Securing Our Future with Sustainable Food Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

In the last two decades, major alarming problems concerning the world, climate change and environmental pollution have caused negative impacts on food security and sustainability on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, recent developments, such as the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, have presented some additional hurdles when it comes to solving the growing food security problems. Thus, intensifying scientific efforts might be the only option of finding innovative synergetic solutions for the colossal sustainability problems in the food industry.

This Special Issue aims to publish high-quality original research and review articles related to a wide range of sustainability topics in food technology. For example, recently, increasingly more scientists in the food industry have been screening agro-industrial wastes and plant by-products to extract and characterize natural hydrocolloids capable of showing health benefits, nutritive values or technological functions comparable to animal hydrocolloids. Similarly, there has been growing interest in food applications of hydrocolloids extracted from seaweed grown using sustainable methods. Another huge trend is the change of chemical food additives (e.g., preservatives, antioxidants and colorants) with natural plant secondary metabolites (e.g., phenolic compounds, carotenoids and betalains) extracted from fruit and vegetable processing waste. This Special Issue is highly interested in green extraction and purification methods, as well as innovative food applications of natural hydrocolloids and secondary plant metabolites. Another important topic for this Special Issue is the development of plant alternatives to animal-sourced food. In the past, no one expected to witness a huge interest in mayonnaise, cheese and burgers composed of legume proteins or jerky from mushrooms. Now, it is possible to obtain mayonnaise without egg protein, cheese without milk, and burgers and jerky without meat, with everyone realizing that this is more than a rising trend in veganism. In fact, it is clear that growing legumes or mushrooms causes a significantly smaller carbon footprint, uses much less land and water and generates less environmental pollution compared to farming, slaughtering and processing livestock. Sustainability problems concerning livestock have also caused significant interest in producing meat using animal cell cultures at an industrial scale. Singapore was the first country that approved cultivated chicken meat for human consumption, but the application of this sustainable meat production method in the USA and EU is just a matter of time. Thus, articles related to the development and processing of cultivated beef and chicken meat are also welcome. Another revolutionary sustainability solution supported by this Special Issue is the transformation of packaging from fossil plastics to sustainable bioplastics or natural hydrocolloids. Recent reports related to the presence of microparticles of fossil plastics in human blood and faeces have caused alarms to ring when it comes to the use of fossil plastics in food servicing and packaging. Therefore, novel methods of improving the economic feasibility, processing technologies and properties (e.g., mechanical and barrier as well as antimicrobial, antioxidant and bioactive properties) of sustainable packaging materials highly fit in with this Special Issue. Finally, the biopreservation achieved through the use of antimicrobial enzymes, fermentation, protective cultures, bacteriophages, etc., in food preservation instead of chemical preservatives and energy-consuming thermal and nonthermal processes is also a hot sustainability topic that must be included in this Special Issue.

We look forward for your submissions related to the food technology topics discussed in this summary, but please note that we are open to evaluating any alternative sustainability works related to this field. Let us help contribute to the efforts of securing our future with more sustainable food technologies.

Prof. Dr. Ahmet Yemenicioglu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• sustainable food processing
• sustainable food technology
• green extraction
• plant protein
• cultured meat
• cultivated meat
• natural hydrocolloids
• bioplastics
• edible packaging
• biopreservation