Fish Food Poisoning and The Role It Plays in Recipe Development

  One aspect of sanitation and food safety that I personally find interesting is the varying toxins that can come from fish and shellfish. The provided reading for this assignment listed two different kinds of illness that can be received from consuming tainted fish, of the two, I chose to research and write about the scombroid food poisoning. Because my family regularly goes fishing in the waters surrounding Sarasota, and we typically eat almost everything we catch, I wanted to research more on this fish food poisoning to better know how to prevent it from happening to us. Scombroid poisoning, according to Rodríguez-Caravaca et al., “Food poisoning after the consumption of fish from the family Scombridae is the most common food poisoning involving fish worldwide…” (2018, p. 1). This common fish poisoning gives the victim unpleasant symptoms such as headache, itchy skin, blurry vision, diarrhea, cramps, and flushed skin. As terrible as these symptoms sound we are probably all wondering how this poisoning happens and how we can prevent it! The scombroid toxin develops in fish containing high levels of histidine, such as bluefish, amberjack, or mahi mai, that is not properly refrigerated. The histidine begins to grow rampantly, and turn into histamine, the high level of histamine then plague those who consume it with the scombroid poisoning. How can we stop the histidine from growing in our fish and infecting us with scombroid poisoning? The most effective way to prevent scombroid poisoning from growing in these high level histidine fish is to immediately refrigerate the fish after it is caught. The low temperature will prevent the histidine from growing into histamine and will in return prevent the scombroid poisoning from developing.   

Preventing scombroid poisoning when creating a new recipe could either be an important factor or not, depending on how you look at it. If someone wants to write a recipe that uses fish as an ingredient, they are going to do so, and are not going to worry about potential foodborne illness. For instance, someone writing a recipe would not think “Oh I can not write a recipe that calls for fish, because what if someone were to get scombroid poisoning from it.” Instead, they would write the recipe, and rely on the fact that whoever chooses to cook it will know how to properly handle the fish they are cooking with. However, in other cases, one certainly may take scombroid poisoning into account when creating a recipe. If one were to write a recipe directed towards beginner chefs, or were dictating a recipe in a cooking class, then proper fish handling techniques might not be implied, and the writer would need to discuss how to prevent scombroid. Therefore, when developing a recipe using ingredients that may cause foodborne illness, the writer should tailor their instructions to who will be using the recipe to cook.

References

Rodríguez-Caravaca, G., Hijas-Gómez, A. I., Tejedor-Alonso, M. Á., Del-Moral-Luque, J. A.,

   Delgado-Iribarren, A., Valverde-Cánovas, J. F., & Gil-de-Miguel, Á. (2018). Food poiso

   ning caused by scombroids: A case-control study. Journal of Infection and Public Hea

   lth. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/10.1016/j.jiph.2018.09.010