A beginner's guide to sugar and food engineering

Scientific breakthroughs in food engineering have allowed us to make substitutes of almost anything — in case you've ever wondered, here are the origins of how we discovered food engineering, and some alternatives they've created.

Since people first kept animals and grew plants for food they have been crossbreeding their best livestock and their most abundant plants to create meatier animals and to develop crops with higher yields. In the 18th century agricultural innovators started to intensify the process, becoming even more selective about the animals they chose for breeding.

A Leicestershire farmer's son, Robert Blackwell, was one of the pioneers; he created distinctive breeds such as Longhorn cattle, Leicestershire sheep and Large White pigs. Until the 1760s, British pigs retained the long-legged, slim form of the original wild boars; crossing them with plumper, short-legged Chinese pigs eventually led to the development of much larger, meatier animals.

When the Cambridge scientists Francis Crick and James Watson worked out the structure of DNA in 1953, they paved the way for genetic engineering in the 1980s. The first genetically engineered food to go on sale was the Flavr Savr tomato, introduced in the USA in 1994. The fruit had a shelf life of 50 days or more. This was made possible by blocking the action of the gene that allows rotting.

Accidental sugar alternatives

To satisfy their craving for sweetness, the Romans created sapa, an artificial sweetener made by concentrating grape must in lead-lined pots. It was sweet but also poisonous — because of the pots it was stored in — and caused miscarriages, headaches and anemia.

While investigating the reactions of certain coal-tar derivatives in 1879 at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, the American chemist Ira Remsen and a German student, Constantin Fahlberg, synthesized the compound orthobenzoyl sulphimide, and stumbled across a synthetic alternative to sugar. Having eaten some bread at his bench and found it sweet, Fahlberg realized that he must have had some of the substance on his fingers. Later analysis showed it was 300 times sweeter than sugar. Fahlberg filed a patent claim and obtained financial backing for the new product, which he named "saccharine."

One-tenth as sweet as saccharine but without saccharine's bitter aftertaste, cyclamate was discovered in 1937. Michael Sveda of the American chemical company DuPont was smoking in his laboratory and put his cigarette down on the edge of the bench. When he next put it to his lips he was struck by its intensely sweet taste. James Schlatter of the drug company G.D. Searle was searching for an anti-ulcer drug in 1965 when he realised that aspartame, a mixture of two amino acids — aspartic acid and phenylalanine — tasted sweet. Some 200 times sweeter than sugar, it was marketed in 1981 as NutraSweet.

• In 1935, the Japanese physician Minoru Shirota created a drink made from fermented milk, Yakult, that contained a lactic acid bacteria. His aim was to help people to maintain a healthy balance of bacteria in their intestines.
• Benecol, a full-fat margarine from Finland that reduces blood cholesterol levels, was introduced in 1996. Its key ingredient is sitostanol, a by-product of the wood-pulp industry, which inhibits the absorption of cholesterol.
• First marketed in 1985, Quorn is the protein produced by a mold that feeds on carbohydrates such as potatoes and rice.
• Discovered in 1879, saccharine was said to offer the benefits of sugar without the drawbacks. "Hermesetas dissolve instantly, have no after taste, and give you all the sweetness you want without the calories you don't,"claimed advertisements for a popular saccharine-based sweetener in the 1960s.