What is Carrageenan?
Carrageenan is a versatile fiber used in a variety of foods, personal care products, pharmaceutical products and dietary supplements. It's often used as a thickening agent in place of petrochemical and animal-based products.
Food is social. There’s always lots of conversation about taste, politics, recipes, health and more. Hear what some others are saying.
For as long as we’ve been eating, food ingredients have been used around the globe. Learn more about important ingredients, such as carrageenan, here.
For as long as we've been eating, food ingredients have been used around the globe.
The application of food science is even more important as the world population expands. Food science makes food available for billions of people. It allows us to produce and transport simple products such as milk, juice or ice cream. It makes delicious foods we already have even better.
The arc of food science progress might begin with the processing of food by cooking it, then drying, salting or freezing meat to preserve it. We have been adding color for centuries, throwing in beets or sugar cane as sweeteners and using seaweed to stabilize soups and stews. The industrial revolution and a move from farms to cities made the safe preservation and distribution of food through science a necessity and eventually an industry. Today, advances in food science are at the forefront of helping to address some of the world’s most pressing problems beginning with basic nutrition and extending well in healthy lifestyles.
And considering that we all eat, every one of us has an opinion about what and how we eat and how it should look and taste. We share those opinions at the dinner table and, increasingly, in online mediums like this one. Whether the subject is GMOs, gluten, sweeteners, coloring agents, stabilizers or preservatives we now have an abundance of opinion – much of it agenda-driven, substituting volume and accusation for facts. All this information and opinion on the food sciences has made us somehow less informed and more frightened.
At Dupont Nutrition & Health, we value science as pursuit of simple truth. We employ many of the world's most talented research scientists who also feed their own families every day. For more than a century we've established the atmost standards both for our science and the ingredients we produce.
We believe that it is reasonable to ask not only ‘What’s for dinner?’ but ‘What’s in dinner?’
To that end, we need to understand how to evaluate and appreciate the science of food. Because Food Science Matters.