FSTA02 Summer 2025
Module 4 Outline
Lecture 1 Industrial Processed Food
A. The Quest for Pure Food
1. Pre-Modern Adulteration
2. Canned Foods
3. Chemical Preservatives
4. Industrial Products and Flavorings
5. Vitamin Fortification
B. The Rise of Substitution
1. Extrusion
2. Binding Agents
3. Synthetic Flavours
4. Ultra-Processed Foods
C. Marketing Processed Foods
1. Advertising
2. Standards of Identity
3. Bliss Point
4. Super Sizing
D. Health and Ultra-Processed Foods
1. Medical Studies
2. Industry Advice
3. Food Justice Concerns
Lecture 1 Industrial Processed Food
A. The Quest for Pure Food
1. Pre-Modern Adulteration
○ Early food products were often adulterated with cheaper or harmful substitutes.
2. Canned Foods
○ Consumers worried about safety; manufacturers resisted standards until fatal accidents led to
government regulation.
3. Chemical Preservatives
○ Used to extend shelf life and maintain appearance but raised health concerns.
4. Industrial Products and Flavorings
○ Food scientists developed artificial and natural flavorings using chemical compounds extracted or
synthesized in labs.
○ Major companies (General Foods, McCormick) led the flavor industry.
○ Example: Industrial flavorings sometimes replaced real ingredients (e.g., sprayed olive flavor).
5. Vitamin Fortification
○ Introduced to improve nutritional content but details not covered extensively here.
B. The Rise of Substitution
1. Extrusion
○ Process to create new food textures and products.
2. Binding Agents
○ Used to hold ingredients together in processed foods.
3. Synthetic Flavours
○ Combination of acids, esters, ketones, aldehydes, and oils to mimic natural tastes.
○ These innovations enabled creation of ultra-processed foods.
4. Ultra-Processed Foods
○ Foods that use many industrial ingredients not found in home cooking.
○ Energy-dense, nutrient-poor, containing emulsifiers, sweeteners, salt, colorings, flavor enhancers.
○ Examples include sodas, processed meats, flavored yogurts, packaged breads, and breakfast
cereals.
C. Marketing Processed Foods
1. Advertising
○ Began in the 19th century; trademarked brands like Coca-Cola fought infringement.
○ Early advertising often included exaggerated health claims (e.g., corn cereals, baby food).
○ Betty Crocker persona provided a trustworthy image for packaged foods.
○ Psychologists used motivational research to create relatable brand personalities, often aimed at
children.
2. Standards of Identity
○ Government regulation defined what products like peanut butter and tomato soup could contain.
○ Allowed substitutions as long as ingredients were disclosed and safe.
3. Bliss Point
○ The optimal combination of sugar, salt, and fat engineered to maximize consumer pleasure and
overconsumption.
4. Super Sizing
○ Marketing strategy to sell more food by bundling products and increasing portion sizes, e.g., value
meals and light beer as a marketing ploy.
D. Health and Ultra-Processed Foods
1. Medical Studies
○ Linked consumption of ultra-processed foods to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and
mortality.
○ Highest risks associated with sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats.
○ Studies also suggest connections to mental health issues like depression and behavioral problems.
2. Industry Advice
○ Industry experts, often with conflicts of interest, promoted sugar and additives like MSG, dismissing
health concerns.
○ Similar tactics to tobacco industry in discrediting medical consensus.
3. Food Justice Concerns
○ Ultra-processed foods tend to be the cheapest and most accessible to lower-income populations,
exacerbating health inequalities.
○ Climate change and labor dynamics promote substitution of healthier foods with ultra-processed
options.
○ Marketing targets vulnerable groups, including children and workers with limited time.
○ Concepts like "shrinkflation" reduce product size while maintaining price, driven by ingredient cost
pressures.
Lecture 2 Home Cooking
A. Measuring Home Cooking
1. Food Budget Trends
2. Moralizing Home Cooking
3. Domestic Servants
4. Sources of Authority
5. Structures of Modern Life
B. The Tasks of Home Cooking
1. Culinary Skills
2. Organizational Skills
3. Emotional Labour
C. Learning to Cook
1. Family Recipes
2. Home Economics
3. Social Media
D. The Meaning of Home Cooking
1. Gendered Expectations
2. Family Traditions
3. Making Cooking an Art
Lecture 2: Home Cooking
A. Measuring Home Cooking
1. Food Budget Trends
○ Since 1929, data shows a steady decline in the proportion of food budget spent on meals prepared
at home in North America.
○ In 1960, about 70% of food spending was on home meals; by 2010, this dropped to roughly 50%,
with half of home food consisting of processed or convenience items rather than fresh ingredients.
○ The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily increased home cooking but overall trends point back toward
increased eating out.
2. Moralizing Home Cooking
○ Critiques of declining home cooking date back over 150 years and often carry moral overtones.
○ Early reformers like Sylvester Graham linked diet and morality, advocating home-prepared, “healthy”
rough breads over processed soft white bread.
○ Such moralizing often reflects gendered and classed assumptions, blaming women for decline due to
workforce participation or lamenting social change.
3. Domestic Servants
○ Historically, home cooking in affluent households was frequently done by servants, often racialized
or immigrant women (e.g., “mammy” figure in the American South).
○ For working-class families, food preparation moved increasingly to factories and commercial food
production, shifting domestic labor outside the home.
○ Nostalgia for home cooking can sometimes mask an attachment to older social hierarchies.
4. Sources of Authority
○ Professional chefs, dieticians, and food scientists often critique home cooks for skills, nutrition, and
sanitation, influencing public perceptions.
○ Home cooking is devalued partly due to its association with women’s unpaid, “intuitive” labor, lacking
formal accreditation or status.
○ Claims about “forgotten” cooking skills overlook structural constraints like time scarcity and social
expectations.
5. Structures of Modern Life
○ Time constraints, late work hours, and convenience culture reduce opportunities for cooking at
home.
○ Breakfast and lunch habits have changed, with cold or fast meals replacing traditional hot ones, and
many people eating away from home during the day.
○ Cooking ability is generally adequate among most people; the decline is more a matter of limited
time and competing demands.
B. The Tasks of Home Cooking
1. Culinary Skills
○ Essential cooking skills include knife work, heat management (boiling, frying, baking), and timing to
ensure all elements of a meal are ready simultaneously.
○ Professional chefs perform these tasks with speed and precision, but home cooks often work more
slowly and roughly, which is still effective.
○ Cooking requires mechanical dexterity, sensory awareness (smell, sight), and conceptual planning
(multitasking, timing).
2. Organizational Skills
○ Beyond cooking, home cooking requires menu planning that balances preferences, nutrition,
seasonality, and budget.
○ Shopping decisions involve price-quality trade-offs, frequency, store choice, and substituting
ingredients based on availability and cost.
○ Pantry management helps ensure ingredients are on hand and reduces waste by using older items
before spoilage.
3. Emotional Labour
○ Cooking at home is a form of caretaking, often falling disproportionately on women who juggle paid
work plus “second shift” housework.
○ Emotional labour includes motivating family members to share chores, guiding children’s diets,
managing picky eaters, and navigating social expectations.
○ Gender norms persist, with women doing more kitchen work even in gender-nonconforming families.
○ Examples such as the Japanese bento lunch highlight cultural expectations and emotional labour
around food presentation and competition.
C. Learning to Cook
1. Family Recipes
○ Traditional family recipes and cooking styles are passed down, often from mothers or grandmothers,
providing comfort food and a sense of identity.
○ Sometimes older generations withhold teaching to encourage children to pursue careers rather than
domestic labor.
○ Taste memory helps preserve family culinary heritage and informs personal cooking later in life.
2. Home Economics
○ Early 20th-century home economics education introduced young women to kitchen technology and
cooking as practical skills.
○ Such education sometimes challenged women’s authority in the kitchen but also provided useful
knowledge.
3. Social Media and Modern Resources
○ Today, many learn to cook via online platforms, ranging from commercial recipe sites to individual
blogs and niche dietary communities.
○ Culinary schools offer formal training for those seeking professional expertise.
○ Confidence to improvise comes with practice and exposure beyond strictly following recipes.
D. The Meaning of Home Cooking
1. Gendered Expectations
○ Cooking responsibilities are heavily gendered; women often bear the burden of both the physical and
emotional work involved.
○ Cooking can be experienced as drudgery or obligation, especially when rushed, tired, or caring for
picky family members.
2. Family Traditions
○ Home cooking links people to family history, memory, and cultural identity through recreating
traditional meals.
○ However, tradition is not rigid replication—individual cooks adapt tastes and methods.
3. Making Cooking an Art and Source of Empowerment
○ Cooking skills, such as knife work or timing, can be a source of personal satisfaction and pride.
○ Managing expectations and not striving for perfection frees cooks from intimidation by professional
standards.
○ Preparing healthy, fresh meals can be empowering and offers lifelong benefits of nutrition, cost
savings, and personal creativity.
○ Ultimately, cooking can be both a chore and a meaningful act of care and self-expression.
Lecture 3 Mapping Flavour
A. The Physiology and Culture of Flavour
1. Sensory Perceptions
2. Flavour as Gestalt (Essence)
3. Evolutionary Psychology
4. Social Distinction
5. Learning to Taste
B. The Science of Flavour
1. Industrial Quality Control
2. Tasting Panels
3. Texture Science
C. The Taste of Place (Terroir)
1. Mapping Gastronomy
2. Translating Soil into Taste
3. Nationalist Ideology
4. Flavour Wheels
Lecture 3 Mapping Flavour
A. The Physiology and Culture of Flavour
1. Sensory Perceptions
○ Taste is both a physical and social phenomenon, experienced individually but understood collectively
within culture.
○ Taste buds detect five primary flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (discovered by Japanese
scientist Ikune Kikunae in 1908).
○ Flavor is a holistic sensory experience involving taste, aroma, texture, sight, and even sound (e.g.,
crunchiness).
○ Sensory receptors are distributed not only in the mouth but throughout the gastrointestinal system.
2. Flavour as Gestalt (Essence)
○ Flavor perception works by the brain integrating sensory inputs and memory to form an overall
essence, much like Gestalt psychology’s visual illusions.
○ Recognition is holistic; the brain fills in gaps using past experiences to evaluate whether a food is
good or bad.
3. Evolutionary Psychology
○ Early humans used taste memory to differentiate edible foods from toxins.
○ Likes and dislikes have a biological basis but have been repurposed in modern society.
4. Social Distinction
○ Taste reflects and reinforces social categories and class distinctions (e.g., refined foods like truffles
vs. affordable meat and potatoes).
○ Taste preferences are often learned, inherited through cultural privilege, and reinforced by social
norms.
5. Learning to Taste
○ Good taste is socially constructed; for example, wealthy children may grow up drinking wine,
acquiring “good taste” early.
○ Advertising and cultural education influence perceptions of good vs. bad taste.
B. The Science of Flavour
1. Industrial Quality Control
○ Early flavor science aimed to standardize and ensure consistency in industrial food products (e.g.,
beer).
○ Analytical chemistry identified molecules linked to taste and aroma, though machines cannot fully
replicate human sensory perception.
2. Tasting Panels
○ Developed in the mid-20th century to produce reliable, scientific flavor profiles through trained
human tasters.
○ Triangular tests and tasting panels statistically measure perceptible differences between products.
3. Texture Science
○ Texture is critical but challenging to measure scientifically; acoustic methods and instruments like the
“Plutt” rod were developed.
○ Alina Szczegniak defined eight texture characteristics (viscosity, elasticity, hardness, cohesiveness,
adhesiveness, brittleness, chewiness).
○ Mechanical devices and human sensory panels assess texture and mouthfeel, especially for
processed foods.
C. The Taste of Place (Terroir)
1. Mapping Gastronomy
○ Terroir literally means “soil” and links flavor with geographic and environmental conditions.
○ Since the 18th century, agricultural manuals and 19th-century gastronomic maps in France identified
regional specialties and their origins.
2. Translating Soil into Taste
○ Flavor results from complex interactions among microbes, animal diets, soil, and climate (e.g., Alpine
cheeses reflect the grasses cows eat).
○ Industrial methods often mask or replicate terroir flavors (e.g., international style chardonnay with
added oak).
3. Nationalist Ideology
○ Terroir became a symbol of national identity in France post-Franco-Prussian War, representing
authentic, local food production versus foreign imitation.
○ Legal designations (e.g., Champagne) protect geographic authenticity and value.
4. Flavour Wheels
○ Developed to standardize flavor description without aesthetic judgment, originally for chemical
researchers and industrial tasters.
○ Adapted by wine scientists to teach and articulate flavor nuances, linking chemical compounds to
sensory experiences.
○ Used beyond wine (e.g., maple syrup flavor wheels) to map terroir and increase product value,
supporting both luxury and everyday foods.
Lecture 4 Fermentation
A. The Cycle of Life
1. Definition
2. Historical
3. Recipes
4. Varieties
5. Microbiome
B. Meat from the Laboratory
1. Textured Vegetable Protein
2. Industrial Applications
3. Cultured Meat
C. Precision Fermentation
1. Definition
2. Applications
3. Food Justice Concerns
Lecture 4 Fermentation
A. The Cycle of Life
1. Definition
Fermentation is the metabolic process of breaking down substances using microorganisms like fungi and bacteria. It
can occur in various environments — in nature (e.g., fungi decomposing organic matter), in the kitchen (e.g., sauerkraut
or kimchi), and in the human body (e.g., gut microbiome).
2. Historical
Fermentation may be one of the oldest food preparation methods after fire. Ancient humans likely discovered it through
observing fermenting fruits and mead made from diluted honey. Over time, they used fermentation to preserve a wide
array of foods, from vegetables to meat, fish, and grains. It was practiced across environments from the tropics to the
Arctic.
In the 19th century, Pasteur led a campaign against bacteria, shifting scientific food practices away from traditional
fermentation.
3. Recipes
Making fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi involves:
● Chopping vegetables finely.
● Adding salt and spices.
● Excluding oxygen (via sealed jars).
● Allowing beneficial bacteria like lactobacillus to flourish.
Lactic acid produced in the process kills spoilage organisms, enhances flavor, and predigests nutrients.
Cheese making includes a second step — moisture removal — which helps preserve the product better than yogurt.
Traditional cheese used rennet (from animal stomachs) to break down lactose, aiding those with lactose intolerance.
4. Varieties
Fermentation types:
● Solid-state ("dry"): kimchi, miso, cheese, bread.
● Submerged ("wet"): beer, wine, vinegar.
Fermenting agents:
● Lactic acid: yogurt, kefir, pickles, sourdough, injera.
● Alkaline: natto, dawadawa (fermented legumes).
● Amino acid: soy sauce, fish sauce.
● Acetic acid: vinegar, kombucha.
5. Microbiome
The human gut hosts a microbiome of ~500 species essential to health:
● Break down dietary fiber.
● Block harmful bacteria.
● Help regulate immune responses and weight.
The microbiome is affected by diet, antibiotics, and even mother's milk (which contains indigestible sugars
meant to feed beneficial microbes in infants). Overuse of antibiotics may harm beneficial bacteria like
Helicobacter pylori, linked to the rise of allergies and asthma.
B. Meat from the Laboratory
1. Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP)
Developed in the 1930s by Robert Boyer, TVP was inspired by rayon textile production:
● Made from defatted soy flour extruded into protein fibers.
● Used as meat extenders (e.g., in Baco’s bacon bits).
● Had a spongy or fibrous texture depending on processing.
2. Industrial Applications
In the late 20th century, the focus shifted to low-fat foods:
● Cream substitutes made with enzyme-treated oat starch.
● Gelled seed hulls mimicked fat's thick texture.
● Simplice: whey protein turned into microspheres mimicking fat.
Olestra, a zero-calorie fat substitute:
● Too large to digest, passed through the body undigested.
● Also absorbed nutrients, leading to intestinal issues.
● Products with Olestra required warning labels for cramping and leakage.
3. Cultured Meat
In 2013, Prof. Mark Post unveiled the first lab-grown beef burger:
● Cultured from stem cells.
● Cost over $330,000.
● Nutrients used came from fetal bovine serum — raising sustainability issues.
C. Precision Fermentation
1. Definition
A high-tech form of fermentation using genetically engineered microbes to produce food components. Originally used in
medicine (e.g., insulin production), now applied to food.
2. Applications
● Insulin: First developed in Toronto in 1922; modern versions made using engineered E. coli or yeast.
● Cosmetics: SK-II’s “Pitera” derived from sake yeast fermentation.
● Synthetic Palm Oil: Yeast fed with sugar or food waste to produce fats; challenges include large-scale
production.
● Dairy Proteins: Casein and whey replicated using microbes; combined with coconut oil and enzymes to make
vegan cheeses and dairy products. Example: Blue cheese by Kleenex Foods used in Michelin-starred
restaurants.
3. Food Justice Concerns
● Debate exists around who benefits from genetic engineering: corporations or the public.
● Potential benefits:
○ Reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock.
○ Support local food production using widely available feedstocks (e.g., food waste).
○ Relieve deforestation pressures (e.g., from palm oil production).
● Ongoing research includes using fungi to help store carbon in soil, potentially restoring depleted farmland.
● However, questions remain about scalability, affordability, and long-term impacts on food systems and health.
Lecture Questions 1
How did the quest for pure food lead to rampant substitution?
What marketing techniques did food processors adopt?
Are ultra-processed foods healthy?
Lecture Questions
How and why has home cooking changed in the past hundred years?
What skills do you need for home cooking?
Can you make home cooking a source of personal creativity and empowerment?
Lecture Questions 3
Is flavour a physical or a social phenomenon?
Can sensory science promote sustainability and food justice?
What is terroir and how does it connect flavour and the environment?
Lecture Questions 4
How does fermentation happen in the environment, in the kitchen, and in the human body?
What meat alternatives has the food industry produced in the past half century?
Can precision fermentation offer acceptable substitutes for meat and dairy?