Customer Reviews

Food Chemistry

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This text deserves much better accolades than what I have seen. First of all, it is a book about FOOD. It covers every food I know of, and many more I didnt know. Second, it is a CHEMISTRY book, so you WILL have trouble understanding it if you dont know what "CHO" means, or have no chemistry background!
It is extremely organized with chapters on proteins, enzymes, lipids, carbohydrates (CHO), vitamins, minerals, and even aroma substances and food additives (want to know what MSG really is?). There is a section on food contaminants that would interest anyone who prefers certified organic foods, or wonders why they should. The whole food sections are divided into dairy, eggs, meat seafood, cereals, legumes, fruits, vegetables, and sugars. There are even chapters on alcoholic beverages (any home beer or wine makers?), coffees and teas, spices, and water!
Of course, you can see this from looking at the table of contents, but what you dont see is the organization and attention to detail that he pain-stakingly provides. Do you want to know how toffee is made?, What happens to beef after the cow is executed? What were the first ancient grains grown? (enkorn and emmer are now being sold by many raw-food enthusiasts. How are "soy-meats" made? What fruit has the most lignans or sugar content? What is a crayfish? What happens when fruit ripens or which fruits have brain neurotransmitters like serotonin? Why do you need to take aspirin when many fruits have salicylates already in them? How much vitamin B-6 is destroyed during meat cooking?(45%), or vegetable cooking?(20-30%) What is red dye #2? How much mercury, lead, and cadmium are in the foods you eat?...and much more!
This book is certainly intended for the student of food technology with all the attention to chemical processes and aroma compounds, but the wealth of information on food in general could easily interest any nutritionist, vegetarian, raw-fooder or maybe even a creative chef! As a physician interested in healthy nutrition, my copy will have well worn pages. This author deserves tremendous praise for the immense amount of time he must have spent compiling so much knowledge of food, and in such an organized fashion, that I feel obligated to take the time to give him my personal ovation.

Food Chemistry is an amazing book, BUT, be careful before you buy it. You DO have to have a fairly strong background in the fundamentals of structure, nomenclature, reactions and the like involved in organic chemistry and biochemistry. They show some great reactions and offer some pretty helpful tables and charts on chemical properties and reactivities of various foodtsuffs. The later chapters, such as dairy, meat/fish, fruits are extremely comprehensive. I will at one point be using this as a text book for an advanced food chemistry course. However, if you are just beginning to explore food chemistry I would suggest starting out with "On Food and Cooking," and work your way up to this AFTER you get a bachelor's in chemistry

If I were a professional food chemist looking for a reference book to remind me of all the food-related chemical reactions I'd learned in college, I might give this book 5 stars. I'm not a food chemist, though, and I was hoping for something that would actually educate me about some processes I don't understand very well. This book does not succeed on that score.

"Food Chemistry" makes little effort to actually teach the subjects it covers. All of the text has a very passive tone, describing chemical reactions and physical structures of food in a very disjointed way, such that there's never any real indication of why they're telling you anything. This weakness may be a result of translation from German, but somehow, I suspect this book was equally dry in the original.

Huge sections of the book are devoted to simply listing chelating agents, enzymes, lipids, etc., with a description of the chemical reactions each is involved in, but there is really no indication anywhere of why anybody should care about such things.

There is enough text to indicate that "Food Chemistry" is actually intended to be used as a textbook, but unless you already have a very thorough grounding in the principles of food chemistry, you won't be able to make much sense of it. Even if you actually do have sufficient background to make sense of the book, you probably don't need another textbook like this one. You may, however, find it quite useful for reference, or for filling in obscure details of chemical processes you already mostly understand.

Unless you regularly engage in food-related industrial or research chemistry, though, you will find this book almost completely useless.

I still use it as a reference book at times. The topics covered are well explained and organized which makes it easy to find what one needs to know.

Up to now, it the only book that talks about food chemistry in details that I have found!

Books I've read before about food chemistry aren't so detailed and specific. This book is full of graphs, tables, chemical structures and very clear explanation of what are the components of a great number of foods and how their react to natural process as the fermentaton or in certain food treatments (cooking, freezing, ecc..). Chemical reactions are described in great details with reaction mechanism and intermediate products. Lot of fun while you sitting down at the table....or at the desk!

This book is very valuable becasue it covers almost every subject with as much facts as possible. Therefore it is very usefull for quick reference.