ABSTRACT
Plants produce a great diversity of products which over the years have been used for many purposes. These products include wood as a building material and fuel and primary metabolites such as sucrose, starch and vegetable oils as food commodities. Alongside these bulk products are the secondary metabolites, compounds not directly associated with the growth processes of the plant organism. These compounds are biochemically diverse, often of complex structure, and each one is generally specific to only a few species of plant. They have found their uses in human society as medicines and food flavoring ingredients. In some societies, the pharmacological properties of these metabolites are exploited by use of either parts of the intact plant or crude extracts. In Western medicine however, the tradition is to use plant-derived pharmaceuticals in the form of purified compounds. Such plant-derived compounds now constitute some 25% of prescribed drugs in the United States. The flavor compounds, apart from imparting the flavor characteristics of plants consumed directly as foods, are most often used as a whole plant materials such as herbs or as dried prep-
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arations such as spices. As food production has become more industrialized, a market has also developed for purified flavor compounds, either as food ingredients themselves or as components of prepared flavor mixtures.
