Course Learning Goals
- Students will be able to recognize major food biomolecules from their chemical structures and molecular formulas.
- Students will be able to recognize and identify the major food biomolecules, vitamins, minerals and selected additives from food packaging. If packaging is not available or uninformative, they will know how/where to find and interpret the information.
- Students will be able to assess the validity of food packaging claims such as: “high in protein”, “good source of Vitamin C”, “organic” with respect to health, nutrition and chemistry. Students will also be able to make informed decisions about how to cook a food in order to preserve or enhance nutritive molecules (e.g. prevent the breakdown of vitamins).
- Students will be able to assess the roles of components within a recipe as a function of their biomolecular composition and therefore their chemical and physical properties.
- Students will be able to predict the outcome of a recipe based on knowledge of 1) the recipe components as mixtures of biomolecules and 2) the physical and/or chemical interactions of those molecules that occur during cooking.
Course Materials
The Science of Cooking: Understanding the Biology and Chemistry Behind Food and Cooking; Joseph J. Provost, Keri L. Colabroy, Brenda S. Kelly , Mark A. Wallert; ISBN: 978-1-118-67420-8, 552 pages; May 2016
Laptop/computer with webcam and microphone. A headset is very useful, but not required.
Laboratory materials: Student needs access to a stove, oven and microwave. Bowls, pots, pans and utensils are also required. Whatever you have, we will make it work. Do not feel like you need to go an buy special kitchen tools.
Assignments
Students will interact with course content through a variety of assignments including, quizzes, exams, blogging (with text and images) and commenting.
CourseWork
Lessons
Each Lesson is like a “lecture”, but with comprehension questions to answer called “check-ins”. These are graded on completion. That means you can re-take any check-ins as many times as you want, until you have a perfect score.
Assignments
There may be a small number of assignments that will be turned in for a grade but also a large number of worksheets that practice for you and will not be graded.
Labs and Comments
Labs are really fun. You get to cook in your own kitchen, document your process with photo and video, and create a blog that catalogs your summer CHM 114 experience. You and your classmates will read and comment on the science of your blog posts in the Discussion forums. See the page Blogging for detailed info on how to set up your blog.
Quizzes
The quizzes are open notes and open book. They should be considered practice for the exam. There are a total of 7 quizzes.
Exams
There are two exams, a midterm and a final. You get to make a Crib Sheet (two-sides of an 8.5×11 page with any information you want) to use during the exam. The exams pull randomly from banks of questions I have created for each Lesson . The questions and answer choices are randomly shuffled. You will not have the exact same exam questions or the same answers in the same order as another classmate. If you prepare for the exams using the strategies I give you, everything will be fine.