Levels of Pesticides in Food and Food Safety Aspects

Surveillance for pesticides residues in food is performed in many countries worldwide to ensure, that consumers are not exposed to unacceptable levels of pesticides and that only pesticides approved by the authority are used and for the right applications with respect to crop, application dose, time and intervals. Foods are permitted as long as they comply with the maximum residue levels (MRLs) set by the authorities. Another purpose of monitoring pesticide residues in food can be to assess the food safety risk due to the population’s dietary exposure to pesticides. This chapter deals with monitoring of pesticide residues in food in general and shows examples of monitoring results in fruit, vegetables, cereals, food of animal origin, and processed food such as drink, infant and baby food. In addition, it describes how consumer exposures based on dietary intake estimates can be performed as part of risk assessments and examples of such exposure assessment studies are given.