Expert: PFAS testing in food and wildlife is feasible but costly, method-dependent

At the Sept. 12, 2025 meeting of the Legislative Study Commission on the Environmental Health Effects of PFAS, John Patelli, a Battelle Memorial Institute researcher and former toxicologist with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (DES), told commissioners that detecting PFAS in food and wildlife is technically possible but expensive and analytically complicated. "We do have the methods to do it, but it's costly and resource intensive, and it really requires a lot of scrutiny," Patelli said.

Patelli told the commission that drinking-water standards (maximum contaminant levels, or MCLs) do not directly translate to food because intake assumptions differ; screening values for food are commonly in parts-per-billion rather than parts-per-trillion. That difference arises, he said, because people typically do not consume the mass equivalents that drinking-water risk calculations assume. He gave the example that converting a drinking-water intake to pounds of food would equate to eating roughly 18 chicken breasts a day.

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