Australian food science 2 *: 1940 to 1970--some personal recollections. (Retrospective).

In a recent visit to the Science Museum in South Kensington, London, I found myself looking at a laboratory from the 1890s. It was in essence the laboratory I had walked into when I joined Kraft Walker Cheese Co from university in 1938. The beam balances and glassware were the same. Nothing much had changed in forty years. We soon got modern balances with air damping and remote control of the addition of the minor weights, but it was some years before Quickfit glassware appeared: reflux condensers and the Soxhlets for fat extractions were secured to the flasks with corks. Kraft had a large, for those days, laboratory staff of about twelve, mainly girls. There was not a single qualified person among them, though some were studying part-time. The chief chemist was only partly qualified, but received me graciously. They all knew far more about food analysis than I did and, luckily, I said so. The methods in daily use were Kjeldahl nitrogens for protein, ether extraction for fat, Munson and Walker for carbohydrat es, oven drying for moisture, incineration for ash with colorimetric methods for metals, Volhard for chloride, and so on. There were no instrumental methods that are so familiar today and the only chromatography available was Tswett's macro-columns. In the mid-forties, I sought to separate the protein derivatives in Vegemite by saturation and half-saturation with ammonium sulphate. It was crude and time-consuming but was symptomatic of the relatively elementary nature of contemporary food science. What follows can only be a personal view of some examples of the development of food science in Australia over the following thirty years.

Though the laboratory I joined was essentially a control lab, especially during the war, there was a climate of research and development in Kraft. Dr CP Callister, a Melbourne DSc, supervised all of production and all technical matters and had himself developed Vegemite, established the parameters for cheese for processing and produced in a vacuum drier a perfectly satisfactory liver extract. Line management was fairly loose and, in effect, Dr Callister was my supervisor. I owe him much. In October 1938, six months after I had joined Kraft, he asked me to use the recently published Jansen thiochrome method to determine the vitamin B 1 (thiamin) in Vegemite. He knew that product had vitamin activity and roughly how much. RHA Plimmer in the 1920s and Katherine Coward in the 193Os had carried out animal assays, rats and pigeons respectively, on samples sent to London, but the chemical method opened up new possibilities. So, I bought an ordinary 'black' lamp as a UV source, and a selenium barrier layer photocell. The factory carpenters made me a box and the engineers a suitable mount for the lamp. I used a moving coil mirror galvanometer to throw a metre long beam onto the scale, and from a batch of ordinary test tubes I selected by trial and error a set with minimum and uniform fluorescence. This equipment was not very sensitive, but it worked. It was some years before we got a commercial fluorimeter. One gram of synthetic thiamin was flown in from America and, with this as a standard, I began to clean up Vegemite solutions sufficiently to enable me to measure thiochrome fluorescence. Eventually, I succeeded in measuring thiamin concentration and was able to study the process and to improve thiamin retention from 37% to 85% of the vitamin originally present in the raw material yeast.

This was the beginning of vitamin work on Vegemite and, I think, of the first systematic application of kinetics in food science which enabled us inter alia to predict the loss of vitamin activity on markets of g given mean temperatures. Sir Stanton Hicks, then setting up the Army Catering Corps, heard of it, visited me to see what it was all about, and wrote the product into he services ration scales. Paediatricians became interested because we could quote figures, and in due course, with reprints of original papers in my hands, I was able to brief directors of infant and maternal welfare in Melbourne and Sydney. Later, I had the opportunity of similarly briefing Dr Muriel Bell in New Zealand. In the meantime, we had added riboflavin to our fluorimetric measurements and Margaret Dick had perfected the microbiological assay of folic and nicotinic acids and of some amino acids also. By 1950, we knew a lot about these nutritional aspects of the product and were in touch with the relatively small band of dietiti ans then practising. During the war, we had also used Mamie Oliver's potentiornetric method for measuring vitamin C in black currant spread in army ration packs.

Kraft was not the only source of vii amin information. In 1937, in the Chemistry Department of the University of Melbourne, studies on vitamin A in fish liver oils had been carried out. In the early 1940s, RA Bottomley at Kimptons in Melbourne began to use the thiochrome method to study thiamin in flours and later measure riboflavin. ED Slater at the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra also conducted a survey of thiamin in wheat flours and, at Arnotts in Sydney, WBS Bishop used a fermentation method for thiamin.

All this was chemistry. We even used the microbiological assays to study chemical kinetics. To the end of the 1930s, Kraft had no microbiologist in the Melbourne factory though a technician had been trained to do elementary plate counts and was good at it it, but, with the outbreak of war in 1939, the company installed a separate microbiology laboratory and a graduate microbiologist. She was soon joined by Margaret Dick and when, shortly after, she transferred to the wartime Commonwealth Food Control Laboratories, Miss Dick was put in charge and began her distinguished career in food science. However, in 1936 Derek Shew had been appointed to Kraft's Allansford factory near Warrnambool. From about 1940 he began to follow up Whitehead's New Zealand work on the significance of bacteriophage in cheesemaking and so began Australian work on the scourge of the industry. With AJ Hodge of CSIRO, he succeeded in taking electron micrographs of phage particles attacking bacterial cells and when he left Kraft to go north, Margaret Dick carried on phage work for many years, collaborating where possible with CSIRO. For me, microbiology was at first a new aspect of food science and Miss Dick taught me much, especially in carrying the application of microbiological thinking into the factories with regular technical audits which anticipated the principles of hazard analysis of critical control points by some twenty years.

Gas chromatography became available in the 1950s and I realised that no self-respecting food company could ignore it. Accordingly, I readily agreed to the proposal of a senior chemist, Ken Weeks, that he should learn all about this new instrument by building one. I never regretted this. Ken became very knowledgeable and great benefits accrued--in flavour work, both positive and negative in that some taints were quickly traced and corrected, and in the study of head space gases in packages and the permeability of packaging films. But the leaders in flavour and taint studies were CSIRO laboratories in Melbourne and Sydney.

In the 1960s, atomic absorptiometry opened up new opportunities in trace metal analysis. Heavy metals were found where they had never been suspected, for example mercury in fish, cadmium in shellfish. Gas/liquid chromatography led to the identification and measurement of organic contaminants, specifically pesticides, but other agricultural chemicals as well and substances such as polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxin. The concentrations of these substances were often well below those of any public health significance but once identified they had to be accounted for and here, too, concentrations permitted in food were pushed lower and lower.

War had found the Australian food industry wanting. Very few companies knew anything about the scientific background of their products and processes, nor did most of them know anything about the nutritive value and dietetic significance of their products. Kraft was one of the exceptions. There was a strong technical support and all the departmental managers were qualified chemists or equivalent, but those companies not so well off depended on CSIR. The Section of Food Preservation became a Division in 1940, and its contribution to the Australian food industry during the war and to the establishment of Australian food science and technology, was enormous and crucial, far more so than all of industry combined. The story has been well told in 50 Years of Food Research, and JR Vickery's Food Science and Technology in Australia. I was fortunate to have many happy contacts with the Division of Food Preservation and continued to enjoy the friendship of staff members from Dr Vickery down. The response of whole secti ons of the Australian food industry to the challenge of science was to establish research institutes. The Bread Research Institute was founded in 1947, the Sugar Research Institute in 1949 and the Australian Wine Research Institute, formalising years of wine research, in 1955. All did excellent scientific work.

In 1942, the food industry was faced with US Quartermaster Corps demands for nutritive value and quality control and, especially in New South Wales, soon realised its need for instruction in food science and technology. Ad hoc courses were organised at the Sydney Technical College, and their development into formal courses in the now University of New South Wales is well known. Immediately after the war, dairy technologists organised the Australian Society of Dairy Technology, and industry, again in New South Wales, inaugurated the Food Technology Associations. I was not involved in any of these moves, nor with the formation, first in Sydney, and then in Melbourne, of sections of the Institute of Food Technologists, but I was soon drawn into the committee work of the Victorian Food Technology Association and the Institute of Food Technologists southern Australian section. Willy-nilly, I seem to have become closely involved in the setting up of a food technology course at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Tech nology and, more closely perhaps, in the foundation of the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology (AIFST,) partly in response to international moves towards the International Union of Food Science and Technology. The dietitians had begun to organise themselves in the 1930s, and as things settled down after the war, began to ask food companies about their products. It was not long, therefore, before I became a target, so to speak, for their enquiries and in due course I made many friends among their number. Through them I began to learn a lot about nutrition. I had to, because Kraft's policy was to cooperate in this burgeoning branch of food science and in 1950 I had become responsible for the whole of Kraft's scientific and technical activities other than the various branches of engineering.

In the early 1950s, the world's food regulators began to realise that some food colours could be harmful and that a whole range of substances were becoming available as functional additives for food. Thanks to alert officers in the Commonwealth Department of Health, Australia was in the forefront of reaction to potential dangers and the Food Additives Committee (FAC) was set up in 1953. The Council of Australian Food Technology Associations nominated me for membership and I served for 33 years. In so doing I learnt a lot about toxicology from specialist members of FAC and its successors. The FAC preceded the establishment of the Food Standards Committee (FSC) which it eventually served. The FSC was guided for years by Associate Professor FH Reuter whose influence both on it and on the development of Australian education for food science and technology cannot be exaggerated. The FSC slowly edged towards the unification of Australian food standards, a goal reached only in the 1980s.

Supermarkets date from the 1950s and, perhaps, their greatest impact has been on packaging. The advances in plastics after the war changed packaging forever. It suddenly became science based. I realised this during a visit to the United States in 1956 and returned to set up a Packaging Section in Kraft research and development. I appointed the late Steve Muir to lead it and he soon showed a natural flair for it, becoming an authority on packaging films. In the same period, tanker collection of bulk refrigerated milk from the farms began and an unexpected result was a change in the milk flora. Psychrophils suddenly became important. Similarly unexpected was the appearance in the sixties of thyrotoxicosis in Tasmania. Bread was iodised as a precaution against goitre, but residual iodophors in milk from sanitisers used in the dairy industry caused trouble by increasing iodine intake, and alternatives were quickly introduced.

Though known in Australia from 1940, quick frozen food was essentially a post-war introduction and immediately problems with the cold chain became apparent. Some persist. The introduction of instant mashed potatoes in the 1960s depended on background science for the selection of potato varieties, their storage and processing, and from the same decade CSIRO Dairy Research Laboratories led Australian, and some international, research on membrane technology. Here, at last, was a science-based technology leading to the recovery of useful functional products from whey and many other applications in the food industry.

Early in the 1960s Kraft heavily promoted the salad habit. Primarily it was to sell a range of salad dressings being developed, but it was also sound nutrition. However, in this period several controversial nutritional issues emerged--the postulated relationship of fat intake, cholesterol and heart disease, fibre as protector against bowel cancer, salt as a factor in high blood pressure, and sugar as 'empty calories' and a promoter of dental caries. Possibly the most dramatic was the first. The food industry was predictably defensive and its response was coloured by contradictory scientific results. It would seem that, on the whole, Australia generally avoided the worst of the overseas controversies. The resolution of all these matters lies beyond 1970, but there is no doubt that during the 1960s the food industry became much more sensitive to the need for more knowledge of the nutritional status of its products. The gathering of it was facilitated by the availability of sophisticated instrumentation for cont rol measurements of, for example, moisture and protein, and by the more advanced automatic amino acid analyser as well as the atomic absorptiometry and gas/liquid chromatography already referred to. By 1970, a food laboratory was a totally different place from the one I had entered 32 years previously. Now, dominated by video display units, it is different again.

In 1970, I was President of AIFST and Nancy Turner (later Cats) was President of the Australian Dietetic Council. She and one or two others prevailed on me to approach the council of the Australia New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) for a new section, Food Science and Nutrition. To that point we had been dependent on Chemistry and Biochemistry. So, I wrote a letter and then journeyed to Adelaide to present the case verbally to a council meeting preceding the 1970 Adelaide meeting of ANZAAS. We succeeded and Section 27 was included in the program for the Brisbane meeting in 1972.

No brief account can convey the excitement of the post-war decades. The volume of research in food science and technology increased exponentially and government and industry reacted to the challenges and opportunities. The food industry and the professional s organised themselves into associations and institutes, the formal teaching of food science and technology began, food regulators became more sophisticated as they embodied scientific advances at home and overseas, and specialised journals became established. But at the time few, if any, realised what an historic period it was. There were things to be done, and they did them.

The Retrospective section is coordinated by Nancy Hitchcock, a former Editor of the Journal.

* Australian food science I: to 1940, is published in Aust J Nutr Diet 2001 ;58(4):246-248.