Quantitative texture analysis comparison of three legumes.

A validated texture-analysis method to evaluate product quality in frozen or cooked legumes is needed to support high-quality vegetable production but is not currently established in the literature. Peas, lima beans, and edamame were investigated in this study due to similar market use as well as growth in plant-based protein consumption in the United States. These three legumes were evaluated after three different processing treatments (blanch/freeze/thaw (BFT); BFT+microwave heat (BFT+M); BF+stove-top cooking (BF+C)), using both compression and puncture analysis following an American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) texture analysis method and moisture testing following an American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard method. Texture analysis results showed differences between legumes and processing methods. Compression analysis identified more differences between treatments within product type than puncture for both edamame and lima beans indicating compression might be more sensitive to texture changes in these products. Implementation of a standard texture method for legume vegetables for growers and producers would provide a consistent quality check to support efficient production of high-quality legumes. Due to the sensitivity obtained from the compression texture method in this work, compression should be considered for future research into a robust method to evaluate edamame and lima bean textures throughout the growing and production processes.

Sensory descriptive analysis of hard ciders from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic United States.

Although alcoholic or "hard" cider is a beverage of growing popularity throughout the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States (US), the industry lacks a consistent language for describing the sensory quality of its products. The main objective of this research was to explore the sensory attributes that can be used to describe a large representative sample (N = 42 samples) of ciders from Virginia, Vermont, and New York, using classical descriptive analysis (DA). The secondary objective of the research was to determine if cider samples' sensory attributes differ based on extrinsic factors, such as style, packaging, and apple varieties. The study was conducted using a standard DA: 8 panelists were trained for 13 h to develop a lexicon of aroma, taste, and mouthfeel descriptors for 42 cider samples (15 single varietal ciders, 27 blended ciders). Then, subjects evaluated each cider in duplicate for all descriptive attributes in standard sensory-evaluation conditions. Results were analyzed to determine overall differences among the individual cider samples, geographic origins, cider styles, and packaging formats, as well as significant differences across individual attributes. Herein, we report on 29 attributes that can be used to discriminate cider samples, as well as a subset of attributes which differentiate ciders based on extrinsic product variables. These results provide a framework for describing ciders from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US, which may be further generalizable to other North American ciders. As well, these results highlight the potential for more descriptive, sensory-based style guidelines may inspire future research related to cider production practices and terroir.

Sensory Descriptor Analysis of Whisky Lexicons through the Use of Deep Learning.

This paper is concerned with extracting relevant terms from a text corpus on whisk(e)y. "Relevant" terms are usually contextually defined in their domain of use. Arguably, every domain has a specialized vocabulary used for describing things. For example, the field of Sensory Science, a sub-field of Food Science, investigates human responses to food products and differentiates "descriptive" terms for flavors from "ordinary", non-descriptive language. Within the field, descriptors are generated through Descriptive Analysis, a method wherein a human panel of experts tastes multiple food products and defines descriptors. This process is both time-consuming and expensive. However, one could leverage existing data to identify and build a flavor language automatically. For example, there are thousands of professional and semi-professional reviews of whisk(e)y published on the internet, providing abundant descriptors interspersed with non-descriptive language. The aim, then, is to be able to automatically identify descriptive terms in unstructured reviews for later use in product flavor characterization. We created two systems to perform this task. The first is an interactive visual tool that can be used to tag examples of descriptive terms from thousands of whisky reviews. This creates a training dataset that we use to perform transfer learning using GloVe word embeddings and a Long Short-Term Memory deep learning model architecture. The result is a model that can accurately identify descriptors within a corpus of whisky review texts with a train/test accuracy of 99% and precision, recall, and F1-scores of 0.99. We tested for overfitting by comparing the training and validation loss for divergence. Our results show that the language structure for descriptive terms can be programmatically learned.

A review of sourdough starters: ecology, practices, and sensory quality with applications for baking and recommendations for future research.

The practice of sourdough bread-making is an ancient science that involves the development, maintenance, and use of a diverse and complex starter culture. The sourdough starter culture comes in many different forms and is used in bread-making at both artisanal and commercial scales, in countries all over the world. While there is ample scientific research related to sourdough, there is no standardized approach to using sourdough starters in science or the bread industry; and there are few recommendations on future directions for sourdough research. Our review highlights what is currently known about the microbial ecosystem of sourdough (including microbial succession within the starter culture), methods of maintaining sourdough (analogous to land management) on the path to bread production, and factors that influence the sensory qualities of the final baked product. We present new hypotheses for the successful management of sourdough starters and propose future directions for sourdough research and application to better support and engage the sourdough baking community.

The Facial Action Coding System for Characterization of Human Affective Response to Consumer Product-Based Stimuli: A Systematic Review.

To characterize human emotions, researchers have increasingly utilized Automatic Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), which automates the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and translates the facial muscular positioning into the basic universal emotions. There is broad interest in the application of FACS for assessing consumer expressions as an indication of emotions to consumer product-stimuli. However, the translation of FACS to characterization of emotions is elusive in the literature. The aim of this systematic review is to give an overview of how FACS has been used to investigate human emotional behavior to consumer product-based stimuli. The search was limited to studies published in English after 1978, conducted on humans, using FACS or its action units to investigate affect, where emotional response is elicited by consumer product-based stimuli evoking at least one of the five senses. The search resulted in an initial total of 1,935 records, of which 55 studies were extracted and categorized based on the outcomes of interest including (i) method of FACS implementation; (ii) purpose of study; (iii) consumer product-based stimuli used; and (iv) measures of affect validation. Most studies implemented FACS manually (73%) to develop products and/or software (20%) and used consumer product-based stimuli that had known and/or defined capacity to evoke a particular affective response, such as films and/or movie clips (20%); minimal attention was paid to consumer products with low levels of emotional competence or with unknown affective impact. The vast majority of studies (53%) did not validate FACS-determined affect and, of the validation measures that were used, most tended to be discontinuous in nature and only captured affect as it holistically related to an experience. This review illuminated some inconsistencies in how FACS is carried out as well as how emotional response is inferred from facial muscle activation. This may prompt researchers to consider measuring the total consumer experience by employing a variety of methodologies in addition to FACS and its emotion-based interpretation guide. Such strategies may better conceptualize consumers' experience with products of low, unknown, and/or undefined capacity to evoke an affective response such as product prototypes, line extensions, etc.

Food Agency in the United States: Associations with Cooking Behavior and Dietary Intake.

"Food agency" is one's ability to procure and prepare food within the contexts of one's social, physical, and economic environment. In 2018, we used Amazon TurkPrime to field two large national surveys in the United States (US) to examine food agency and several food- and cooking-related factors. The first survey (n = 1,457) was fielded in a national sample of US adults. The second survey (n = 1,399) comprised of parents of 2-9-year-old children. Analyses included hierarchical linear regression to examine factors that explained variation in food agency and used Poisson and generalized linear models to examine the association between food agency and between cooking behavior and dietary intake, respectively. Cooking skills; food skills; and cooking confidence, attitudes, and perceptions explained a high degree of food agency variance. Higher food agency was associated with more frequent cooking of all meals, more frequent scratch cooking, and less frequent cooking with packaged ingredients among both adults and parents. Higher food agency was also associated with higher consumption of vegetables among both adults and children. Food agency encompasses a number of the interrelated factors important for home cooking and is a useful construct for understanding and promoting home cooking behavior.

Associations between Food Security Status and Diet-Related Outcomes among Students at a Large, Public Midwestern University.

BACKGROUND: Food insecurity is a growing issue of concern on college campuses. While many studies have focused on predictors of food insecurity, fewer studies have examined how food insecurity affects diet and diet-related outcomes among college students. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to examine differences in dietary intake, food and cooking agency, and body mass index (calculated as kg/m2) by food security status in a sample of college students at a large, public midwestern university. DESIGN: We conducted a cross-sectional online survey administered from March to June 2018. PARTICIPANTS: Students were recruited from a random sample (n=2,000) provided by the university, which included an oversample of minority racial/ethnic students from lower-income households and first-generation students. The response rate was 43% (n=851). After excluding students with missing data, the final sample was 754 enrolled students. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Food security status was measured using the US Adult Food Security Survey Module. Dietary intake was assessed using the National Cancer Institute dietary screener questionnaire. Cooking and food agency was measured using the Cooking and Food Provisioning Action Scale, a new validated questionnaire. Body mass index was calculated from self-reported height and weight. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS PERFORMED: Differences between food security categories and diet-related outcomes were examined using generalized linear models. Models adjusted for sociodemographic covariates, such as student's age, sex, race/ethnicity, and receipt of financial aid. RESULTS: Compared to students with high food security, low food security was associated with lower intake of fruits, and very low food security was associated with higher intakes of total added sugar and added sugar from sugar-sweetened beverages. Marginal and very low food security were positively associated with body mass index. Marginal, low, and very low food security were inversely associated with cooking and food agency. CONCLUSIONS: Students with food insecurity experience diet-related challenges that could translate into health disparities over time. More research is needed to understand the longitudinal effects of food insecurity on student health and well being.

Bourbon and Rye Whiskeys Are Legally Distinct but Are Not Discriminated by Sensory Descriptive Analysis.

We present a Descriptive Analysis (DA) of a large representative sample (24 whiskeys) of two legally distinct types of American whiskeys: bourbon and rye whiskey (respectively distilled from a fermented "mashbill" of at least 51% corn or rye). We wanted to determine whether a trained panel could find sensory differences between these two products. We used standard DA: 11 judges were trained for 10 hours to develop a lexicon of 24 flavor, taste, and mouthfeel descriptors for the 24 whiskey samples (15 bourbons and 9 ryes). Then, subjects rated each whiskey sample on each attribute, using unstructured line scales, in standard good sensory-evaluation conditions, and in triplicate. Results were analyzed using MANOVA, Barycentric Discriminant Analysis, and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis. Overall, while 10 descriptors significantly differentiated the whiskeys, no attribute or combination of attributes was predicted by mashbill: The judges did not find differences in sensory character between bourbon and rye whiskeys as categories. However, significant differences could be attributed to the producer of the whiskey and to age at bottling. These results are important because American whiskey has recently become staggeringly popular, and because there is a consistent belief that bourbon and rye whiskeys-as categories-have distinct sensory characteristics. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: This research contradicts popular and expert beliefs about the distinction between the popular and important American rye and bourbon whiskeys. A comprehensive sensory DA study of 24 American whiskeys with different mashbills (9 ryes and 15 bourbons) shows that-while each whiskey is individually distinct on a number of sensory dimensions-sensory differences between rye and bourbon whiskeys as product categories cannot be predicted by mashbill. For producers, consumers, and researchers, this research points to the need for new theories on the origins of flavors in whiskey, as it is now clear that the grain content alone cannot predict sensory qualities.

Juice Clarification with Pectinase Reduces Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen in Apple Juice without Affecting the Polyphenol Composition in Cider.

The term "cider" refers to the fermented beverage produced from apples. The rapid growth in the cider industry coupled with the prominence of traditional, or craft, approaches emphasizes the need for research on cider production. A common problem in ciders is the production of sulfur off-aromas by yeast during fermentation. Prefermentation juice clarification has the potential to reduce the occurrence of unwanted sulfur off-aromas. Concerns that prefermentation juice clarification will reduce the yeast assimilable nitrogen (YAN) and polyphenols in the juice have limited the application of this practice by cider makers. In this study, 3 clarification methods were applied to 'York' apple juice, that is, static settling, centrifugation, and pectinase. Raw (control) and clarified juice were fermented to cider, and the impact of clarification on the physicochemical parameters, amino acids and polyphenol content of the juice and cider was assessed. Juice clarification by pectinase decreased YAN by 50%, while static settling and centrifugation increased the concentration of most amino acids by 83%. All clarification treatments lowered the concentration of total polyphenols in the juice (from 60% to 30%, P < 0.05) and affected the individual polyphenols in the juice but these changes were not evident in the ciders. These findings demonstrate that prefermentation juice clarification results in changes in the chemistry profiles of apple juice. These changes were however not evident in the ciders. This approach therefore has the potential to limit the production of sulfur off-aromas during cider production without adverse effects on quality. PRACTICAL APPLICATION: Clarification of apple juice changes polyphenol and nitrogen contents, factors known to affect cider quality. However, these differences in the chemical profile of apple juice may not be reflected in the finished ciders. These findings demonstrate that juice clarification can be employed in cider making without affecting the quality. Cider makers should not assume that changes in apple juice imparted by clarification will be reflected in the finished ciders. Outcomes should be measured in finished ciders, rather than juice to accurately evaluate effects of the processing steps on quality.

Empowered to cook: The crucial role of 'food agency' in making meals.

What makes an individual, on any given occasion, able and willing to prepare a meal for themselves: that is, to cook? As home cooking has increasingly become the focus of public-health, nutrition, and policy interventions and campaigns, the need for a better understanding has become apparent. It is clear that cooking is not merely a matter of mechanical skill or rote training; beyond this, it is difficult to explain why similar individuals have such different capacities for setting and achieving food-related goals. This paper proposes a new paradigm for cooking and food provisioning - termed "food agency" - that attempts to describe how an individual's desires form and are enacted in correspondence with social environments: broadly, agency emerges from the complex interplay of individual technical skills and cognitive capacities with social and cultural supports and barriers. Drawing on a close reading of anthropological and sociological research into cooking, the authors propose that an individual's ability to integrate such complexity in regard to provisioning - to possess 'food agency' - is crucial. This argument is supplemented by empirical case studies from a large body of ethnographic observations and interviews with home cooks from the United States, conducted over the last decade. Overall, more food agency means the cook is more empowered to act. Adopting the paradigm of food agency into the consideration of everyday cooking practices has the potential to support transdisciplinary food scholarship integrating individual actions within a food system and thus inform nutrition and public health interventions related to meal preparation.

The Lexicocalorimeter: Gauging public health through caloric input and output on social media.

We propose and develop a Lexicocalorimeter: an online, interactive instrument for measuring the "caloric content" of social media and other large-scale texts. We do so by constructing extensive yet improvable tables of food and activity related phrases, and respectively assigning them with sourced estimates of caloric intake and expenditure. We show that for Twitter, our naive measures of "caloric input", "caloric output", and the ratio of these measures are all strong correlates with health and well-being measures for the contiguous United States. Our caloric balance measure in many cases outperforms both its constituent quantities; is tunable to specific health and well-being measures such as diabetes rates; has the capability of providing a real-time signal reflecting a population's health; and has the potential to be used alongside traditional survey data in the development of public policy and collective self-awareness. Because our Lexicocalorimeter is a linear superposition of principled phrase scores, we also show we can move beyond correlations to explore what people talk about in collective detail, and assist in the understanding and explanation of how population-scale conditions vary, a capacity unavailable to black-box type methods.

Replication Improves Sorting-Task Results Analyzed by DISTATIS in a Consumer Study of American Bourbon and Rye Whiskeys.

In consumer food-sensory studies, sorting and closely related methods (for example, projective mapping) have often been applied to large product sets which are complex and fatiguing for panelists. Analysis of sorting by Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) is common, but this method discards relevant individual decisions; analysis by DISTATIS, which accounts for individual differences, is gaining acceptance. This research posits that replication can improve DISTATIS analysis by stabilizing consumer sensory maps, which are often extremely unstable. As a case study a fatiguing product set was sorted: 10 American whiskeys-5 bourbons and 5 ryes-were sorted into groups by 21 consumers over 2 replications. These products were chosen because American whiskeys are some of the most important distilled beverages in today's market; in particular, "bourbon" (mashbill more than 50% corn) and "rye" (more than 50% rye) whiskeys are important and assumed to be products with distinct sensory attributes. However, there is almost no scientific information about their sensory properties. Data were analyzed using standard and aggregated DISTATIS and MDS. No significant relationship between mashbill and consumer categorization in whiskeys was found; instead, there was evidence of producer and aging effects. aggregated DISTATIS was found to provide more stable results than without replication, and DISTATIS results provided a number of benefits over MDS, including bootstrapped confidence intervals for product separation. In addition, this is the first published evidence that mashbill does not determine sensory properties of American whiskey: bourbons and ryes, while legally distinct, were not separated by consumers.

"A little information excites us." Consumer sensory experience of Vermont artisan cheese as active practice.

This research is concerned with explaining consumer preference for Vermont artisan cheese and the relationship between that preference and sensory experience. Artisan cheesemaking is increasingly an important part of Vermont's dairy sector, and this tracks a growing trend of artisan agricultural practice in the United States. In popular discourse and academic research into products like artisan cheese, consumers explain their preferences in terms of intrinsic sensory and extrinsic - supposedly nonsensory - food qualities. In laboratory sensory studies, however, the relationship between preference, intrinsic, and extrinsic qualities changes or disappears. In contrast, this study explains this relationship by adopting a social theory of sensory perception as a practice in everyday life. This theory is applied to a series of focus group interviews with Vermont artisan cheese consumers about their everyday perceptions. Based on the data, a conceptual framework for the sensory perception of Vermont artisan cheese is suggested: consumers combine information about producer practice, social context, and the materiality of the product through an active, learned practice of sensory perception. Particular qualities that drive consumer sensory experience and preference are identified from the interview data. Many of these qualities are difficult to categorize as entirely intrinsic or extrinsic, highlighting the need for developing new approaches of sensory evaluation in order to fully capture everyday consumer sensory perception. Thus, this research demonstrates that social theory provides new and valuable insights into consumer sensory preference for Vermont artisan cheese.