Introductory Post

Hello and welcome to my food blog for my Science of Food and Cooking course at Loras College. My name is Mike Carey and I am a Senior pursing a Bachelor's degree in both Criminal Justice and Psychology. In addition to my work in the class room, I have also worked for Loras Campus Dining for the past 4.5 years now. During this time I have done every job imaginable in the process of providing food service for the campus of Loras College. In fact there have been a few instances where I have had to cook the food for diner service, for 400+ people with the aid of only two other student workers. And as a result, have been hired by Aramark to serve as the interim Cafeteria Supervisor. While I learned to cook at a young age, out of a necessity to help take care of my family, working in the food service sector has helped to expand my knowledge and understand of processes that go into both preparing and serving numerous meals.

While I enjoy cooking outside of work and often cook for friends, my time in the food service sector has taught me that cooking is not something I would want to do for a career. One of the reasons for this stems from the frustration associated with the complaints about the meals that are prepared on campus. Two common complaints that are most often voiced regard the taste of the food, which is often considered bland, as well as the nutritional aspect of the food options. This is extremely frustrating, because very few students are aware of the great efforts it takes to prepare these meals, as well as that very few students get to see all the hard work that goes into preparing their meals. As a result, one of the things that I have come to realize is that when food is prepared in the volumes required to feed an entire campus, it seems to lose it's integrity, in the aspect that no matter what you add to it, it just doesn't taste as good or flavorful as it does when it is prepared in smaller batches.

With that being said, my three goals for this course are to:

• 1) Develop a better understanding of how the molecular structure/composition of different ingredients interact with each other, possibly explaining why dishes may turn out differently when certain ingredients are substituted. And also, how this may effect the overall quality of dishes/meals when their production is scaled up to larger proportions.

• 2)Develop a better understanding of the science that goes into the nutritional component of preparing different meals.

• 3)Develop a better understanding of how and why different microbes can turn the food we consume into potentially harmful substances.