Microbes Play a Beneficial Role in Food
Title: Fermented flavours
Source: Chris Loss from Chemistry World
Date: March 7, 2017
Summary: Microbes play a large role with the food that everyone eats and how various food items grow. Scientists and chefs are starting to team up to enhance the eating experience that people enjoy by examining how they can use different microbes contained within the food to enhance flavors and potential benefits to people’s health. Besides changing the how certain foods taste, microbes can increase the “nutritional” benefits these foods provide too.
Connections: In this article, the author mentions the importance of the microbes that are being manipulated to help chefs better their customers’ food experience, which adds to the list regarding the importance of microbes.
Critical Analysis: I have briefly heard how microbes are starting to be used to influence how food tastes and what food can provide for our bodies prior to reading this article. I found the fact that these microbes being manipulated to make some food dishes more nutritionally beneficial to be interesting because this is a field of science that can be explored more. In terms of the scientific accuracy of this article, I could tell that the author was catering towards the food theme, trying to link puns when describing the role of microbes or biochemical processes. Although this makes the article entertaining and easier to read, the author could provide a brief background as to how proteins are influenced by “biochemical cleavers,” for example. This article definitely did a good job at informing the public of the science that is going on and how this type of science can benefit people because the author primarily expressed the benefits of having microbes in food.
Question: Could experimenting with the microbes in fast food make fast food items more nutritional and beneficial to people while keeping the price relatively cheap?