What Are Food Sciences?

Food science is an interdisciplinary field studying all aspects of food from production to consumption, ranging from safety to packaging to cooking techniques. Food science affects how your food tastes, how it’s stored, how it’s prepared, and far more – every aspect of food is affected by food science. Because of this, food science is often described as spanning “from field to fork”.

Food science covers multiple specific fields, rather than being a single category. Someone who works in food science may, for example, be responsible for the development and testing of new artificial flavors. A different person in food science may study ways to make food production safer, reducing contamination risks. Another may study the composition of food on a molecular level and the chemical reactions involved in its production. The field is broad and deep, covering multiple disciplines of science and multiple specific fields of focus.

One of the most important elements of food science is, of course, food safety, and research in the field has improved safety standards worldwide. Food safety focuses on preventing contamination and sickness in people, and to that end the field focuses on working out what standards of safety should be, monitoring products to check them against enforced standards, and the like. The study of food safety has brought us pasteurized milk, helped to prevent the spread of salmonella, found ways to combat e. coli infections, and more. Without food science and food safety, every meal would be far more of a risk, with the chance of illness being much higher.

A rather intriguing field of study within food science is flavor development. While many balk at the idea of artificial flavors, the truth is that artificial flavors are often safer than many flavors listed as ‘natural’ – for example, ‘natural’ almond flavor is often derived from peach pits, which of course contain cyanide. Flavor research focuses on developing safe artificial flavors that often taste startlingly like what they are meant to imitate. The author of Fast Food Nation, given a chance to sample artificial flavors and scents, was startled to find that one strip of paper soaked through with artificial flavor smelled exactly like a fresh-cooked burger. Even minute doses of many of these artificial flavorings can produce incredible effects. Rather than being something to be scared of, artificial flavors are a great development, allowing for new and unique products.

Food science is, overall, a truly fascinating field, with many interesting specialties within it.