I am writing this in an hotel lobby in Gent, Belgium. It is after an intensive course on meat science. I have two more days to go.

Today, I stretched my brain a bit by learning about fermented meats (salami and the like) and proteomics (please, as a consumer, do not worry about theses technical terms- in simple terms it is a study of proteins).

Over the years, I have broadened my knowledge in Food science into different disciplines. I started as a simple Food scientist. I advanced my food science skills by going into food engineering specifically understanding freezing food below certain temperatures makes it to last ‘forever’. They call these temperature; glass transition temperatures, in short Tg.

It means, after freezing your food below these temperatures, it becomes like glass (brittle solid with limited molecular mobility).

After that I have done a lot of other things which include edible food packaging i.e. edible films, microwave heating of foods and crispiness of foods.

Learning is continuous process, currently, am working in the area of ‘futuristic cooking methods’. We are trying to develop methods which cook meat and other foods without increasing temperature. Yes, you read it right. Cooking food at 25 °C or below. These are the technologies to be used in near future. The advantage of such cooking techniques is that you retain all vitamins, nutrients and flavour.

This week, am being taught what is meat, how is it processed, where are we going with meat? Are we all going to turn vegetarians or meat has a place in our future plates. Anyway, do not worry about it for now, time will tell.

Finally, as a reader of my website, I thought it is good that I bring it to your attention that my article was published in Daily Nation Yesterday. In that article, I was wondering whether being rich has disadvantages to health. If you did not get a chance to read it, you can access it on the following link. Is wealth a disadvantage to health?