I know someone, who was working at a company that does food testing in Germany.
When it comes to pesticides, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) set maximum amounts, German authorities set more stringent rules on the allowed pesticides and then German supermarkets overperform by requiring even stronger limits.
On the other hand, the standard techniques that are used to pick up contaminants in food do not pick up microplastics. There are no official limits exposed by EFSA for microplastics.
If you think that low-effort good spectrometers will give you good information about microplastics pollution or poisoning attempts by skilled attackers, I think you overrate what you could detect that way.
Theranos was built on the idea that you can detect a lot if you combine microfluid technology alone with spectrometers and they failed despite investing significant research money.
Does Germany have a lot of food/MP testing companies? Germany seems highly represented in analytical chemistry, as I saw from the SLAS2024 conference.. (for all those people who complain about "lack of innovation" in Europe, they're all underrating analytical chemistry). This conforms to stereotypes about Germans and precision..
(and the culture of Germany is WAY more amendable to eco-consciousness/environmental health than the culture of America)
It would be nice (even in fringe cases) to have one country/area dedicated to being microplastic/pollution free so that people could travel there and then test to see if they feel healthier there (people who have multiple chemical sensitivities often have life-defining levels of motivation for this). Like, this would be the very definition of a health-conscious resort/recovery/convalescence spa.. (people used to go to the mountains for this)
This documentary features Germans:
#sense-making
Infrared spectroscopy, HPLC, Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and reverse ecology are examples. Figuring out the purity of one's foods/drugs (which is not done enough) can be a Pareto-efficient improvement on the attention economy of "pivotal actors", and can be done by environmental health specialists (whose skills are orthogonal to "pivotal actors"/those in our communities and are not appreciated enough - they were involved in the construction of the new Harvard SEAS building). Enhanced testing could be the first step towards improving the purity of one's food/water and help "cleaner thinking" (which alone has a lot of alignment potential).
Why is this important? B/c people are not mindful enough of the potential toxins/contaminants in their food (we are only beginning to learn the effects of microplastic accumulation in the body/brain), and given that some toxins bioaccumulate in the brain, the effects compound. AI gives rapid improvements to bioweapons near-term (which Kevin Esvelt is very concerned with), which makes contamination of the food/water supply by foreign agents particularly concerning.
Russia will continue to troll the world, and who knows what foreign biological agents that Russians may introduce to the food supply of "pivotal actors".
Mithridates, the Poison King, had deep knowledge of botany and employed many people to taste his food for him. An excellent biography (referenced by Peter Fedichev) is here: https://www.amazon.com/Poison-King-Legend-Mithradates-Deadliest/dp/0691150265
So one of the most important questions is.. what are some low-effort food spectrometers one can get? Given that short timeline/AI will deflate prices of some machines and occupational specialists, the cost should not be an issue, especially for those in high-value corporations that agents will try to infiltrate or poison (such as OpenAI).
Some links:
infrared spectroscopy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8997473/
https://www.rapamycin.news/t/are-chromatography-mass-spec-assays-the-ideal-methods-for-determining-compound-purity-eg-for-rapamycin-or-semaglutide/12290