Chemistry of Food and Drink around the World

For the past five years, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has been promoting the relevance of chemistry to everyday lives by teaching a course on the Chemistry of Food. Open to all students who have completed an introductory chemistry course, the course has been extremely popular among students at every level and from every major. Recently, the course was expanded to include an international component. With minor adjustments to the course technical content, “The Chemistry of Food and Drink in Japan” was offered the spring quarter of 2023. After learning fundamentals of food chemistry alongside fundamentals of Japanese food and culture, fourteen students travelled with two faculty to Japan for a two-week excursion. As an interesting side-benefit to this trip, two students not enrolled in the course were happy to be able to travel with the class to Kanazawa to participate in undergraduate research for the summer at Kanazawa Institute of Technology. The course was offered a second time in spring quarter of 2024. Demonstrating the flexibility of the course structure, ‘The Chemistry of Food and drink in Greece’ was offered spring of 2025. In addition, plans are underway to take the course to Italy in the spring of 2026. This chapter will present the structure of the course and student response to the experience.