Autor/es:
BARONI, M.V. ; INGA, C.M; FURLAN, G; PODIO, N; FABANI, M.P; PERAL-GARCIA, P.; BADINI, R.; WUNDERLIN, D. A.
Resumen:
Traceability is essential to give information on origin, processing, retailing and final destination of food. The EU TRACE Project aims to provide systems that can not only trace food but are also capable of confirming its origin. In this sense, EU TRACE Project is aiming to correlate geographical-geological characteristics with those of locally grown food in order to be able to confirm the origin of food. Five regions of Argentina, representing major productions zones of different agricultural commodities, were sampled. Beef, cereal, olive oil, soil, and water samples were obtained from the provinces of San Juan, Entre Ríos, Mendoza, Buenos Aires and Córdoba (Figure 1). Here we present preliminary results on multielemental analysis of water samples, obtained by ICP/MS and analyzed by multivariate statistical techniques. Discriminant analysis (forward stepwise) allows selecting 10 element out of 18 analyzed as the most important for region discrimination. The elements selected were: Cu, Ca, Mg, Na, Ba, Li, K, V, Sr and Mn. These 10 elements allow differentiating water samples from the five studied areas with 98% certainty. This means that only 1out of 60 samples analyzed was misclassified. Canonical analysis (Figure 2) shows good discrimination of water samples according to its geographical origin. Further work is oncoming to evaluate the incidence of irrigation water on metal composition of food commodities produced in these areas.