Have you ever stopped to think about how much energy it takes to dry the coffee beans in your coffee? Or the corn in the tortilla chip you’re crunching? Or the rice in your sushi roll? Probably not — you might lose your appetite. Biological Systems Engineering Ph.D. student Alice Dien has thought about it a lot and come up with an intriguing solution: Desiccation.
Agriculture contributes close to a trillion dollars to the U.S. GDP and provides about 10 percent of employment. Food accounts for more than 12 percent of household expenditures and the food industry is one of the largest in the U.S.
Detecting, controlling and maintaining food safety and quality are paramount and require efficient processing, storage, and handling along all parts of the food supply chain. Some of our research focuses on the following:
There are clues about how to preserve food and keep it safe that based on nature inspired approaches if we look hard enough for them. Professor Nitin, in the latest in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Winter Quarter Seminar Series, discussed this topic and how he has applied it in his work.
Professor Nitin started off with a carrot. A simple food that leaves questions unanswered when one takes the time to look more closely at it.
