A New App Will Be Able to Detect Food Poisoning

A Caucasian woman and her doctor are indoors in a medical clinic. The woman is holding her stomach and describing her stomachache symptoms.

We already have the nail polish that can go undercover to detect if your drink has been drugged. Now we have an app that can tell us if our food is contaminated with bad bacteria like E. Coli and Salmonella. We have the creative geniuses at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to thank for this 21st-century idea.

The now old-fashion way to do this involved heavy machinery and over 24 hours of waiting around for the results. For the futuristic phone way, all you’ll need is a $30 microscope attachment and the corresponding smartphone app.

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The device works with a chemically-coated chip that will bind to bacteria found. Place the contaminated food into a bowl full of water and let the chip do its thing for 30 minutes. Not only is this contraption useful for everyday kitchen life, but for testing water during natural disasters and things alike.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a couple years for the software to be perfected. Right now, the food scientists haven’t been able to tell if the bacteria you see through the microscope is good or bad. What will scientists come up with next?

Rachel Behlmann