Review: Quality of animal-source foods.

This article critically reviews the current state of knowledge on the quality of animal-source foods according to animal production and food processing conditions, including consumer expectations-behaviours and the effects of consumption of animal-source foods on human health. Quality has been defined through seven core attributes: safety, commercial, sensory, nutritional, technological, convenience, and image. Image covers ethical, cultural and environmental dimensions associated with the origin of the food and the way it is produced and processed. This framework enabled to highlight the priorities given to the different quality attributes. It also helped to identify potential antagonisms and synergies among quality attributes, between production and processing stages, and among stakeholders. Primacy is essentially given to commercial quality attributes, especially for standard commodity animal-source foods. This primacy has strongly influenced genetic selection and farming practices in all livestock commodity chains and enabled substantial quantitative gains, although at the expense of other quality traits. Focal issues are the destructuration of chicken muscle that compromises sensory, nutritional and image quality attributes, and the fate of males in the egg and dairy sectors, which have heavily specialised their animals. Quality can be gained but can also be lost throughout the farm-to-fork continuum. Our review highlights critical factors and periods throughout animal production and food processing routes, such as on-farm practices, notably animal feeding, preslaughter and slaughter phases, food processing techniques, and food formulation. It also reveals on-farm and processing factors that create antagonisms among quality attributes, such as the castration of male pigs, the substitution of marine-source feed by plant-based feed in fish, and the use of sodium nitrite in meat processing. These antagonisms require scientific data to identify trade-offs among quality attributes and/or solutions to help overcome these tensions. However, there are also food products that value synergies between quality attributes and between production and processing phases, particularly Geographical Indications, such as for cheese and dry-cured ham. Human epidemiological studies have found associations between consumption of animal-source foods and increased or decreased risk for chronic non-communicable diseases. These associations have informed public health recommendations. However, they have not yet considered animal production and food processing conditions. A concerted and collaborative effort is needed from scientists working in animal science, food process engineering, consumer science, human nutrition and epidemiology in order to address this research gap. Avenues for research and main options for policy action are discussed.

Deciphering the protein digestion of meat products for the elderly by in vitro food oral processing and gastric dynamic digestion, peptidome analysis and modeling.

The elderly population will increase sharply in the future, along with an emerging range of specific nutritional needs that include adapted food. We aimed to develop a workflow to study the fate of a food, objectify the bioavailability of nutrients in the case of the digestive physiology of the elderly, and model the fate of proteins in the stomach. Pork frankfurters were subjected to in vitro normal and deficient mastication and gastric digestion, mimicking adult and elderly food oral and digestive processing. Swallowable food boluses were characterized for granulometric and rheological properties. Biochemical analyses were conducted on the bolus and on the digesta. Macronutrients, label-free peptide quantification and identification were performed, and modeling was applied to protein digestion kinetics. After deficient mastication, the food bolus was harder with more large particles, lower free iron release and more protein oxidation. The amount of peptides released in the stomach progressively increased, but to a lower extent for the elderly digestive condition and irrespective of masticatory efficiency. 592 peptides were identified from 67 proteins. Different trajectories were observed for adult and elderly digestive conditions, and two groups of meat proteins were identified based on the rate of hydrolysis. Designing suitable foods requires in vitro tools to evaluate the possible benefit for the elderly. Besides the well-known notion of Food Oral Processing (FOP), our work broadens the concept by extending oral activity to digestion when working in a nutritional context. This new concept is named Food Oral and Digestive Processing, FODP.

Modeling of Camembert-type cheese mass loss in a ripening chamber: main biological and physical phenomena.

A model of the mass loss of Camembert-type cheese was established with data obtained from 2 experimental ripening trials carried out in 2 pilot ripening chambers. During these experiments, a cheese was continuously weighed and the relative humidity, temperature, oxygen, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the ripening chamber were recorded online. The aim was to establish a simple but accurate model that would predict cheese mass changes according to available online measurements. The main hypotheses were that 1) the cheese water activity was constant during ripening, 2) the respiratory activity of the microflora played a major role by inducing heat production, combined with important water evaporation, 3) the temperature gradient existing inside the cheese was negligible, and the limiting phenomenon was the convective transfer. The water activity and the specific heat of the cheeses were assessed by offline measurements. The others parameters in the model were obtained from the literature. This dynamic model was built with 2 state variables: the cheese mass and the surface temperature of the cheese. In this way, only the heat transfer coefficient had to be fitted, and it was strongly determined by the airflow characteristics close to the cheeses. Model efficiency was illustrated by comparing the estimated and measured mass and the mass loss rate for the 2 studied runs; the relative errors were less than 1.9 and 3.2% for the mass loss and the mass loss rate, respectively. The dynamic effects of special events, such as room defrosting or changes in chamber relative humidity, were well described by the model, especially in terms of kinetics (mass loss rates).