As the world literally burns away, our food supply gets tighter, yet the demand for new food keeps on increasing.
The history of food science is quite amazing because it solves the drastic needs of the time and now we have a drastic need, and food science will once again solve the problem without getting any credit and without anyone noticing. Or maybe this time, it’ll be different.
The Black Plague
I listened to a nice youtube video about plague doctors during the black plague. In the past, people never thought that eating rotten meat and having rats live in their food would cause people to die. They thought it was a balance of the four humors and worst of all, would incorporate things such as leeches as a way to cure the plague.
As we all know, that wasn’t the case. Most food preservation up to that time was purely accidental. Fire was an accident but made meat taste great. Cheese was accidental because someone needed milk from a waterskin and used a calf’s stomach, and accidentally solidified the milk. Bread and wine were just things that were accidentally left outside one day and one day, people ate it and some lived, and some died.
We now not only know how food is made, but we’ve optimized these accidents using science! We now know what yeast can produce at what levels at what temperatures, we grow Rennet in a lab, and we have college degrees on wine making, and bread baking.
Discovering Microbiology
Louis Pasteur (among other scientists) found out that microbes can kill you and once germ theory was actually adopted, the floodgates of science allowed us to understand what micros are, what types kill you, how they grow, and how to kill them fast. A waterfall of innovation allowed us to eventually realize that microbes die under acidic conditions, they need water to survive, and you can seal something really well so microbes can’t get in it.
Tada! As long as you follow these simple steps, you now have food that’s safe to eat. Do you want proof no microbes can grow on your product? A microscope or a Total Plate Count will tell you exactly that. The agar media you use allows you to sort out E.coli versus Salmonella and you can do it over and over again as long as your methods are sterile.
In an unrelated scenario, but of the same topic, it took a long time for doctors to accept that handwashing was important and there were times where once it was discovered that handwashing dramatically reduced the deaths of women who just gave birth, doctors were baffled that it was their fault they were killing people. Even today, communicating that microbes are the cause of foodborne illnesses is very hard.
Canning Revolution
200 years ago, a confectioner named Nicholas Appert discovered canning. I think the only people who know or care about Nicholas are food scientists. Appert’s Wikipedia page is pretty barren, but he discovered that by putting food inside a sealed can and boiling the heck out of it, the food would last for years. On the page, Appert’s biggest feat was doing this with a whole sheep.
Scientifically, this makes sense. You kill anything inside the jar under intense heat and pressure, and since there’s no air, microbes can’t grow. Some could say Nicholas didn’t really know that, but it worked and people ran with it.
(Edit: Appert’s invention was actually BEFORE Louis Pasteur and germ theory was popular so he actually had no idea why canning preserved food.)
Canning became a huge deal because now you could not only preserve things like meat, but you can ship an indestructible can of spam from California to Florida and have it last a year.
But even then, preservation has evolved. I have a short article on food dive about refrigeration which I’ve always been fascinated about yet nobody really cares. IQF, or quick freezing has revolutionized the industry probably the same way High-Pressure Processing is doing now (very subtly). Now we can not only uniquely freeze a vegetable, or a meat, but we can thaw it and it will arguably taste better than it would be if you found it in the grocery store.
What’s even better is that we are able to keep this cold and transport it all around the world.
Chemicals and “Not-Chemicals”
After a war or two, chemical research shifted from war to other uses and that of course, was how to make our food “better”. “Better” is relative, but basically anything that either cuts cost, improves taste, or improves shelf-life was considered “better” We’ve found many ways to alter cellulose, we’ve found what happens if you add any weird sounding chemical to something, it would improve the cost, yield, or whatever. This was the time where diacetyl was used in popcorn and the time companies can synthetically produce anything for the sake of cost or flavor. When you think of food science, you might think of this. People in lab coats purifying food to its essence for profit.
And then people started to get educated. Not scientists, average people, and that’s thanks to the internet. People with sometimes no scientific credibility started to call out chemicals that were in food as bad. Sometimes there was proof, sometimes there wasn’t. Either way, because of the internet and how everyone loves food, this became the start of the clean label industry and natural movement. No matter how badly some of the science was communicated, the industry shifted to this movement regardless.
The irony of this all is that of course, the companies that were getting panned had to change and they had to ask food scientists to find alternatives. In the past 10 or so years, there has been a ton of innovation in the natural/clean label industry that I find fascinating. Artificial flavors and colors have been replaced at a rapid rate with natural flavors and colors and proliferating. Isolated single saccharide syrups are being replaced with extracts found in the oddest plants such as chicory root, monk fruit, and stevia and these were all developed by food scientists!
This shift is to just bring up one simple point: food scientists make the chemicals and they also made the not-chemicals. Yes, they isolated glucose and then they isolated hundreds of other compounds. Some synthetic, and some natural. Food Scientists did all of it. No matter what part of the process or the supply chain, a food scientist has had a hand in either the idea, the creation, or the approval of this new, innovative, thing.
Where are we now? – Saving the World
The shift in food used to be preservation, then flavor, then chemicals, then “not-chemicals”, and now it’s about making products that play a role in saving the world.
Food waste, meat reduction, worker equality, better nutrition and more are all part of what food can stand for now.
And though you might have the guys who have the great idea and will get all the credit, it’s the food scientists, the Nicholas Appert’s of the world, who has a crude drawing of him instead of an actual photo on Wikipedia, who will solve the big problems and save the world.
As food scientists, we’ve fed everyone. We’re still feeding everyone every single day. We make sure our food is safe, reliable, and delicious and that’s pretty cool.
So though we have a lot of problems we have to face as food scientists, remembering the history of what we have to face before, then the problems shouldn’t scare you, they should excite you.
So thank you for feeding the world today, and preparing yourself to feed it tomorrow.
