2005: Making Sense of Food

'Making Sense of Food' was the title of the third Food Summit meeting organized by the Structure and Functionality group of Wageningen Centre for Food Sciences (WCFS).
Following two highly successful meetings on Perception and Texture Dynamics, the third meeting focussed on the interactions between food and the human response system. This does not only deal with understanding how properties of food start a series of events (ingestion, mastication, swallowing, digestion) leading to sensory responses such as 'liking'. The meeting also discussed how properties of food help regulate food intake. Taking food as the trigger, we discussed what processes are induced and how they are interrelated: from the first visual and olfactory sensing of food down to the metabolic and hormonal level, in turn affecting perception. We also focussed on the measurement of such responses, discussed state-of-the-art technologies, their interpretation and how they can help us to understand the human response system.