ABSTRACT
The fracture and yielding behavior of foods is an important quality mark, affecting aspects such as (1) eating quality; (2) usage properties, for example, ease of cutting, grating, and spreading; (3) handling properties during storage and/or further processing in connection with, for example, shape retention and robustness during transport. These aspects pertain to the fracture and yielding behavior of foods under widely varying conditions and time scales. During eating, for example, food is quickly deformed until it fractures; the time scale of this deformation is less than a second. On the other hand, the time scale of shape retention during storage may be of the order of days or (much) longer.
