ABSTRACT
In the case of food science and food processing, the main concepts of nanoscience and nanotechnology provide a sound framework for further developing our understanding of the interactions and self-assembly behaviour of the basic food components (proteins, polysaccharides, lipids) into nano/microstructures under well-controlled and extreme environments (pH, ionic strength, heat, shear, high pressure, drying, freezing, etc.). These interactions and self-assembly processes subsequently control food hierarchical structures, and ultimately food texture, food rheology, and food functionality on the macroscopic scale. One may presume that such developments could be especially promising in the field of food colloids, where the primary structure-building elements are nanosized molecules (biopolymers, emulsifiers and lipids) along with colloidalsized particles (emulsion droplets, air bubbles, lipid micelles or biopolymer aggregates). These are all contained in a liquid dispersion medium and hence are responsive to environmental variations. Therefore, the application of nanoscience and nanoengineering to food colloids is concerned with understanding and manipulating the molecular and colloidal interactions involving all these entities for the purpose of developing innovative food products of outstanding quality (Dickinson, 2003a, 2004, 2006a; McClements, 2006; Sanguansri and Augustin, 2006; Morris, 2005, 2006; van der Linden, 2006; Semenova, 2007). According to this interpretation, both the ‘top-down’ and the ‘bottom-up’ approaches of nanoscience and nanotechnology have actually been used successfully already by food scientists for rather a long time (Dickinson, 2003a, 2006a; Veerman et al., 2003; Bolder et al., 2006; Graveland-Bikker and de Kruif, 2006; Graveland-Bikker et al., 2006; Manski et al., 2007).
