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Food and cooking have become two of the nation's favourite pastimes. Now Professor Garry Lee is helping science students master the technology that underpins it all by helping draw up a new Master of Food Science course at UWA.

Prof. Lee is UWA's new Professor of Food Science, and the new course is set to enrol its first students this year.

He’s already made an impact on WA's food industry. Prof. Lee and his colleagues in the Centre of Forensic Science and TSW Analytical recently won an award from the Food Industry Association of WA for Best Service to the Industry.

They won for their work on what Professor Lee calls ‘traceability’.

With the help of funding from the Australian pork industry, the team developed a technology called Physitrace, which can help trace Australian-produced pork back to the farm.

"We export a lot of our pork to Asia, especially Singapore – it's a huge industry," Prof. Lee says.

"In the past, if anything was wrong with any of the pork from Australia, it could mean the entire market was thrown into chaos, with billions of dollars lost. Although there is a national livestock identity system there are loopholes in the system. We were able to close those loopholes with our technology based on chemistry and the environment.

"If any suspect pork is found in Singapore, they can send a sample back to us and, within 36 hours, we can say where that pig came from, so the whole industry is not hurt and can keep going, while that one producer is identified."

Problems with food quality aren’t the only worry. Prof. Lee says studies estimate that about 10 per cent of food in supermarkets is fraudulently labelled.

"I've seen New Zealand Kiwi fruits labelled as Italian, prawns from Vietnam selling as Australian, and a wine from China that tried to pass itself off as coming from the Coonawarra region of Australia," he says.

The industry-ready graduates from the new Masters degree will be trained in food provenance to help guard against such fraud.

Graduates with either a science or engineering degree can apply for the new program, which will start in second semester. The course has been developed in collaboration with Food Standards Australia and New Zealand, PathWest and the National Measurement Institute.

With so much insight into food production, does it stop Professor Lee eating anything?

"Come on, I'm Chinese. We eat everything!" he says.

"But I think I've put some people off eating chocolate by telling them how the cocoa farmers in the West Indies and Ivory Coast take their boots off and ‘polish' the beans by trampling them with their dirty sweaty feet, after which they are only very, very lightly roasted and ground.

"But don't worry, dark chocolate is high in antioxidants, so it is still very good for you."

(Article courtesy of UWA News).