In Defense of Food Science

What is it with the demonizing of food science anyway? And why is our industry paying for it?

My blood pressure boiled hearing the man who played Magnum P.I. read a message from The Florida Department of Citrus (FDOC): “Food scientists have spent years with their beakers and flasks and chemistry sets, trying to come up with something as good for you as Florida orange juice…” Now, some faux executive disses technology in a commercial called “Putting the ‘NO’ in Innovation,” hawking Post Original Shredded Wheat. And these aren’t the first.

Obviously, they are trying to ride the wave of sentiment that believes natural is good and technology is bad when it comes to food. Unless, of course, you are Homaro Cantu et al., and you whip up some concoction using “molecular gastronomy” and slap a $175 price tag on it. Then it’s high art.

Just yesterday, a friend and I were trading snarky comments about the foibles of the new foodie philosophers and their followers, and she commented that natural botulism toxin encountered in home canning is so much better than the store-bought kind. Although, at least one public person who champions a more-natural diet (author of the book “Swindled: From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee: The Dark History of the Food Cheat”), Bee Wilson, has a more-tempered view. She said in “Five Myths About Food,” a Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune article: “We like to think that scientists are the food bad guys—plotting to fill our diets with unnatural additives. Actually, we owe a huge amount to the quiet behind-the-scenes work of scientists—the food detectives who do their bit to uncover food fraud.”

I wish we could hear more about the benefits of food science. Perhaps IFT could spearhead an image-upgrade initiative: food scientist as superhero or Angelina Jolie in a lab coat. But, alas, there’s no glamour in the industry outside of celebrity chefs that put out their own line of processed (shh!) foods.

Let’s go back to the FDOC. Same state, different group (Department of State) credits the scientists who invented a process for making concentrated orange juice for transforming orange-juice production into a multibillion-dollar industry—some of those same dollars that are currently making fun of food science. Then there’s the press release on the FDOC grower website lauding Russell Rouseff, Ph.D., University of Florida/Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences Citrus Research and Education Center, Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition, and recipient of the 2009 Advancement of Application of Agricultural and Food Chemistry Award for the “outstanding accomplishments (he) has achieved in the area of flavor chemistry of processed fruit products.”

Whoops. Just pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with his beakers and flasks and chemistry sets.

   -Lynn A. Kuntz