Coming Soon: DIY Food Safety Testing

Soon we will all be able to quickly and easily check to see if our food is safe to eat. The University of South Carolina is developing a new food saftey dipstick test that will help improve food safety standards..

The purpose of this new dipstick is so that people can check whether their food has spoiled and thus could cause food poisoning. The new food safety test should be easy to use and the test can be completed in less than five minutes.

When using the food dipstick it checks for certain chemicals that would be emitted by the food when it is spoiled, but may not yet be showing any visible signs of going off.

The dipstick will tell users two states of the food spoiling process. The first indicates that the food is beginning to spoil, this is when the dark purple dipstick changes to red. The second indication indicated that the food has perished. This is when the dipstick turns yellow.

However the new test is not 100 percent full proof and there would be bugs that would not be picked up by the test according to the UK Health Protection Agency. According to Suzanne Surman-Lee from the UK Health Protection Agency, "You can't equate spoilage to the risk of getting food poisoning."

The new food safety dipstick was presented by the University of South Carolina researchers, in prototype form, at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Symptoms of spoiled food are many times easy to notice. The food will emit a foul smell or have mould. However this is not the first sign of food spoiling. In fact food may become unsafe for consumption before any obvious signs appear. This new food safety dipstick should help reduce the number of food borne illnesses.

The new dipsticks provide a way for everyday people to test their food without purchasing and using expensive and complicated methods that test for specific bacteria.