From: Food PhD <FoodPhD@aol.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 1997 14:03:09 EST
To: pinhole@exploratorium.edu
Subject: Re: FOOD SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS
There are several sources for food science experiments. One is the
Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) based in Chicago. They used to publish
a short booklet with some labs in it along with a teachers copy. Its been a
while since I contacted them for this. Check at www.ift.com .
The food science department at UC-Davis may also be able to suggest some
labs depending on what your lab facilities are like.
In the ChemCom text book, p. 204, is a lab for making an ester, methyl
salicylate, which smells like wintergreen.
Additionally, a cookbook and some imagination are also a good source of
ideas. One that I use is to swap rooms with the home ec teacher for a day and
have the kids bake cookies. I take a simple recipe and make minor
modifications (brown sugar for white sugar, whole egg for yolk, etc.) for each
group with a control following the original recipe. The kids take a few
simple measurements on the cookies before and after baking like diameter and
thickness, and then they eat the cookies. The next day we compile results and
look at the effect of each ingredient and/or its quantity on the final
product.
Another teacher at my school makes ice cream using liquid nitrogen. As
long as food is involved and the kids can eat some of it, they are always
interested.
I hope this helps as a starting point. There is a lot of good science in
foods and food production.
Rob Kravets
(foodphd@aol.com)
Benicia HS