Monitoring of Aldehyde Concentration in Chicken Meat during the Storage Period after Radiation Treatment with Accelerated Electrons

Radiation treatment of food makes it possible to solve some issues of the food industry, including suppression of pathogenic microbial contamination, retention of the nutritional value of the product, and increase in its shelf life. This treatment method in combination with highly sensitive methods of gas chromatography–mass spectrometry makes it possible to reveal biochemical markers of irradiation treatment in meat products with moderate fat content, such as chicken and turkey. This work describes the experimental results of the dependences of the content of volatile organic compounds in chilled chicken meat treated with 1 MeV accelerated electrons with the doses from 250 Gy to 20 kGy in two weeks of storage. The content of volatile organic compounds in irradiated and reference food samples has been determined on days 0, 1, 4, 6, 8, 11, and 13 after irradiation treatment. Similar behavior pattern of aldehydes identified in treated poultry meat, namely, hexanal, heptanal, and pentanal, has been determined in two weeks of product storage. An increase in the aldehyde concentration has been detected in samples treated with doses from 500 Gy to 10 kGy on days 1–4 after irradiation. It has been revealed that, with an increase in the irradiation dose the period of aldehyde accumulation in irradiated meat is displaced toward a shorter period of product storage. Thus, aldehydes can be considered as potential markers of irradiation treatment of chicken meat in the first four days after irradiation.