Course Objectives, Requirements & Contents:

Food chemistry, which deals with the composition and properties of food and chemical changes during handling, processing and storage, is an important subject for students majoring in Food Science and Engineering or Food Safety and Quality. The goal of this course of for students is to make scientific measurements that have been designed in this Lab to illustrate some of chemical and physical principles discussed in lectures.

This Lab is intended for students who have previously taken laboratory courses in chemistry and biochemistry. This course provides opportunities to improve experimental design and practical laboratory skills and can also be a useful reinforcement for other special course. More importantly, food chemistry experiments very often do not work according to plan. In food chemistry we often have more complex starting materials and many side-reactions can occur in parallel under non-ideal conditions. Not surprisingly, the data obtained can be confusing and hard to interpret. This course is intended to develop students’ skill to solve food research problems and to conduct critical analysis of the data in a complex food matrix.

To successfully complete this course you will be also required to:

(1) Understand the important reactions in food chemistry and their consequences in food systems.

(2) Develop an expertise with the analytical methods to used measure these reactions.

(3) Report data and observations in an appropriate format.

(4) Design and conduct an experiment to study simple food chemistry system.

Credits: 1