Chemical imaging in food authentication

The authenticity of foods is an age-old problem. Food authenticity issues, especially adulteration, have been existed as long as food has been made and sold. Now it has become more sophisticated and widespread all over the world. Major food adulteration events seem to occur regularly, for example, Sudan Red dye adulteration with spices in 2003, melamine adulteration with milk powder in 2008, dioxins adulteration in pork in 2008, detergent, fat, and urea adulteration in milk in 2008, horse meat adulteration in processed beef in 2013, and many more. These are just a few of the major incidents, and the full scale of adulteration is not well known because most incidents go undetected or unreported. Moore and Lipp documented over 1300 cases of food adulteration occurred from 1980 to 2010. The occurrence of fraud is not natural to evaluate without using highly sophisticated analytical tools. Detecting adulteration is difficult, as most of the cases, the adulterants are very usually similar to the authentic product.