The Chemical Sensory Informatics of Food ─ Measurement, Analysis, Integration

Food chemicals provide a variety of information. They inform us of food safety, quality, authenticity, and origin, with direct links to our emotional responses in many cases. This information is key to our survival, whether to avoid disease or to find nutrients, and our enjoyment. Those involved with food production, processing and testing strive to better understand how food chemistry and oral processing provide information about food. Ideally, chemical analytical instrumentation and sensors could be developed to measure, analyze, and predict the chemical sensory information of food. While many research groups endeavor to develop such systems, recent research confirms that the information obtained by humans during food interaction and eating involve extremely complex interactions between the sensory stimuli and the information processes they invoke. Simple chemical analysis of the content of selected stimulants in food will likely not allow the prediction of the total information content that is desired. There is a longstanding need to better understand the generation of complex human sensations produced by food during eating and how they are integrated and translated into perceptions of food quality and safety.

The goal of this book is to compile recent advances, research findings and approaches, and current knowledge across the different aligned areas of research, where experts from chemistry, instrumentation, data analytics and physiology, as well as behavioral and sensory sciences focused on these topics.

Dr. Barry K. Lavine is a Professor of Chemistry at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. He has published more than 100 papers in chemometrics and is on the editorial board of several journals including the Journal of Chemometrics and the Microchemical Journal. Dr. Lavine's laboratory is a leader in the field of evolutionary computations, and the application of pattern recognition methods to the forensic examination of automotive paints using infrared and Raman imaging techniques.

Brian Guthrie currently performs research to understand the chemical and physical origins of human sensations during the oral processing of food. He has worked in the food and ingredients industries with responsibilities spanning from knowledge building, utilizing fundamental science, to formulation and product development. Brian has also worked extensively in food sensory science.

Jonathan Beauchamp is a physicist (MSci, University College London, U.K., 2002) with expertise in the detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and proton-transfer-reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS). After completing his PhD in environmental physics (University of Innsbruck, Austria, 2005), Beauchamp worked for a small private company before relocating to Germany in 2008, to joining the Department of Sensory Analytics at Fraunhofer IVV in Freising, where he is currently a research associate and deputy head of department.

Andrea Buettner studied Food Chemistry and is a Professor of Aroma Research. Her work has demonstrated the importance of the combined effects of the food matrix, physiology and behavior on flavor release and perception. At the University of Erlangen and Fraunhofer IVV, Freising, Dr. Buettner has broadened her research interests to include the field of odorants in the physiological context, with monitoring of uptake, distribution and biotransformation of odorants, as well as further physiological impact in humans.