Product Summery
Preface
This Dictionary of Foods is focussed on native foods, food products, processed foods and ingredients – totaling 12,000 terms in English and German, along with an appendix of 2000 scientific names of food plants and animals, each with its corresponding English and German common names. Major topics include:
Fruits, Vegetables, Grains Bakery Products Spices, Mushrooms, Algae Sugar & Confectionery Meats, Venison & Fowl Fats & Oils Dairy Products Beverages Seafood (Fish & Shellfish) Ingredients & Additives
Most anything has been tested for edibility and food choices vary, depending on availability, sociocultural preferences, and individual predisposition. Many potential foods require processing in order to become palatable or to improve tastiness,others can only be consumed in minute quantities, and some may exert medicinal benefits.
Market and trade names can be rather vague and may refer to entire groups of foods. For instance, the term “whitefish” is being used for more than a dozen distantly related fishes that only share the characteristic of firm and white flesh, “wine” is not necessarily made from grapes, and imitation “cheese” (or cheese analogue) is not a dairy product. For proper identification it is thus necessary to state the exact nature of the product and ingredients along with according scientific names and the origin of the food items.
This dictionary is useful for students and teachers of the food sciences and nutrition, as well as for individuals working in the food trade sector, in gastronomy and cooking, as well as for translators, public administrators, and specialists in the field of food marketing and advertisement.
The Dictionary of Foods lists the names of most food items on the market today in an attempt to help improve communication in the food sector, as much as at the dinner table!
Word Clusters. It is useful to group foods into natural categories. By comparison we often identify differences among apparently similar foods. Thus, in addition to the usual alphabetic listing, you will find word clusters, e.g., under milk, cheese, ham,and eggs – or tea, coffee, wine, and beer – or oil, sugar, grain, and salt. The major meat cuts are listed under beef, veal, pork, and lamb etc.
For entries under which multiple scientific names are listed, usually the first one will represent the currently valid name – the following names being synonyms.
Orthography. The new German orthography rules have been taken into account according to Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch, 8th edn. (2006), and Duden – Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, 24th edn. (2006), the English orthography follows the American spelling according to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edn. (2003).