Page 6 - Scientific reviews on meat analogues and plant-based ingredients

Preface
In the past years, a lot of scientific publications on plant-based foods were published. Especially plant-based foods aimed to mimic meat, so called meat analogues, received a lot of attention. Novel techniques to make meat analogue products were explored, but also new tools were described that allowed a better analysis of this type of products. Besides, many new plant-based ingredients were proposed for meat analogue applications. This book is a collection of review papers that describe these advancements and show how those contributed to the acceleration of meat analogue developments. We thank all scientific journals for their permissions to publish the papers in this book.
The idea for writing these reviews was born on March 16, 2020, when the first lockdown because of the corona virus was announced in the Netherlands. For us, it became a time of working from home with less access to the labs. To mitigate the consequences for (PhD-) students, we decided to focus on doing literature searches to thoroughly reflect on the scientific progress made on plant-based foods in recent years. The newly gained insights were captured in review papers, and this book presents those new review papers, as well as a few other recent reviews on related topics. It thus describes the today’s science and technology for meat analogues with respect to ingredients, processing and analysis.
We would like to thank the sponsors of the following projects that made our research possible:
• Plant Meat Matters (TKI-AF-16011), Topsector Agri & Food, Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, The Netherlands;
• PlantPromise (LWV-19027), Topsector Agri & Food, Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, The Netherlands;
• The GreenXProt project (36440.1 IP-LS), Swiss Innovation Agency ’Innosuisse’;
• The GreenProteins project (#12627), the Dutch Technology Foundation TTW (former STW);
• Intensified Protein Structuring Project (PI 00-03), The Institute of Sustainable Process Technology, The Netherlands