The great thing about food chemistry is that it’s all around you. You prepare food, eat and drink on a daily basis and you’re literally eating some quite chemically complex products! To help you ‘see’ the chemistry around you, you can do a project on a food product as you go through this course! Along the way, you’ll be applying what you learned immediately.
This project is optional and won’t be graded. You can upload your results in the course to help you keep track of the different steps you’ve taken. If you do want feedback on your results at the end of the course, just use the course community to share your results.
We will start the project after we’ve covered our first topic: atoms. But, before we get started with the actual content, we’ll need to do a little bit of preparation:
You can do this food chemistry project on just about any food that you know of. You will need to choose just one subject, so one specific food to focus on. It can be anything, but generally the simpler, the better. Overwhelmed by the number of options? We’ve got a couple of suggestions for you:
BREAD
Choose a bread. It can be prepackaged, homemade, from a bakery or supermarket.
FRUIT
Choose a piece of fruit for your food chemistry exploration. Just choose one type and use that in your journey.
LEGUME
There are tons of legumes out there, peas, lentils, beans, etc. Choose one specific type and make that your project.
No need to pin yourself down on this one food yet. You can still change until you start doing your first assignment in the next lesson. For now, keep your chosen food in mind.
This sounds fancier than it truly is. We just need you to dedicate a place to write down all your ‘findings’ about your food. You can grab a piece of paper and a pen, dedicate an online word document, use a note-taking tool, anything you can use to write down and organize your information.
Now that you’ve got your subject and your ‘lab notebook’ you’re ready to go. After most lessons, you will be asked to study your chosen food product and apply what you’ve just learned!
To help you on your food chemistry journey, we’ll be joining you in this food chemistry project, to give an example of what to look at. Our chosen study subject is:
An Apple!
We’ve chosen such a simple food on purpose, to show you that chemistry really can be anywhere.
Let us know in the comments which topic you decided to choose!
Hi, as an example, we chose apples!
Peanuts
Actually, I’ll work with bananas
I choose lemons as a food to investigate.
Good choice Kath!
Let me know if you get stuck at any point along the way.
Bread
Great choice! You might want to opt for a specific bread that you like, it should make the exercises easier :-).
thanks