FoodBalt Day 2

Anja Warmerdam had the pleasure to write a report of the second and last day of the FoodBalt 2012 conference:

After a nice conference dinner with traditional Lithuanian music and a good night of sleep, I have the task today to write you a nice story on this blog. Today is the last official day of the trip and the last day of the FoodBalt conference: tomorrow we are leaving the Baltics. When we woke up, we immediately saw the weather was much better than yesterday: the sun was shining! The PhD trip committee arranged us a nice breakfast and then we made a short walk from the hostel to the conference.

Today it was ‘our’ turn to present our work in the conference. There was a special guest session arranged in the morning: “Food Science and Technology in the Netherlands”. Remko was chairing the session together with Audrius Pukalskas. Before some of us could present their work, Huub Lelieveld (GHI president), key note speaker of today told us about the possibilities of PEF (pulsed electric field) as a replacement of cooking. Instead of cooking foods for (in some cases) several hours, PEF can be used to pretreat foods in less than a second!

Huub Lelieveld

After this presentation, we had nice, interesting and lively presentations from Kashif, Yvette, Pascalle, Jimmy, Karolina, Nicolas and Marta. Marta was actually forgotten in the conference program, but Remko nicely made some space for her. While Marta (as the last speaker of the morning session and the last presenter in our complete tour) still had the microphone, she took the opportunity to thank professor Venskutonis for receiving us at the conference.

A bit later that we are used to, it was time for coffee and at the same time we had to present the posters that we brought. Most of our posters were placed in a small abandoned corridor where only a few people came: a pity.

The second session of the day was called: “Various aspects of food science and technology” and we heard several presentations about e.g. modeling of the cooling rate of freshly baked bread, stability of lycopene in (processed) tomato, and properties of whey protein films around strawberries and apples from people from Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. Around 13.00h we had a nice warm meal: I think we (at least the Dutchies among us) ate the last two weeks much more warm food and less bread than we normally do. During the lunch break there was another opportunity to view and present the posters, but considering the interest and place of our posters we went outside and enjoyed the sun.

The third session of the day was called: “Various aspects of food chemistry and technology”. Lots of results about obesity, chervil, and  phenolic compounds were presented by people from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Around 16.15h, presentations were finished and the conference was closed by professor Venskutonis. He handed out 188 certificates to all the participants and mentioned especially the group from Wageningen that was present.

 Overall, I think we can say that this conference was a special experience and that the main message of the day for us was that we are rather spoiled in Wageningen with all the equipment and possibilities that we have available.

Afterwards, everyone went his own way. Some went to the shopping centre, some went for a walk, some went running, and some just relaxed in the hostel room. Around 7pm we met again in a restaurant called ChilliPica. The dishes that we ate varied from pizza’s and pasta’s to chicken with French fries, and salads. The drinks didn’t vary that much: a few juices, some cokes, but mainly BEER. At least three taps with five liters of beer were ordered which resulted in very nice, for ‘stukjes’ usable pictures ;-). It was a nice celebration of a very successful PhD trip. Remko thanked the organizers Marta, Martin, Maurice, Nicolas, and Rianne for all their efforts and as a present they got a nice T-shirt and hat or shawl and flags from the Baltic States and Finland.

A very happy PhD trip committee

Tomorrow, we will hopefully have a good flight home without any active volcano’s on our way!

Best wishes,

Anja (W.)