Food Science Academic Proofreading Services

The scope of food science

The subject of Food Science covers the entire process from growing food to serving it. While hot button areas such as dioxins in meat, genetically modified crops, and deforestation to crate grazing land for cattle get the most media attention, there are many other issues that often go unexplored. California is suffering terrible droughts in which ancient aquifers are being depleted to the extent that the ground has dropped by several metres in certain areas, and a big reason for the drought is the amount of soybean crop being grown in the area.

Such crops require an enormous amount of water from supplies that simply cannot meet the demand. There is an economic theory called the tragedy of the commons that often comes into play in circumstances such as this. Technically, no one owns the water in an aquifer before it has been pumped out, and if everyone just takes a moderate amount then its use is sustainable as the amount taken is balanced by the amount flowing back in. However, if a few people expand their operation and start to take a little more, they make larger profits, but there is less water for other users.

This leads other users to take more of the water, depleting the shared resource. Soon, everyone is trying to take as much of the water for themselves before others can take it from them and soon the tap runs dry. Economic theories may seem a strange and disparate thing when trying to discuss Food Science, but as any good Food Science academic proofreading service will tell you, a holistic approach is often advisable when trying to discern the reasons behind or details of large-scale phenomena.

Alternative proteins and research

There have been recent developments in the creation of alternatives to traditional meats such as beef, chicken, fish and pork. Two major ideas are the creation of lab-grown meat from stem cells, where animal muscle stem cells are developed in a growth medium until large enough for consumption. The only issue with this is the high cost associated with obtaining stem cells; research into finding cheaper methods of creating them is a current hot topic but has its charlatans, such as work published in 2011 purporting to show a method of inducing pluripotency in cells through acid treatment, several worrying gaps were found in the study and certain evidence seems to have been fabricated, as detailed by Cyranoski (2014).

Communicating unfamiliar ideas

The other potential replacement for standard has only one major issue, known colloquially as the “ick” factor. Insects are the most efficient natural source of animal protein that can be scaled up to the size of production that would be able to cater to human requirements (its production is easily less damaging to the environment, required less water, food and space per kilo of meat produced), maggots that have been shredded, compressed into burger patties and fried have been described as perfectly palatable and they really are the only viable meat source that utilizes current technology and can account for future continued human population growth.

There are certain problems with more chitinous insects such as ants, speaking as an employee of a Food Science academic proofreading service, I once ate a sugar-coated scorpion and found the natural armour rather unpleasant. The public perception issue would have to be overcome, but there are certain ways this could be achieved. One excellent idea has been feeding regular livestock on insects that have been grown as feedstock such as mealworms. This reduces the difficulty of sourcing protein for omnivorous livestock such as pigs, acts as a protein supplement for herbivores such as cattle and sheep, and improves farms’ efficiency.

This has gained media attention from journalists such as Kai Kupferschmidt (2015)

References

Cyranoski, David (2014) Acid-bath stem-cell study under investigation. Nature Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/news/acid-bath-stem-cell-study-under-investigation-1.14738

Kupferschmidt, Kai (2015) Why insects could be the ideal animal feed. ScienceMag.org Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/feature-why-insects-could-be-ideal-animal-feed