A new food quality concept based on life processes

Joke Bloksma, Martin Northolt, Machteld Huber, Geert-Jan van der Burgt and Lucy van de Vijver, Louis Bolk Instituut, 

Consumers expect organic producers to provide healthy and tasty products. But which qualities enhance health and what is tasty And how can all this be realised by crop or stock management  

In the conventional vision, product quality is mainly based on external, nutritive and sensory properties and is strongly directed by traders and trends. Besides tastiness and ripeness, organic consumers expect products to have properties such as vitality and coherence , which are not easy to define and thus to explain and transfer. In the past, experimental parameters have been proposed to estimate vitality and coherence , but they were neither scientifically validated nor related to a validated quality concept with relation to human health. 

Meanwhile, new questions have been raised. Is there indeed a relation between soil health, plant health and human health as expected in organic agriculture Is the quality of genetically modified and hybrid varieties less coherent , and if so, is this a health concern Do food crops with increased levels of vitamins or phenols enhance health What do coherence and ripeness mean in terms of taste and consumer health These questions are very topical, but they are based on vague notions of food quality. A new conceptual framework for these topical questions is needed, as well as better-defined concepts to operationalise these questions. 

The new quality concept was developed in cooperation with other research members of the international research association Organic Food Quality and Health (FQH, for projects and partners see www.organicfqhresearch.org). The research association was established to promote research into the health effects of good quality organic food and to develop parameters for quality assessment. The research members distinguish four lines of research  

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A new food quality concept based on life processes... 

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