NFOK20000U Meal Systems and Technologies

Volume 2023/2024
Education

MSc Programme in Integrated Food Studies

Content

Governments and local authorities have an important role and responsibility in ensuring food and meals for a wide range of people. These include elderly people in care homes, ensuring ‘healthy’ eating opportunities for children in schools and kindergartens, meeting the nutritional needs of hospital patients, to meals for prisoners or the armed forces and often the workforce employed in government service.

Public meals in this respect are highly complex and diverse food systems with technical, political and procurement challenges.

This course will concentrate on the public meals systems, introducing aspects of the role that technology plays in them, such as the processing, food quality, food safety and sustainability. The course covers both national and international perspectives on meal system. The course touches upon opportunities and barriers to system changes in relation to producing healthy, sustainable, palatable and ethical meals. In addition, as part of the course students will conduct innovative meal centered experiments at the Future Consumer Lab using different behavioral change strategies, e.g. nudging.

A common theme running throughout the lessons will be the public health nutrition approach to food-related issues. This means the application of a logic sequence to be followed for identifying problems and solving them using public meals to meet nutrition and health objectives. For this approach, the students will be introduced to basic statistics and the application of it.

Learning Outcome

After completion of the course it is expected that the student has achieved the following qualifications:

Knowledge

  • Knowledge and understanding of the history and development of public food systems
  • Knowledge of the approach to public meals from a public health nutrition (PHN) perspective
  • Knowledge about how public food supply chains are organised and work as a ‘food system’, including food preservation methods, good manufacturing practices, and hazard analysis and food hygiene
  • Knowledge about how technical issues relate to public food systems
  • Knowledge and comprehension on how sustainability and nutrition concerns are impacting public food systems
  • Knowledge about basic statistics.

 

Skills

  • Assess the different public food systems from an integrated PHN approach
  • Understand and apply nudging and choice architecture in a meal setting
  • Ability to design and solve a multi-disciplinary problem within public food systems
  • Use kitchen-lab facilities
  • Apply descriptive statistics to collected data using appropriate software
  • Communicate research results in scientific writing.

 

Competences

  • Integrate the public health nutrition aspects to the public meals systems
  • Critically analyse specific public meal systems and technologies
  • Contribute critically to the design of public meal systems including technological design of production, procurement, serving and catering
  • Ability to conduct meal centered research
  • Ability to collaborate and contribute effectively in group work.
Literature

See Absalon for a list of course litterature.

Academic qualifications equivalent to a BSc degree is recommended.
Teaching comprises a combination of lectures, exercises, experimental work, and working on a group assignment.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 53
  • Preparation
  • 80
  • Laboratory
  • 16
  • Project work
  • 50
  • Guidance
  • 6
  • Exam
  • 1
  • Total
  • 206
Written
Oral
Collective
Continuous feedback during the course of the semester
Feedback by final exam (In addition to the grade)
Credit
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Oral examination, 15 minutes
Type of assessment details
Individual oral examination about the group assignment and the course curriculum. Without preparation time.

The student may use up to 5 minutes presenting their group assignment, before the questioning by the examiners.
Exam registration requirements

Preparation of a group assignment, handed in and approved by the supervisors before the oral exam.

 

Aid
All aids allowed
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
No external censorship
Several internal examiners.
Re-exam

The same as the ordinary exam. Non-approved group assignments must be edited and handed in two weeks prior to the re-exam date.

Criteria for exam assesment

See Learning Outcome.