Before you buy it, cook it, and serve it for dinner, your food goes through a lab for rigorous testing.

How is food tested? What are scientists looking for? Is there a significant difference between organic and standard produce?

Here from one expert who has been testing food for nearly 30 years.

She answers these questions and shares her findings on the state of our food supply.

That's next on this episode of Technology Today.

We live with technology, science, engineering, and the results of innovative research every day.

Now, let's understand it better. You're listening to the new

Technology Today podcast presented by Southwest Research Institute. Hello and welcome to technology

today. I'm your host, Lisa Benia. We're about to learn a new meaning for the phrase, clean your

plate as we discuss the science that is happening behind the scenes to make sure the

food that hits our plates is clean, fresh, and healthy. So what is in our food do we really know?

Even our produce can be hiding secrets. Our guest today and her team are experts at investigating

our food supply, both processed and fresh foods. Lorraine Scheller

is a laboratory manager and food chemistry expert at Southwest Research Institute, and she's here to talk

to us about determining the nutritional content of our food and detecting contaminants and residues

in food. Lorraine, thank you for being here. Good to be here.

Well, this is a topic that's really important for everyone.

We want quality food in our pantries and on our plates, and it's always jarring when there's a recall or news of something unsavory in a product or produce.

So let's start with a really basic question. Well, basic for me, for you,

but not so much for me. What is food chemistry? Food chemistry pretty much runs a gamut from

just simple ingredients to a fully processed food, vitamins, minerals, different types of fats, calories, sugar.

Everything you would see on a nutrition label makes up our food.

...