ABSTRACT
The aim of this book is to discuss kinetics of reactions in foods in relation to food quality. By reactions we mean all type of change taking place in the food whether they be chemical, enzymatic, physical, or microbial. Kinetics is about change. For the moment it suffices to describe kinetics as the translation of knowledge (theoretical as well observational) on a time-dependent chemical, physical, microbial, reaction into an equation describing such changes in mathematical language. The mathematical relations result in models that we can use to design, optimize, and predict the quality of foods. It should also be helpful in choosing the technology to produce them. We thus need chemical, physical, microbial knowledge to build mathematical models as well as knowledge on composition and structure of foods, i.e., food science; it is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic principles of food science and technology. The major part of the book is concerned with modeling the kinetics of relevant reactions in foods and
deals with questions such as: what is kinetics, what are models, how do we apply kinetics to practical problems in foods, what are pitfalls and opportunities, how to deal with uncertainty, and how to interpret results. A key question to be answered is why the kinetics of reactions in foods is often different from, say, that of chemical engineering processes. In this chapter, we discuss some important determinants of food quality. While the subject of quality
deserves a book in its own right, the purpose here is to put the relationship between kinetic modeling and food quality in perspective, to be developed in subsequent chapters.
