This lecture shows how food chemistry, microbiology, and processing interrelate, with composition and chemical changes guiding microbial growth and processing choices to ensure safe, high-quality foods.

Explain how rapid urbanization and changing lifestyles drive convenience foods, with processing methods like canning, chilling, and freezing ensuring safe, ready-to-eat options.

Food provides energy, growth, and regulation, and is classified into basic four, basic five, and basic seven groups such as cereals, milk, vegetables, oils, and meats.

Explore how food constituents—biochemicals derived from plants and animals—shape taste, texture, color, and nutritional value, and classify macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, lipids) and micronutrients (minerals, vitamins) to understand food composition.

Explore how nutrients function in energy production, body building, regulation of bodily processes, and health maintenance, detailing energy sources, proteins, minerals, fats, and phytochemicals.

Explore carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids as macronutrients, detailing simple and complex sugars, starch structure, dietary fiber and prebiotics, amino acids, peptide bonds, triglycerides, essential fatty acids, and trans fats.

Investigate the biochemistry of food, from carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids to spoilage, safety, and sustainable packaging in modern processing.

Explore carbohydrate biochemistry from simple sugar units to starch, glycogen, cellulose, and chitin, highlighting energy storage, structure, and cell communication. Follow glycolysis, the TCA cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation yielding ATP.

Explore protein biochemistry, including the 20 amino acids with the proline exception, salt bridges, and classify them by polarity to explain proteins' signaling, structure, and transport roles.

Define lipids as water-insoluble organic compounds with fatty acids as basic units, distinguish saturated and unsaturated fats, and outline lipid classes and roles in membranes, energy storage, and signaling.

Explore how nucleic acids underpin food science, detailing DNA structure, the central dogma, and how genetic modification affects enzymes, proteins, and crop traits, plus DNA-based food authentication.

Explore how food spoilage degrades quality and safety through enzymatic and non-enzymatic processes, microorganisms and pests, and physical factors like water activity and temperature; reveal how preservation counters these losses.

Explore the fundamentals of food processing and the properties of liquids, solids, and gases, including phase transition, density, viscosity, emulsions, foams, and texture.

Explore fluid flow in food processing, from static liquids and hydrostatic head to dynamic flow and Reynolds number, and learn how viscosity, pipe size, bends, and height govern pump power.

enhances product consistency by process control, reducing variability to meet quality and safety standards while lowering waste and costs through automation and monitoring across production stages.

Defines food quality and quality attributes, explores consumer specifications, quality evaluation, quality control, good manufacturing practice, quality assurance, and international food regulation organizations shaping standards.

Identify consumer specifications and apply a quality control cycle from sampling schedules and control points to final inspection to ensure safety, nutrition, sensory properties, and consumer satisfaction in processed foods.

Explore food quality evaluation, contrasting subjective sensory methods with objective instrument-based analysis to measure flavor, aroma, texture, safety, and use gas chromatography to link chemistry with perception.

Improve food quality by selecting appropriate ingredients, controlling processing parameters, preventing contamination, and applying prevention strategies to ensure safety, stability, and customer satisfaction through effective quality control.

Explore separation processes in food processing, including mechanical separation: sedimentation, centrifugal separation, filtration, sealing, and contact equilibrium methods such as gas absorption, extraction, washing, distillation, and crystallization.

Explore heat processing using steam or water, with blanching as a pre-treatment to inactivate enzymes and reduce surface microbes while preparing foods for subsequent processing.

Evaporation concentrates liquid foods by boiling off water, increasing solid content and reducing water activity for pre-concentration. Distillation separates volatile compounds to yield distillates and bottoms.

Fry with hot oil to enhance eating quality and preserve food by thermally destroying microorganisms and enzymes while lowering surface water activity and forming a crust as moisture escapes.

Explore heat processing by direct and radiated energy, including dielectric and ohmic heating that generate heat inside food, and infrared heating that applies external radiant heat to the surface.

Master controlled and modified atmosphere storage and packaging (MAP and CAP) to reduce oxygen and raise carbon dioxide, slowing respiration and inhibiting microbial growth.

Freezing lowers water activity by immobilizing water as ice, preserving nutrients and aroma, while freeze drying and freeze concentration reduce water without heat, boosting shelf life.

Explore direct and radiated energy in food processing through irradiation, ionizing radiation using gamma rays or electron beams to damage DNA and rRNA of microorganisms and impact packaging.

Explore irradiation in food processing: doses up to 15 kGy (avg up to 10 kGy per WHO) to sterilize, reduce pathogens, extend shelf life, and disinfect, with packaging considerations.

Explore pulsed electric field processing as a minimal method that preserves nutritional quality and sensory characteristics by reducing heat and destroying microbes via membrane pores.

Explore pulsed light processing that uses non-ionizing ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to destroy microorganisms, purify water, and prevent surface mold on bakery products and air contamination, via high-energy, short pulses.