Maria Micali - Böcker

This book presents the concept of food sharing from a European perspective, and provides a concise analysis of its safety implications and the chemical properties of recovered foods. In our modern world, 33% of the total food produced is lost each year, with serious economic, environmental and social consequences.

This book discusses the scope and limitations of the antimicrobial and antioxidant properties of foods as medicines or medicinal coadjuvants in traditional Indian herbal therapies.The first chapter introduces readers to the relevance of the Ayurveda system, its holistic classification approach, applications of selected herbs and the demonstrable efficacy of herbal extracts in terms of antimicrobial susceptibility. In turn, the second chapter discusses the antimicrobial properties and kinetic mechanisms of inhibition ascribed to selected vegetable extracts. The third chapter addresses the antioxidant power of phenolic compounds from vegetable products and herbal extracts. The book closes with a review of natural antioxidant agents’ role in the treatment of metabolic disorders.Written from an Indian perspective, this book unravels the chemistry of the traditional Indian diet and its impact on health. Further, it can serve as a reference for other traditional productswith similar health claims.

This Brief discusses aspects of the increasingly complex production of legal and reliable food products of non-animal origin.  It introduces to the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in the USA (from January 2011), which requires the food industry to follow risk-based approaches with stronger self-regulation of food safety through measures such as the foreign supplier verification programs (FSVPs). The Brief addresses important chemical hazards of vegetable products: their peculiar microbial ecology, that can become responsible for the occurrence of specific foodborne disease outbreaks, and the chemistry of the involved neurotoxins and other dangerous molecules, that can potentially lead to lethal pathological reactions.Finally, the Brief also critically discusses the technology of ready-to-eat vegetable products and chemical and physical modifications used for packed products (respiration of vegetables, colorimetric modifications, etc.).