Beer, wine, cheese, sausage, and sauerkraut are all made using live, growing, dividing bacteria, yeast and other fungi. In just a single slice of cheese, you willingly swallow about 10 million vibrantly live bacteria that presumably taste good. But who says all those "bugs" won't harm us?
For food micro­organ­isms, the EU currently only has approval systems for gene­tically modified organisms (GMO's) or for micro­organisms that are truly novel to the food supply.
However, the EU food authority EFSA has now drawn up a procedure for how it will evaluate the safety of the tra­di­tional food "bugs" before we eat them. With this procedure, EFSA gives itself an administrative tool that lets the Authority a priori accept or reject a micro­or­ganism for food and feed use, depending on which species or genus the microorganism belongs to. For industry this mean its own documentation of safety is superfluous. The EFSA procedure is termed "Qualified Presumption of Safety," or QPS, and EFSA itself compares QPS with the US system of GRAS (generally recognized as safe) for food chemicals and microorganisms.
The new QPS system groups the food and feed microorganisms in four categories:
- the Gram-positive non-sporulating bacteria,
- species in the genus Bacillus,
- the yeasts, and
- the filamentous fungi.
Until March 5th, 2007, the QPS procedure is open for public comment on EFSA's homepage.
As yet, EFSA has not announced when it will start implementing its QPS system.
DHI's Department of Human Health and Safety has evaluated the safety of many microorganisms for both food and feed. The Department has also been a bit of a player in the development of the QPS system. For this we capitalized on our expert knowledge of what makes a microorganism safe and what makes a food and feed microorganism efficacious.