After this semester, I still feel that food is a good way to bring people together, but my views on food have grown and changed over time. Coming to this class, I was already familiar with the topics of GMOs, organic foods, and plant-based alternatives coming into this class. I had some knowledge of allergens, gut health, and health claims as well. However, I was very unfamiliar with topics like culture, world hunger, novel foods, edible cannabis, and functional foods.
This class has given me a great opportunity to learn more about the topics that I was unfamiliar with and given me an opportunity to gain new points of view on topics I already knew about. I was very unfamiliar with the topic of novel foods before this class, and I feel like I have learned a lot about novel foods and the opinions that different countries have on the definition of novel foods and how they are regulated. I had never thought of using crickets as a substitute for flour before this class, and I would be interested in learning more about using bug-based substitutes for different products.
Another topic I was unfamiliar with was food psychology. I knew almost none of what we covered in class, and it was fascinating to see the amount of research that has gone into how humans perceive food differently. I particularly thought that the research study about popcorn volume and staleness was very fascinating. The idea that the volume of food presented will affect how much you eat so strongly is still mind-blowing to me, and it makes me never want to buy a full-size bag of chips again.
In high school, I learned a lot about organic foods through my agricultural education classes. But this class still brought up something that I hadn’t thought of before, which is the effect of pesticides on the people who actually work on the farms. I had known that the chances of a consumer developing any reported health issues like cancer from exposure to their produce were extremely low. But I had never thought about the producers that are exposed frequently for many years and how this could affect their health. I feel like this was a major oversight on my part, and it has changed some of my harsher views of organic produce.
Before this class, I was already very familiar with GMOs. In high school, I wrote two speeches for public speaking competitions back in high school. This meant that I’m very familiar with GMOs, how they are created, and what legal regulations they have. While I didn’t learn any new information about GMOs from this class, it was interesting to hear some of my classmates’ and professor’s thoughts about them.
Throughout this semester, I learned that there were a lot more topics that are relevant to the present and future of food science than I had considered before. Overall, this class has taught me a lot about contemporary issues in the field and went much more in-depth than I expected when I first read the syllabus.
Image from: https://www.culinaryphotographer.com/san-diego-food-photographer