CeFood2022

11th Central European Congress on Food and Nutrition with the topic “Food, technology and nutrition for healthy people in a healthy environment“ was organized in Čatež ob Savi, SLOVENIA, from 27th until 30th September 2022. With about 250 participants and the program that combined three scientific sessions per day, with additional plenary sessions and round table, the CeFood2022 provided great platform to meet, discuss and create. It was all about versatile aspects of food science.  

Our ICFMH Workshop “Food and its safety in a fast changing world” was held on 29/09/2022  and was Chaired by Prof. dr. Andreja Rajkovic (president) & Prof. dr. Peter Raspor. Various ‘contradictions’ associated with food safety in terms of cultural, environmental, production and analytical aspects were addressed including the following:

W9 ‐ Andreja Rajković (BEL): Microplastics in food safety: From toxicity to shuttle effect?

W10 ‐ Antonello Paparella (ITA): Plant essential oils for food safety: From research to practice

W11 ‐ Gabriella Kiskó (HUN): Antibiotic resistance: Still Food safety concern?

W12 ‐ Peter Šimko (SVK): How efficient is Elimination of aflatoxin treat from milk?

W13 ‐ George Nychas (GRC): Data Science; can it be at the Food Safety service

W14 ‐ Peter Raspor et al: Food Microbiology/food safety education and training obstacles in virtual world?

The lectures were followed by inspiring open discussion that was moderated by Andreja Rajković and Gabriella Kiskó

The workshop was a high level, yet easy to grasp overview of some of the established and some of the emerging issues in broad understanding of term food safety. It was a coherent, interdisciplinary and complementary discussion that linked multifaceted impacts of presence of foodborne contaminants (microbial, chemical and mixtures thereof) on human health. From the emerging issues of microplastics and nanoplastics (with detailed look at Horiozn202O project ImpTox: en | IMPTOX and CUSP research cluster CUSP cluster - The European Research Cluster to Understand the Health Impacts of Micro- and Nanoplastics (cusp-research.eu) with their microbiological cargo, to established problems of Aflatoxin M1 and foodborne pathogens such as Listeria monocytogenes, links have been made to antibiotic residues and antibiotic resistance, as well as solutions that may come from the natural products, mainly essential oils and plant extracts, containing mixtures of highly efficient antimicrobial molecules that work in synergism. Next possible game changer was introduced being machine learning and artificial intelligence that can generate, utilizes, interpret and correlate data of different (chemo)metrics to assess microbial load of foods. Finally, all these new and old paradigms are essential to modern food microbiology curricula that needs to take the best put of current mixture of physical and virtual education approaches. Audience interacted, proposed, and discussed issues that were linked to the presentations and went above that by introducing their own impressions and considerations. Also young researches and students gave their inputs of a great value.

ICFMH, its activities and outreach were presented by president, and special attention as given to announcements ad PR of FoodMicro2024 in Burgos (Spain) and 12^th International Conference on Predictive Modeling in Food in Sapporo (Japan). We hope to welcome there so many young and established food microbiologists and food scientists in general.

Here are two full length report of the Congress:

Reports by the CEFood2022 chairs

Overall report