Meal Systems and Technologies

Course 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 a highly complex and diverse food systems with many technical as well as political challenges.

This course will concentrate on the public meals systems and introducing aspects of the role of technology in public meals systems such as the processing, the importance of food quality, food safety and risk management as well as how technology shapes public meals systems and presents opportunities and barriers to system change. In addition, as part of the course students will be introduced to working in a kitchen-lab.

A common theme running throughout the module 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.

Education

MSc Programme in Integrated Food Studies

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.
  • Basal statistics.

 

Skills

  • Assess the different public food systems from an integrated PHN approach.
  • Use kitchen-lab facilities.
  • Work on a multi-disciplinary problem within public meals to address a specific challenge in specific public food systems

 

Competences

  • Integrate the public health nutrition aspects to the public meals systems.
  • Ability to analyse critically a specific public food system and technologies.
  • Contribute critically to the design of public food systems including technological design of production, serving and catering.

Teaching comprises a combination of lectures, exercises, experimental work, and working on a group assignment.

See Absalon for a list of course litterature.

Academic qualifications equivalent to a BSc degree is recommended.

Written
Oral
Individual
Collective
Continuous feedback during the course of the semester
Feedback by final exam (In addition to the grade)
ECTS
7,5 ECTS
Type of assessment
Oral examination, 15 minutes
Individual oral examination about the group assignment and the course curriculum. Without preparation time.
The student may use up to 3 minutes presenting their group assignment, before the questioning by the examinations.
Aid
All aids allowed
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
No external censorship
Several internal examiners.
Criteria for exam assessment

See Learning Outcome.

Single subject courses (day)

  • Category
  • Hours
  • Lectures
  • 45
  • Preparation
  • 80
  • Laboratory
  • 10
  • Project work
  • 50
  • Seminar
  • 8
  • Guidance
  • 12
  • Exam
  • 1
  • English
  • 206