Resumo de To Feed A Nation

To Feed a Nation is broad-ranging, covering not
just food science and technology but their underpinnings and connections: where
relevant it touches on agriculture and husbandry, transport and distribution
networks, finance and capital, medicine and public health, and the broader
history of science. Part one briefly surveys Aboriginal food, the skills and
knowledge accumulated in Britain
over centuries and brought to Australia
by the First Fleet, and the village technologies of early Sydney.

Part two covers the developments in food technology during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, with chapters on meat processing, refrigeration,
sugar, fruit and vegetable products, milling and flour-based products,
fermentation (beer and wines), dairy products. It also covers early moves
towards a scientific approach.

Australia
possessed salting from the earliest days, derived its canning, and was
innovative in refrigeration. Canning technology was also applied to jam, then
to fruits and other products, and so into the modern industry; refrigeration
was quickly applied in the dairy industry. Both these developments were
by-products of the British market pull for meat, and the technological response
to it.

Attempts from the mid-1920s to set up dairy research
at CSIR met strong resistance from the smugness of state departments of
agriculture and an industry organized in co-operatives which would rather make
second-best products than face the capital and R&D expenditure necessary to
make the best. ... It took a war to change a lot of attitudes.

Part three begins with the Second World War and the watershed of
1940-1960. Farrer then describes the building up of the foundations for food
science, with the establishment of professional bodies and educational
institutions and courses, with government and industry support; among the
sciences themselves he stresses the importance of rheology, the physics of
flows and deformation. He then surveys the challenges faced by specific
industries and their responses.

Possibly Australia''s most spectacular
success in food engineering was Dr DJ Casimir''s invention of a spinning cone
for the stripping of flavors, good and bad, from liquids. It has been developed
commercially and applied to the collection of important volatile components
from fruits, beverages and essential oils without damage either to the flavor
collected or to the residual product. Early removal of flavors from a processed
product conserves them and allows them to be returned in the final stages of
processing.

Newly milled flour has a yellowish tinge that has long
been known to fade on ageing for two to three months. About 1900 it was found
the flour from the mill could be bleached with agents such as oxides of
nitrogen, ozone and chlorine. Modern practice is to use benozyl peroxide at
levels considerably lower than those permitted. Cake flours, preferably from
low-protein wheats, are chlorinated. Other additives include enzymes to ensure
consistent fermentation of the dough, simple oxidizing and reducing agents to
moderate the behavior of the gluten, mineral salts to ensure maximum yeast
activity, and mould inhibitors to extend the shelf life of bread. In addition
bread has been used as a simple medium for ensuring that the population gets a
crucial nutrient, for instance calcium and phosphorus in wartime Britain, and iodine in certain goitrous parts of
Australia.

Farrer concludes with chapters on the new science of nutrition
and on popular anxieties and concerns over food additives, contamination,
irradiation and genetically modified organisms. He takes a fairly corporate stance in these chapters, downplaying many public health
concerns: There is no such thing as a junk food, only junk diets,
while lead has a perceived potential for damage in growing
children, to give just two examples.

In Australia
in the late 1990s there were three ses food poisoning incidents which
involved death and hospital admissions. They destroyed one company, damaged the
reputations and balance sheets of the others, and shook consumers'' confidence
in the products involved. ...

Much of To Feed a Nation is quite dry, and it is densely packed
with the names of people and products and places and companies and organizations.
This material is, however, connected with broader history and Australians will
find many of the names familiar; it offers a different perspective on the
brands and products in our supermarkets.

Resumos Relacionados