Some Notes on Our Food Science Experiment II

Abstract

The opportunities for chemical experiments by our second year students are considerable; they had already experienced Food Science Experiment I which included many experiments in the field of organic food chemistry. In addition, they had already studied basic chemical experiments.Given this background, the experience and knowledge of chemistry among our sophomores seems to be good; though, it is still better to choose nontoxic chemicals, or to select less dangerous procedures or plans as much as possible. Consequently, both appreciation of safety in the laboratory and the least pollution of the environment are important considerations. In this experiment, the determination of mineral nutrients in foodstuffs is an important subject. A dry incineration method was chosen and used as a pretreatment for inorganic analysis. This substituted for wet digestion which is a general method of liquefaction in food analysis; although a considerable amount of toxic acids are used. Our dry incineration has been improved so as to get carbon free ash more easily. A suitable standard range and dilution times for respective samples were checked and are shown in a table which can be easily referred to by readers. These are important for our student leaders in this experiment class, because those data can be easily used by each atudent to make respective experimental plan. Items in this experiment are described in succession.