ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on foods and dietary patterns. The food quality paradigm ultimately involves integrating food production and processing quality cultural-traditional knowledge, and sensual-practical experience, as well as the nutritional-scientific analysis of nutrients, foods, and dietary patterns. Refined-extracted ingredients can have an important role to play in preparing tasty and healthful meals, such as the use of oils for cooking or adding to salads. The process of refining and extracting foods is also a way of preserving and making these foods available all year round and enables ease of transportation and storage. The reconstituted meat ingredient dubbed "pink slime" is an example of such a processed-reconstituted food. A chicken nugget is typically manufactured out of mechanically extracted chicken, with a range of additives to hold it together and give it texture and flavor, such as textured vegetable protein, modified starch, and gum. The question of food quality needs to be distinguished from that of quantity.
