The food project was designed to teach students about both the chemistry and and ethics of food and cooking.
Humanities
For the humanities portion of the food project, we studied the ethics of eating and buying food. We explored many topics such as industrialization and how it affected food production, obesity in America, industrial slaughterhouses, and big and small organic. We also read The Omnivores Dilemma by Micheal Pollen and went on a field trip to discover more about natural farming, composting, or meat processing. All of this and more helped us develop our own food ethics.
The final part of the food project for humanities was writing our own food ethic essay. My final essay is below.
Above is a lovely image of the meat freezer at SunnySide Farms.
The food project was taught in both humanities and chemistry at the same time. The result of this was getting two major perspectives on food, with both how we eat and what we are eating. Although throughout this project we were learning about food the whole day, it was very interesting to me and I enjoyed it. Eating is something that every human needs to do, and so it seems right that we know where our food comes from as well as what is happening to it when it is processed and cooked. If anything, this project made me more aware of my food and the health benefits that come from certain things, and I am happy that we studied food in both classes.
Overall, this project introduced me to the corruption and disorganization within our food systems. Before this project started, I was a pescatarian, and this continues to be an ethic that I follow every day, although now it is more solidified. I find myself looking at food labels and avoiding certain things like high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, and excess sugars. Along with this, I've realized just how much corn Americans consume in different forms without realizing it. Now when a package doesn't list corn as an ingredient, I can find it still in the more obscure labels like xanthan gum or maltodextrin. Food isn't a usual school course, but I'm glad this project exists at Animas to give me a better idea of what I'm putting in my body on the daily.
Chemistry
In chemistry, we discovered what the molecules of certain foods were bonding with and doing when a portion of food was cooked or baked. We also learned about what makes certain foods taste the way they do and what calories are. For example, the Maillard reaction is when the amino acids and sugars in foods are heated up to a certain temperature, usually above 285°F. A chemical reaction occurs and the result is a yummy and caramelized food. You can see the Maillard reaction when you bake chicken or toast, for example, by the browning. Our final product for the chemistry section was to experiment with food and write either a recipe card or a scientific paper about it. I chose to make blueberry pies and write a recipe card. For my project, the independent variable was the amount of cornstarch, so I made three pies each with a different amount of cornstarch. When I designed my experiment, I wanted to measure viscosity. Viscosity is essentially the thickness of a liquid or the drag of the liquid on an object (like a ball going through molasses). I knew that more corn starch would probably make the pie filling more viscous and that less cornstarch would make it less viscous, or runnier. When making my pies, I added a certain ratio of starch to water. This affected the result of the pie all the way to the final product. When I heated the starch and water, something in the particulate level was going on. The cornstarch absorbed the water molecules, creating a swelling effect. The intermolecular bonds start to break down because the amylose chains in the starch are being dissolved by the hot water. Because these chains are no longer bound tightly, the structure becomes amorphous. This allows for more water to bond with the starch, and the process happens again and again. When the bonding is complete, you are left with a sticky web of starch molecules. So, when I added less starch, there was more water that was not able to bond, and so the leftover water made the final product more viscous. The same thing goes for when I added more starch: all of the water was absorbed leaving a very thick filling. So at a microscopic level, the food was changing quite drastically, leaving us to see, macroscopically, the thickness or viscosity of my pie filling. There are many ways that cooking and science are similar. Firstly, cooking requires doing chemistry, even if you don't realize it. Chemical reactions take place all the time when cooking, often caused by the added ingredients or the temperature of the food. Doing chemistry in a lab is similar to this because you add or take away ingredients to get the desired effect, and are often heating your mixture on a burner to trigger the reaction. A great example of using chemistry when making food is baking. Baking requires specific measurements of each ingredient so it interacts and bonds with a certain amount of another ingredient. Chemistry is very similar to this because of the precision. Chemists must measure and record everything that they are doing to have the ideal zero error, and this includes taking measurements such as grams or volume. When baking, similar methods are used so the baked good turns out with the right shape, texture, etc., with all of the parts reacting exactly with the other parts. Baking and cooking, however, use measurements like cups or tablespoons instead of grams. All and all though, being a food scientist and being a professional chef are really not much different when you take a look at the methods. A food scientist may start with a problem and work towards solving it by adding and taking away certain things from it/the food. A chef, on the other hand, may start with a food that they want to improve (it may even be the same type of problem that the food scientist is working on) and add and subtract different ingredients from the food to make it ideal. The main difference between cooking food and food chemistry is precision. With a chef, they may be throwing spices this way and that and combining any sort of ingredient to see what works. They may not even write down the recipe until many trials later. On the flip side, doing chemistry requires a lot of precision, both in the recording process and in the adding/subtracting process. One mole of a chemical off and they may be in trouble. So in this way, chemistry and cooking are much different, depending on the work being done. Another main difference between general chemistry and food is the fact that chemistry can cover many things and humans can do chemistry in many other fields besides food. Cooking is just a subcategory of chemistry, if you will. Overall, there are many similarities between chemistry and cooking and a number of differences, and both have their own niche to fill in science and everyday use.
Below is my final recipe card for my blueberry pies.