1Thanks for coming along, Nadia and Fergus.
2So this is a chance for you to give us some feedback about different aspects of your course.
3What would you like to begin with?
4I've enjoyed the sessions on food safety.
5There was some information there that I found really surprising,
6although some was stuff I knew already, like the rise in rates of obesity.
7Yeah, that's been in the news a lot.
8But I hadn't realised that unsafe food causes more than 200 different diseases.
9No, I'd no idea it was that many.
10And speaking of diseases, I knew resistance to antibiotics is on the increase,
11but I didn't know why...
12...that it's partly because when animals are treated with antibiotics then consumed by humans,
13the antibiotics get into the food chain.
14I had no idea about that either.
15Then the sessions provided a lot of information about plastic pollution from food packaging in the ocean,
16but I think that most of us were already aware of that.
17Yeah. But I thought we could have done more on how much food is thrown away unnecessarily through fear of it being out of date,
18that was only mentioned in passing.
19Okay, I'll bear that in mind.
20What did you think about the sessions from visiting lecturers, Fergus?
21For me the most interesting one was about that project to prevent companies giving incorrect information to consumers about food.
22Ah, food fraud, yes.
23I thought it was really good to address a problem that's faced by so many different groups -
24people with special religious rules, as well as vegetarians and vegans.
25And those with allergies.
26And another thing, we've had effective ways of analysing DNA for some time now
27and these can easily be applied to analysing food.
28But what the researchers succeeded in doing was to ensure that these tests were carried out at different stages in the food's journey
29from the producer to the consumer.
30So they knew that the food actually came from the place it was supposed to,
31and had the ingredients it was meant to.
32Exactly.
33So customers can be confident about what they buy.
34And the researchers had a good system for publicising their findings too.
35Well, I thought there were some problems with that, actually.
36Okay.
37And do you have any recommendations for new topics that we could include in the course?
38Well, I'm interested in how crop yields can be increased without damaging the environment.
39But we've already done quite a bit on that,
40but not so much on the seafood industry,
41where stocks are in danger of being overexploited as a food source
42unless we can find ways of keeping stocks up.
43Yes, that'd be a good topic.
44And I'm interested in the idea of a personalised approach to diet,
45now we have the technology to analyse exactly what individuals need.
46That sounds more like a medical topic than food science.
47Okay.
48What about sessions on the variety of food and eating habits around the world?
49That's very relevant nowadays.
50Yes, I think the whole class would be interested in that.
51Then there's technological stuff,
52things like 3D printing of food and smart packaging.
53Mmm... maybe too specialist.
54Now, I'm particularly interested in your project,
55the one where you developed a new food product.
56So talk me through the stages...
57First you had to decide on your initial aim.
58We decided we wanted to create something people could eat on the go rather than in a restaurant.
59Yeah so we chose falafel, which was originally a Middle Eastern snack.
60We made up our minds about that pretty quickly.
61I know some students found it a lot harder to choose, and wasted a lot of time.
62Then we had to do the literature review.
63We hadn't done one of these before
64so the handout with advice for the project was very useful here.
65Yes, especially the advice on how to present the information.
66Then product development, actually deciding what we'd use to make the falafel,
67and for me the interesting thing about that was that we wanted it to be something a bit different from an ordinary falafel.
68We really made the right choice when we finally decided to use jackfruit,
69even though it wasn't something that either of us had ever tasted before.
70Yeah, like the name tells you, it's a fruit but actually it's really good in savoury dishes.
71The product production, working out how to make the falafel, was harder than I expected because I'd never made them before.
72It was mostly trial and error.
73We started off with the basic recipe and then experimented and when it went wrong...
74...which it did a lot of the time...
75...we just moved on and kept adapting it
76and in the end it turned out fine and we had a lot of fun.
77We did!
78Thank you...