I have successfully requested mycotoxin occurrence data from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). It’s been a lengthy, but successful process getting the data (but surprisingly transparent and being kept up to date by the legal department of EFSA), but once all member states had approved the release of their data a CD arrived in the mail a few weeks later with more than 500,000 data sets of regulated mycotoxin concentrations in a variety of raw and processes food matrices.
Together with collaboration partners from Europe, I am now in the process of analysing occurrence data for regulated toxin species. I am setting up a series of analysis scripts in R (using the tidyverse, such as dyplyr and ggplot2) to shed light on the contamination of food products with toxins such as Aflatoxins, Deoxynivalenol and Ochratoxin A.
