Institute of Food Technologists and also a faculty member in Food Toxicology, at the University of California, Davis.

Today I'll be talking about food safety issues that involve potentially dangerous chemical contaminants that make their way into the food supply. There is currently a lot of interest and a lot of concern, concerning many of these chemical issues in food, such as, pesticide residues that might show up on fruits and vegetables, metals that might show up in seafood.

In some cases, contaminants that come from plastic containers that hold water. There is a lot of chemical issues out there, what I'm going to try to do today is to provide some of the scientific background to discuss these issues. Hopefully, you'll be able to take this information and use it to make good choices about food for yourself and for your family.

Before doing that, I'd like to first tell you a little bit about myself. I hold a PhD in Agricultural and Environmental Chemistry, and I've been a faculty member at the University of California for the last 22 years. In my role there, I am also the Director of a program called the FoodSafe Program which is an educational program designed to provide information about food safety to consumers in a variety of health professionals.

When we talk about poisons, contaminants in our foods, we really need to talk about the subject of toxicology. So in the next segment, I'll be discussing some of the basic principles of toxicology which is the science of poisons.