Chapter 13 FATTOM and Hurdle Technology for Food Safety Control by Dr. Tang在线视频

Chapter 13 FATTOM and Hurdle by Tang

Hello, Ladies and Gentleman, Welcome to our Science based food safety supervision course.

In today’s lecture, I’m going to talk about FATTOM Hurdles and Food Safety Control. What is FATTOM? FATTOM stands for food，acidity, temperature, time, oxygen and moisture, so those actually are the condition or factors for the bacterial to growth, without any of these factors, the bacterial inhabit to growth , if you can provide all those factor, the bacterial can growth very well ,for example, food, food is actually the new chance for the bacterial , acidity is pH, so the bacterial grows suitable pH should be provided, also for the temperature, if temperature is too high ,the bacterial cannot grow, if too low, cannot grow either, so the suitable temperature should be provided for the bacterial, so those factor we also can use it to maintain, to promote bacterial to growth, we also can use it to control to growth our bacterial ,it calls hurdle, hurdle is factor, what is hurdle? Hurdle a factor to barrier the microbes to grow or prolify. What is Hurdle technology? Hurdle technology is a technology which combination of hurdles to inhibit the growth of microbes but not or less affect the food quality, that means not affect food it safe only affect microbe or bacterial inside food , these make food stable safe but not affect quality within shelf life. So we can use it to control it.

So it’s we said FATTOM, for example, food, acidity, temperature, time, oxygen, moisture, we can use any one of them is hurdle or barrier to control bacterial, so the more hurdle we use, the more effective to control bacterial, also the effective to balance the safety and quality, so we choose hurdles to control the bacterial, but how about quality of the food? If we use the very survival hurdle to control bacterial, these may affect the quality, so therefore we carefully to choose different hurdle to control the food safety issue without affecting food quality, now I give you an example to how to use hurdle to control safety issue without affecting quality, for example the sausage, we no more using it, for the sausage, there requirement for the safety, also there requirement for the quality, for example for the sausage, we like red color, we like good taste, we like long shelf life, however, for the safety issue , we don’t allow any pathogen inside in particularly there is one which lipid oxidation, this one is fatal or is dreadful , this one also can produce the spores , the spores is very heat resistant, and all the time 100℃ and 2 h can kill these spores, so if we want to keep safe. so we have to use very high temperature, that means over 120℃，if we use this temperature，the quality of sausage would be affected for example color cannot be kept. So therefore, we choose another hurdles which is called chemical preservatives or the chemical which calls Nitrite, before make this sausage in the meat, we add some of Nitrite which 50 -200 ppm, we add this one without heating this one, we can control the clostridium botulinum. because the clostridium botulinum is very sensitive to nitrite, that means nitrite is kill or is very effective one to kill, to inhabit the clostridium botulinum, so that’s why we use nitrite or the nitrite sodium is not perfect safe for our human health but is essential for our sausage, in this case, we can use core temperature, or loose temperature, lower temperature to do this. So this is a good example for us how to balance the hurdles or how to choose hurdles, for further interest, further research, if you are more interesting we have reference book for that is called Hurdle Technologies. Combination Treatments for Food Stability, Safety and Quality.

So we have two questions for this lecture. The first one is what is FATTOM and Hurdle? The second one is why hurdle technology becomes popular?

Thank you for this lecture, see you next one.