ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: This study aims to evaluate food waste and menu quality in two canteens (A and B) from a Portuguese public university in order to identify challenges and opportunities to improve the food service. METHODS: Food waste included the analysis of two canteens over 5 consecutive days by selective aggregate weighing. A qualitative evaluation of a 5-week menu cycle related to lunches was performed through the Qualitative Evaluation of Menus (AQE-d) method. RESULTS: Both menus have "satisfactory" evaluations and lower adequacy to the dietary guidelines in criteria A, which evaluates general items from the dish, and in criteria B, which evaluates meat, fish and eggs. The calculated mean of food waste in both canteens exceeded the acceptable limit of 10%, except for the vegetarian (7.5%) dish in canteen A. The biggest waste was found in the vegetarian dish (16.8%) in canteen A. In meat dishes the conduit presents more waste (17.0%) than in fish and vegetarian dishes. Among these, the vegetables were the most wasted (25.3% and 27.9%, respectively). CONCLUSION: This work presents some insights to future interventions in the direction of a healthier and more sustainable foodservice.
ABSTRACT
The species Aeromonas simiae was first described on the basis of two strains (CIP 107798(T) and CIP 107797) isolated from faeces of healthy monkeys (M. fascicularis) from Mauritius, which were kept in quarantine in the Centre for Primatology, Louis Pasteur University, Strasbourg, France. In the present study, during a survey to determine the prevalence of Aeromonas at three different pig slaughterhouses at north of Portugal, a single strain MDC2374 (out of 703 isolates) was identified as A. simiae on the basis of 16S rDNA, gyrB and rpoD sequencing, confirming that traditional biochemical approaches are not resolute to identify rarely isolated Aeromonas species. To our knowledge, this is the first time since species description that A. simiae is newly isolated and identified.
Subject(s)
Aeromonas/classification , Aeromonas/isolation & purification , Gram-Negative Bacterial Infections/veterinary , Phylogeny , Swine Diseases/microbiology , Abattoirs , Aeromonas/genetics , Animals , DNA Gyrase/genetics , DNA-Directed RNA Polymerases/genetics , Feces/microbiology , Gram-Negative Bacterial Infections/microbiology , Molecular Sequence Data , Portugal , RNA, Ribosomal, 16S/genetics , SwineABSTRACT
The first description of the species Aeromonas allosaccharophila was only based on two strains (the type strain CECT4199, and a duplicate CECT4200) isolated from diseased elvers (Anguilla anguilla) of an eel-farm located in Valencia, Spain, and one stool isolate (ATCC35942) from a female with diarrhoea and food poisoning in South Carolina, U.S.A. In the present study, 17 Aeromonas isolates obtained from carcasses of pigs and from the equipment for the cleaning process, and one strain recently isolated from a clinical case of gastroenteritis, were genetically identified as Aerornonas allosaccharophila on the basis of gyrB and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. In addition, this phylogenetic approach also supports the classification of Aeromonas veronii biogroup sobria reference strains LMG13071, LMG13073 and LMG13074 within the species A. allosaccharophila. The A. allosaccharophila strains isolated from pig carcasses processed in a single slaughterhouse presented a clonal origin, on the basis of random amplified polymorphic DNA genetic typing. To our knowledge, this is the first time since the species description that A. allosaccharophila has been newly identified, being on this occasion isolated from the environment of a slaughterhouse. Our findings indicate that this species may be readily identified by a sequencing approach and, consequently, the present work supports the existence of this phylogenetic cluster.
