Food quality, including colour, texture, flavour and nutritional value, is of key importance in the context of food preservation and processing. Colour, texture and flavour refer to consumption quality, purchase and product acceptability whereas the nutritive values (i.e. vitamin content, nutrients, minerals, health￾related food components) refer to hidden quality aspects. In conventional thermal processing, process optimisation consists of reducing the severity of the thermal process in terms of food quality destruction without compromising food safety

Preventing the loss of vitamins and nutrients in foods is a paramount concern at all stages of food processing involving heating. One example of the critical need for retaining vitamins is to nourish hospital patients who require vitamins to recover from the stress of illness or surgery.1 This issue has invoked recent studies

‘Genetically modified food’ has become the object of a heated debate by con￾sumer activists and replaced irradiation’s leading role as a target. In this debate the term irradiation is frequently confused with radioactive contamination, espe￾cially after the Chernobyl accident. The allegation is made that the nuclear indus￾try needs food irradiation badly in order to find some use for the waste from

The modern frozen food industry was started by Clarence Birdseye in America in 1925. As a fur trader in Labrador Birdseye had noticed that fillets of fish left by the natives to freeze rapidly in arctic winters retained the taste and texture attrib￾utes of fresh fish better than fillets frozen in milder temperatures at other times of the year. Frozen foods were available before Birdseye’s pioneering innovations, but they were of poor and uncertain quality. Birdseye’s insight was that speed of freezing is crucial to retain quality and he was the first to develop machinery

The domestication of different grasses, all members of the monocotyledonous family Gramineae, was a seminal event in the history of mankind. The cultiva￾tion of these plants led to the generation of agricultural surpluses. These in turn enabled societies in different parts of the world to make the transition from a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle to one based on communities living in per￾manent settlements

8.1 Introduction The question of why it is necessary to improve the nutritional value of plant foods is one that at first hand might seem difficult to justify. What evidence is there that this is a problem? In the developed world there are no overt signs of malnutri￾tion even amongst strict

9.1 Introduction The most common dietary problems in developed countries are due mainly to over nutrition. The incidence of overweight, obesity and adult onset-diabetes is increasing steadily. Cancer is now the most common cause of death in many developed countries. The most common cancers are breast, lung, bowel and prostate, which are virtually absent in some developing countries. However, even

Vitamins, by their definition, are essential to health and have to be obtained from the diet on a regular basis because, with the exception of vitamin D, they cannot be produced by the body. In terms of medicine and nutrition, our knowledge of vitamins is relatively recent. Although James Lind discovered an association

The taming of fire, permitting the thermal processing of vegetable foodstuffs in particular, extended enormously the number of natural products that could be used as foods by humans and gave a tremendous impulse to the extraordinary dif￾fusion and development of the human population in almost every region of the world (De Bry, 1994). Foodstuffs can be roughly divided in two classes, those that are or are not edible in their raw form. The most important naturally edible foods are meat and milk, which are heated mainly for eliminating dangerous microorganisms, and some fruits, used by plants to attract animals for diffusing

6.1 Introduction: the problem of providing nutrition information Developments in nutrition research and improved scientific understanding of the relationship between diet and health have led to increasing interest in the nutri￾tional aspects of the food supply. This interest is shared by academics, health professionals, government officials, consumers and the food and supplement industries alike, although not always for the same reasons and generally at dif￾ferent levels of knowledge and understanding. Interest in nutrition, in respect of both total diet and individual foods, is second only to concern about food safety