Marilynn Schnepf, PhD

　　Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences, University of Nebraska Lincoln, USA

　　In the 1970’s and 1980’s the academic and professional disciplines of food science and nutrition were often separated by content and found in different colleges. Nutrition was involved with preparing students, most who were female, for careers in dietetics and food service management. Food science was becoming a separate field of study involved with preparing students for careers in various aspects of the food industry. Changes started to occur as consumers were eating more food prepared outside the home. The food industry came to realize that nutrition could be used to promote the sales of their products.  Nutritionists realized that nutrition was not the main reason people were selecting foods to eat. Often taste, convenience and cost were rated as more important that nutrition when deciding what to eat. In many universities nutrition and food science merged into one department or were encouraged to work together. A more recent development is the rise of culinology as an academic discipline. Culinology is a merger of food science and culinary arts. This discipline is the result of the desire of the food industry to hire people who have knowledge of not only the science of food but also the art of food. When knowledge of nutrition was added, food developed by the food industry could meet the sensory and nutritional qualities of food as well as optimizing industry’s production needs. The next development of the two sciences working together was the development of functional foods. Functional foods are defined as foods that contain nutritional benefits beyond the usual nutrients found in foods. These functional nutrients include phytochemicals, antioxidants, or botanicals. As consumers become more interested in the nutritional properties of foods this segment of the food industry is likely to grow.