For immediate release

Food

The Institute of Food Research is holding a public Open Day on Saturday 17th May from 10am to 4pm. No need to book, just turn up. If you're a football fan, don't worry, we'll be showing the FA Cup Final.

Food can give us immense pleasure - texture, flavour, mouth feel, warmth.

It can make us ill - slowly through the wrong diet, or quickly through food poisoning. It can even kill.

It can protect us against the most common chronic diseases in the UK: cancers, heart disease and type II diabetes.

Hardly a day goes past without a new piece of advice hitting the headlines: eat more of one food, less of another or avoid something altogether. This is your chance to put outstanding questions directly to a food researcher, see how food interacts with the human body and learn how Norfolk research contributes to science worldwide.

IFR has come a long way from its origins as the Low Temperature Research Station in Cambridge. Until the 1950s, food research focused on preservation methods. The LTRS gave us the science to eat perfectly ripened tropical fruits in the UK, including bananas. In 1956, a food scare involving the contamination of egg products by Salmonella triggered new research on food safety. Work on food quality began at the Food Research Institute in the 1960s and the next decade saw the first research into nutritional adequacy. UK food research was consolidated onto one site as the Institute of Food Research in 1999.

Today, cutting edge technology enables us to get right inside the human body to see how food impacts on our body and right inside food to maximise its nutritional and structural quality. We can disarm emerging pathogens, trace the authenticity of food, investigate how the body absorbs nutrients and improve food structure.

There has never been a greater opportunity in Norfolk to learn about food.

Notes to Editors

Please contact Zoe Dunford for more information, quotes, interviews and photos: 01603 255111 / zoe.dunford@ifr.ac.uk

For the list of displays, please visit our website: www.ifr.ac.uk/events

The programme of talks is as follows:

• 11.00 am Botulinum, Botox™ and Birds
  
• 11.45 am Is our food what we think it is?
  
• 12.30 pm Food allergy - distinguishing fact from fiction
  
• 1.15 pm What makes you, you and me, me. A walk round your genes
  
• 2.00 pm Behind the media headlines
  
• 3.00 pm FA Cup Final
  

Refreshments will be available all day.

Talks will also be video-streamed live to a plasma screen in the foyer, and the FA Cup will be broadcast in IFR's Hickling Room.

Photos available from IFR include:

• The diet cooks from the Human Nutrition Unit - humorous, human photo
  
• Pre-cancerous cells, polyps
  
• Pathogenic bacteria
  
• Human cells involved in immune defence
  
• Cells involved in allergic reactions
  
• Yeast
  
• Parma ham
  
• Wine
  
• Food waste (quite gruesome)
  
• Close-up of head of beer

Advance photo opportunities of VIPs:

• The Business and Media Open Day, Thursday 15th May, will be attended by the Lord Mayor of Norwich Councillor Derek Wood, Sheriff of Norwich Bryan Gunn and Chief Executive of South Norfolk District Council Geoff Rivers.
  
• Secretary of State for Education and MP for Norwich South, Charles Clarke, is planning to meet some of our visiting A' Level students on the Schools Open Day, Friday May 16th

Photo opportunities of VIPs on the day:

• Vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Food and Health Forum, Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen.
  
• Chair of the Science and Technology Select Committee and MP for Norwich North, Ian Gibson.

Visual highlights for television:

• Footage in X-ray of person chewing and swallowing a biscuit
  
• Footage of real time digestion of food, taken using technology similar to an MRI scanner
  
• Lots of choice on scientific imagery
  
• On the day: talks will also be video-streamed live to a plasma screen in the foyer, and will be recorded.

Audio highlights for radio:

• COBAS machine: whizzing, clunking, whirring. This machine does the biochemical analyses of blood and urine.
  
• Preparing food for scientific research: crunching apples, slicing onions.
  
• Sound of plate reader going in and out - motor type sound.
  
• Clunking robots used for DNA and RNA analysis.

The information and images contained within these pages are © Institute of Food Research unless otherwise stated. Information may be downloaded for educational and research purposes as long as the source is clearly credited.