This chapter explores food in hospitals. Like any other institutional catering or food service, a hospital has to provide meals for a large number of people with differing needs and preferences. Allowing for customers' diverse cultural and social food habits, and making mass-produced food that is palatable and safe, while paying attention to environmental sustainability, is a challenge for any large-scale catering endeavour. However, hospitals have an additional problem to solve: they are serving customers who are ill. During illness, it is normal to experience a loss of appetite, and hospital patients may have other issues preventing them from achieving an adequate nutritional intake. The chapter then considers policy approaches to the problem; strategies to improve food intake in hospital; and special diets and nutritional supplementation.
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Food in Hospitals
Suzie Ferrie
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Sustainable Food Production in the 21st Century
Maarten J. Chrispeels
This chapter discusses sustainable food production in the 21st century. Because virtually all available productive land is already being cultivated, the only way to significantly increase food production is through agricultural intensification: increasing the amount of crop produced per acre. Closing the yield gap, especially on smallholder farms, is essential to feeding humanity. Both breeding better crops through genetics and better agronomic practices are needed to close the yield gap. Research and education at all levels are also necessary. Moreover, all countries need to diminish the amount of food that is spoiled and otherwise wasted. Ultimately, creating a sustainable world will require decreasing the impact of agriculture on climate change.
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Introduced Traits That Benefit the Consumer
Maarten J. Chrispeels and Eliot M. Herman
This chapter describes crop-plant traits that primarily benefit consumers. Functional foods can be made in several ways: by traditional plant breeding, by genetic engineering, or by the addition of ingredients as foods are being processed. The Golden Rice Project shows an example of what can be achieved scientifically to address nutritional deficiencies by plant genetic engineering, but also how difficult it can be to bring the benefits to consumers. The chapter then looks at how biofortifying crops with iron is a major goal of nutritionists. It also considers heat-stable vegetable oils, particularly soybean oil; hypoallergenic foods; and the use of genetic engineering to reduce postharvest food losses.
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Plant Pathogens: Bacteria
John Elphinstone
This chapter examines bacterial plant diseases which affect a wide range of crops, ornamentals, and environmentally important plants and trees. It first reviews descriptions of bacterial plant diseases by the early pioneers in plant bacteriology, wherein many different genera of bacteria which damage plants were reported. It also highlights the enormous global impact of bacterial plant diseases in both social and financial terms. The chapter outlines types of economic losses that range from minor blemishes, such as spots, areas of dead tissue, or yellowing on leaves or fruit, to more serious rots, wilts, blights, and diebacks, which can spread through and devastate entire crops or areas of natural vegetation. It elaborates on how minor symptoms of bacterial plant diseases can still be economically significant if the loss in quality affects marketability, such as in the cases of high-value ornamental plants or food crops.
