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.