Papers

61,005 results
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Article Tier 2

Food safety considerations in the advancement of cultured meat: Evaluating novel ingredients

This commentary on cultured meat (lab-grown meat) includes a brief but notable section on microplastics as an emerging food safety concern for the technology, noting that plastic scaffolding materials and other production inputs could introduce microplastics into the final product. The paper also addresses cell culture media, fetal bovine serum alternatives, and regulatory gaps more broadly. While not primarily a microplastics study, it raises the underexplored question of whether cultured meat could become a new dietary route of microplastic exposure.

2025 Future Foods 1 citations
Article Tier 2

Global Insights into Cultured Meat: Uncovering Production Processes, Potential Hazards, Regulatory Frameworks, and Key Challenges—A Scoping Review

This review examines the production process and potential health hazards of lab-grown cultured meat, including contamination risks from microplastics in growth media and packaging materials. The findings suggest that while cultured meat may reduce some environmental impacts of traditional farming, new food safety risks including microplastic contamination need careful regulation.

2025 Foods 20 citations
Article Tier 2

Cell-cultivated aquatic food products: emerging production systems for seafood

This review examines cell-cultivated seafood, a new approach to producing fish protein by growing fish cells in a lab rather than catching or farming fish. One potential benefit is avoiding the microplastic contamination found in wild and farmed fish, since the production environment can be controlled. As concerns grow about microplastics accumulating in seafood, lab-grown alternatives could offer a way to reduce human exposure to microplastics through diet.

2024 Journal of Biological Engineering 14 citations
Article Tier 2

Safety Issues in the Development of Cell-Cultured Meat

This review examines safety issues in the development of cell-cultured meat as an alternative to conventional animal husbandry, identifying unresolved concerns around food safety, production scalability, and regulatory approval that must be addressed before commercial deployment.

2025 Highlights in Science Engineering and Technology
Article Tier 2

Emerging Threat of Food Contamination by Microplastics and its Influence on Safety and Human Perspective

Researchers reviewed how widespread plastic use across industry has made microplastic contamination of food a serious public health concern, with particles entering the food supply through environmental pathways including runoff, wastewater, and air. Addressing this threat requires tighter regulations, better food supply monitoring, and public education on exposure risks.

2025 International Journal of Advanced Science and Engineering
Article Tier 2

Appetite or Distaste for Cell-Based Seafood? An Examination of Japanese Consumer Attitudes

A consumer survey examined Japanese attitudes toward cell-based seafood as an alternative to conventional seafood production, finding a mix of acceptance and reluctance shaped by food safety concerns, cultural familiarity, and perceptions of naturalness.

2023 Commodities 5 citations
Article Tier 2

Can Plant- and Cell-Based Seafood Improve Human and Planetary Health?: An examination of the environmental, social and economic costs and benefits of seafood alternatives

This white paper reviews the potential environmental, social, and health benefits and drawbacks of plant-based and cell-based seafood alternatives compared to wild-caught fish and conventional aquaculture. The relevance to microplastics lies in the fact that farmed and wild seafood are increasingly contaminated with plastic particles.

2020
Article Tier 2

Microplastics as Emerging Food Contaminants: A Challenge for Food Safety

This review examines microplastics as an emerging contaminant in the food supply, covering how they enter the food chain, their characteristics, and the challenges of assessing their health risks. Researchers found that while microplastics have been detected in a wide range of food products, current scientific data is insufficient to complete a thorough risk assessment of dietary exposure. The study calls for standardized detection methods and more research to establish safe exposure thresholds for microplastics in food.

2022 International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 113 citations
Commentary Tier 3

Editorial: Transdisciplinary communication for sustainable food systems

This editorial synthesizes research on sustainable food systems topics including microplastic contamination in beverages, cultivated meat development, and food safety, highlighting the multifaceted nature of sustainable food research across disciplines.

2025 Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Article Tier 2

Cultured meat in the European Union: Legislative context and food safety issues

Researchers review the regulatory and food safety landscape for cultured meat — animal protein grown from cells in a lab rather than slaughtered animals — within the European Union's precautionary approval framework. While cultured meat could reduce agriculture's enormous carbon footprint and help feed a projected 9–11 billion people by 2050, concerns about production safety, texture, nutrition, and consumer acceptance still need to be resolved.

2024 Current Research in Food Science 28 citations
Article Tier 2

Regulatory Science Perspective on the Analysis of Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Human Food

This paper from a regulatory science perspective highlights that current methods for detecting and measuring microplastics and nanoplastics in food are not yet reliable enough for formal food safety assessments. There is a lack of standardized definitions, reference materials, and validated analytical methods, especially for nanoplastics. Until these gaps are addressed, it will be difficult for food safety agencies to accurately determine how much plastic contamination people are consuming and whether it poses a health risk.

2024 Analytical Chemistry 33 citations
Article Tier 2

Investigating the Impact of Microplastics on Fish Muscle Cell Proliferation and Differentiation: Enhancing Food Safety in Cultivated Meat Production

Researchers exposed Atlantic mackerel muscle cells to polyethylene microspheres at concentrations representative of environmental contamination and found that microplastics significantly impaired cell attachment and proliferation, particularly at 10 µg/mL. The findings matter for the growing cultivated meat industry, which sources cells from marine species already exposed to microplastics, raising food safety questions.

2023 2 citations
Commentary Tier 3

Editorial: Addressing microplastic contamination: sustainable solutions for resilient food systems

This editorial introduces a special issue on microplastic contamination in food production systems, from agriculture to aquaculture. It frames the challenge of reducing plastic pollution in food supply chains as urgent given both growing global food demand and the widespread use of plastics throughout food industries.

2026 Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Article Tier 2

Enhancing food safety and cultivated meat production: exploring the impact of microplastics on fish muscle cell proliferation and differentiation

Researchers investigated how microplastic contamination affects fish muscle cells used in cultivated meat production. They found that polystyrene microplastics impaired the ability of fish cells to grow and develop into muscle tissue, even at relatively low concentrations. The findings raise concerns about microplastic interference in both lab-grown seafood production and the safety of sourcing cells from marine organisms already exposed to plastic pollution.

2024 Frontiers in Food Science and Technology 5 citations
Article Tier 2

Assessing microplastics and nanoplastics in food

This review assessed analytical methods for measuring micro- and nanoplastics in food, covering current detection limits, sample preparation challenges, and regulatory gaps. The authors found that while microplastics are detectable in diverse food products, nanoplastic analysis remains technically demanding and that harmonized methods for food matrices are urgently needed to support risk assessment.

2025 Burleigh Dodds series in agricultural science
Article Tier 2

The future of foods

Not relevant to microplastics — this paper is a brief commentary on sustainable food systems and resource depletion, with no substantive content on microplastics.

2023 Sustainable Food Technology 13 citations
Commentary Tier 3

Future trends in Food Science and Foodomics: a perspective view by the Editorial Team of Exploration of Foods and Foodomics

A panel of food science experts discussed emerging trends across food safety, authenticity, processing, and bioactivity, including the growing concern about microplastic and nanoplastic contamination in food. The article highlights the need for better analytical methods to detect micro- and nanoplastics in food products and to understand their effects on the food supply chain. Researchers also discussed the potential risks of introducing recycled plastics into food packaging.

2024 Exploration of Foods and Foodomics 10 citations
Article Tier 2

Microplastics and nanoplastics in food, water, and beverages; part I. occurrence

Researchers reviewed what is currently known about the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in food, water, and beverages, concluding that while contamination has been detected across many products, a lack of standardized detection methods makes it difficult to fully assess the food safety risks to human health.

2022 TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry 154 citations
Review Tier 2

Chemical safety of food products: problems and solutions (literature review)

This literature review examines chemical safety challenges in food production and processing, covering contamination by pesticides, heavy metals, mycotoxins, and emerging pollutants including microplastics, and discussing regulatory and technological solutions.

2025 Toxicological Review
Article Tier 2

Micro and Nano Plastics in the Food Chain: Challenges, Risks, and Future Directions

This review explores the presence of micro- and nanoplastics across the food chain, examining sources including packaging fragmentation and synthetic fiber shedding and assessing distribution from soil and water through crop plants, seafood, and processed foods to human consumers. The authors discuss health risks and the challenges of developing standardized analysis and regulatory standards for food-chain microplastic exposures.

2024 Journal of Food Chemistry and Nanotechnology 1 citations
Article Tier 2

Micro- and nanoplastics: Contamination routes of food products and critical interpretation of detection strategies

This review evaluates current methods for detecting micro and nanoplastics in food and beverages, from sample preparation to chemical identification. The authors highlight significant challenges including detection sensitivity limits, interference from food matrices, and a lack of standardized protocols. Better analytical tools are needed to accurately assess how much microplastic contamination people are actually consuming.

2023 The Science of The Total Environment 33 citations
Article Tier 2

Uncovering the hidden risks of microplastics in the food chain

This review highlights how microplastics in the food chain serve as surfaces for microbial colonization, potentially acting as vehicles that transfer harmful pathogens through seafood, produce, and food processing environments. The authors argue that current food safety standards are inadequate to address this microplastic-driven microbial risk and that urgent regulatory and research action is needed.

2026 Trends in Microbiology
Article Tier 2

Global food safety policies: Standards, challenges, and compliance

This review examines global food safety policies and identifies microplastics as one of several emerging chemical contaminants posing challenges to regulatory systems. The study found that foodborne diseases affect approximately 600 million people annually and highlights the need for effective surveillance systems, traceability technologies, and international cooperation to address new threats including microplastic contamination.

2025 International Journal of Science and Research Archive 1 citations
Article Tier 2

Microplastics in food - a critical approach to definition, sample preparation, and characterisation

This review critically examines how microplastics in food are defined, extracted, and analyzed across different studies, finding significant inconsistencies that make it hard to compare results. The lack of standardized methods for isolating and identifying microplastics in food means that contamination levels may be over- or underestimated. The authors call for unified research methods to enable credible assessments of how dietary microplastic exposure affects health.

2023 Food Chemistry 40 citations