Major food adulteration and contamination events seem to occur with some regularity, such as the widely publicized adulteration of milk products with melamine.With globalization and rapid distribution systems, these can have international impacts with far-reaching and sometimes lethal consequences. These events, though potentially global in the modern era, are in fact far from contemporary, and deliberate adulteration of food products is probably as old as the food processing and production systems themselves. This review first introduces some background into these practices, both historically and contemporary, before introducing a range of the technologies currently available for the detection of food adulteration and contamination. These methods include the vibrational spectroscopies: near-infrared, mid-infrared etc. This subject area is particularly relevant at this time, as it not only concerns the continuous engagement with food adulterers, but also more recent issues such as food security, bioterrorism, and climate change. It is hoped that this introductory overview acts as a springboard for researchers in science, technology, engineering, and industry, in this era of systems-level thinking and interdisciplinary approaches to new and contemporary problems. In food safety and regulation, there is a need for a system to be able to make predictions on which adulterants are likely to appear in which food products. The aim is to identify the minimum detectable limit for the adulterants in milk. There are many adulterants that are added to milk including water, flour, starch and even urea in quantitative measures making it undetectable. MATLAB was used to write the algorithm code.