A Tomato, My Kingdom for a Tomato

I suspect that I have never gone a day without a tomato of some kind. Life would not be life, as I know it, without tomatoes. If flavor is king, in fact, then I’d venture to say that the king of all that is food must be, that biological marvel of a red fruit that

Phosphorus and food’s future

James Elser, Ph.D. What can we do about phosphorus and food’s future? The 15th element in the periodic table is not something that comes to mind for most people when they reflect on causes of global food crises of the past. Overpopulation, climate change, crop disease, and soil erosion are more likely to deemed as

Gale Prince: "Food safety is a journey"

Gale Prince Food safety pioneer Gale Prince, the “Dean of safety recalls,” addressed a room full of food scientists at our local Cactus International Food Technologists (Cactus IFT) chapter dinner at the Fiesta Resort conference center in Tempe, Arizona. He spoke about food recall trends, how to enhance food safety progam, and gave us some details

How our senses help us decide what we eat

Senses help us select our food. So, this is a blog post about the importance of sensory criteria for selecting food, which was inspired by a day of cooking up goods for the holidays. What makes people choose the foods that they do? This question may seem obvious to yourself–after all, you know what you

Who’s afraid of a little something sweet?

There are few food ingredients that conjure up more fear in the public mind than sugar and sugar substitutes found in manufactured products. This fear can be bolstered by a common ploy some companies and organizations use to create panic and push their products by smearing nutritive and non-nutritive sweeteners used by their competitors. The

Ampipathic lecithin

Lecithin’s talent comes from its amphipathic nature.(1) The compound’s hydrophilic polar head dissolves in water while its hydrophobic polar tail dissolves in the triglycerides, thus, acting in a way of suspending triglycerides in water.(1p568) As an emulsifier in ice cream, lecithin keeps ice cream smooth with fat globules evenly distributed throughout the solution.(2) It serves