Food science is different from nutrition. It is really focused on how the food industry makes food and how we get it from the field to people’s homes to the grocery store. It involves new technologies for processing food, innovative strategies for improving growing and production, and producing safe food.
Assistant Professor
Food science is different from nutrition. It is really focused on how the food industry makes food and how we get it from the field to people’s homes to the grocery store. It involves new technologies for processing food, innovative strategies for improving growing and production – producing safe food. So we have specialties within food science or disciplines that involve food safety, which is my area, but then also things like food chemistry. So, how can you increase shelf life of things? How can you make things taste good? How can you improve texture of things, because you know, if you get a carrot and can it, after that process, it’s not the same as when you pull it out of the ground. So how can we process things and still make them taste good? That’s really the focus of food science.
I actually got into food science kind of naturally. My mom was a Family and Consumer Science Extension agent and my dad was a high school chemistry teacher. So the two melded together, my mom with that food safety background and then my dad always explaining the science behind everything.
Laurel L. Dunn is an Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of Georgia (UGA). Her program focuses on pre- and post-harvest interventions to reduce the incidence of produce-associated foodborne illness, and she provides food safety education to Georgia’s produce industry. Laurel received her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Florida before joining UGA.