What Is Food?

Now, to spread the focus a little bit - cover a little more ground, to provide some welcome variation - I'll go into "Food science"; talk a little about it.

Food science involves everything food related - from harvesting and slaughtering, to cooking and technical aspects of food; it is, perhaps surprisingly so, often seen as a field distinguished from the nutrition field.

So... what does a food scientist do? What is his work tasks? He designs processes to produce foods, chooses which materials to package food, tests the product microbiologically and chemically and develops new food products -- in other words, has quite a few focuses and diverse focuses. This science, due to the practical approach, is a so called "applied science"; which is exactly what it sounds like -- and, because it includes things like microbiology and chemistry, is interdisciplinary.

Interesting in hearing which different subdisciplines that food science includes? here we go: Food safety deals with finding causes of- and prevent illnesses that are caused by food - food microbiology is interaction, both positive and negative, between food and micro-organisms - food preservation deals with finding the causes of- and preventing a degrading in quality of food over time - food engineering is the undustrial processes that are used to make food - product development is the sub-discipline that comes up with new food products - sensory analysis figures out how the customer sensually perceives the food product - food technology is the "technology of food" - food physics deals with things as food's texture, creaminess and viscosity - molecular gastronomy scientifically investigates the processes involved in cooking.

Hmm.. there wasn't much enough to write about this, so I'm going to go into some very common things.
What's cooking's definition? According to wikipedia, "Cooking is the process of preparing food by applying heat". So, those related to cooking, the cooks, do what..? They are the ones who, using many different tools and methods, both select and use ingredients. This process can both change how the food tastes, how it looks and the texture of it; and it can change chemically. Is a "cook" a "cook", or is cooking done differently in different places in the world? It's very different how people cook their food, both regarding the used ingredients and the cooking techniques -- which reflects economic and cultural- environmental- and economic traditions.

When did a human first cook food? Antropologists generally believe that the first cooking fire was used about 250, 000 years ago. What helped introduce the different regions with each others' ingredients, was the development of agriculture, commerce and transportation.

What Slaughter Is, And Methods

Let's get a little messy here... Time for slaughter. Do you know a lot about it, or does your knowledge consist of horrible videos you'e been shown in school - in high school - and which you haven't been able to let go off since then? Kinda same here. That, and also the political aspect of people complaining - rightly so, I'm sure, in most cases - about the methods which animals are slaughtered with. Anyway... let's go into some definitions here.

As you probably know, a slaughter is when an animal is killed, or butchered, to give us humans food. Usually it is tame animals, also known as "domestic livestock", that are killed in this way. The animals most often killed to give us food? I'm sure you know most of these, but for the sake of providing some information - maybe you have forgotten or whatever - I'll give them to you -- here: cattle gives us beef and veal, water buffalo (did you know this one), sheep gives us lamb and mutton, goats, pigs (for pork), horses gives us horsemeat, chickens, ducks and turkeys.

Can you slaughter any way you want - however brutally you want..? No, there are laws for this - and different animals are killed in different ways (depending on their ability to feel pain, I would assume; but I'm only guessing)

These methods are the ones used in the United States:
so... For sheep, swine and calves, we have "chemical slaughter" -- where carbon dioxide is used to asphyxiate the animal; it is gassed, and then bled.

For a big range of animals - sheep, swine, calves, goats, cattle, mules, horses we have the captive bolt -- shoots into the animal an electrical current which, hopefully immediately, renders the animal unconscious; and, after this, the animal is bled. This is, by the way, a type of "mechanical slaughter".

Another type of the same type of slaughter is the usage of a gunshot -- cattle, calves, sheep, goats, swine, horses and mules, and animals similar to the last few mentioned, are subject to this method. This method is relatively "harmless" - not in the way that it doesn't do harm, which it obviously does, but in the sense that the animal is, preferably, dead or at least unconscious with immediate effect.

For swine, sheep, cattle, calves and goats "Electrical slaughter" is used -- where an electrical current is shot into the animal; the animal isn't immediately killed, but the current provides anesthesia for the animal so that it doesn't have to suffer from the bleeding of it.