Food Science World According to Tharp

Food science is a funny thing. On one level, it can be a kind of common sense, practical, user-friendly discipline. After all it’s only food, and everyone that masters elementary cooking practices “kitchen chemistry.” However, the underlying scientific principles can be quite complex.

Last week I ran across a past article from Main Line Today spotlighting Bruce Tharp, ice cream expert extraordinaire—and one of those people science nerds like me love to converse with. In it, he explained to the lay audience the complexity of just one food product, ice cream: “You tell people you’re teaching for three days about ice cream,” he says, “and they say, ‘Three days? What takes three days about it?’ Well, ice cream is one of the most complicated creations—foods—in the history of mankind. Milk is a complicated biological fluid. There are thousands of compounds—what they are, how they behave and how they maintain their properties when you add flavorings. Then you freeze it, which adds complications.”

That holds true for many different foods with their diverse chemistry. I felt the same way when I was in the baking industry—and often wished I had nothing more complex than a sugar-sweetened powdered drink mix to formulate. Baking’s challenges include physical and chemical interactions during mixing (Have we pinpointed exactly how gluten works yet?), fermenting and/or leavening in some cases, handling, baking, cooling and shelf life. Some of the ingredients subject to the vagaries of Mother Nature and Father Chemistry vary in composition from lot to lot. And the expectation is that, not only can you get everything to work together in the first place, you can reproduce the results every single time.

Hats off to Dr. Tharp for the reminder of the complexity of our technical world and deftly combining the practical and the scientific in the world of ice cream. And hats off to Main Line Today for affording the general public a reality-based glimpse of our world.

   —Lynn A. Kuntz