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About This Book

Welcome from Zyme

Welcome!

Zyme waving welcome Science is delicious! Every meal you eat is a chemistry experiment, a biology lab, and a physics demo all at once. This book exists because you deserve to know why your toast turns brown, why yogurt is tangy, and why the food on your plate traveled thousands of miles before landing there. Welcome — let's bubble up some answers together!

Why This Intelligent Textbook

Food is the most personal science there is — every human being on Earth interacts with it multiple times a day. Yet most high school curricula treat food science as a footnote tucked into a general chemistry or health class, leaving students without the analytical tools to evaluate the nutrition claims on a cereal box, understand a foodborne illness outbreak, or reason about the environmental cost of what they eat.

In the United States:

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 48 million Americans — roughly 1 in 6 — suffer a foodborne illness each year, resulting in 128,000 hospitalizations and approximately 3,000 deaths annually1
  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 17% job growth for food scientists and food technologists through 2032, nearly three times the national average for all occupations2
  • According to the USDA Economic Research Service, 30–40% of the U.S. food supply is lost or wasted — roughly 133 billion pounds of food per year — partly because consumers lack the science literacy to understand shelf life, storage, and spoilage3
  • The National Center for Education Statistics reports that only 22% of 8th-grade students scored at or above proficient in science on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)4

Worldwide:

  • The World Health Organization estimates that 600 million people — nearly 1 in 10 worldwide — fall ill after eating contaminated food each year, and 420,000 die as a result5
  • The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects that global food production must increase by approximately 70% by 2050 to feed a growing world population, requiring millions of food scientists, food engineers, and informed citizens to make that possible6

These numbers represent real students — your peers — who will graduate without ever learning what makes bread rise, why refrigeration slows spoilage, or how to read a nutrition label critically. This textbook exists to close that gap.

This book takes a fundamentally different approach from a traditional food science text. It is built on a learning graph of 241 interconnected concepts organized across 14 topic categories. Concepts are introduced in the precise order their prerequisites are established, so understanding builds naturally from chapter to chapter — no jumping ahead, no confusion about missing background knowledge. Throughout the book you will find interactive MicroSims — browser-based simulations where you can adjust pH sliders, watch yeast populations grow in real time, or trace energy flows through a cooking process. The entire textbook is open source and free — no paywalls, no access codes, no expensive annual editions. It was written specifically for 9th-grade students at an accessible reading level, with every key term defined on first use.

How to Use This Book

This textbook is designed for self-paced study. Each chapter builds on previous material, so reading in order is recommended for first-time learners. The book includes:

  • 15 Chapters covering food chemistry, heat and cooking, baking science, food microbiology, food safety, nutrition, food preservation, sensory science, food technology, agricultural systems, farm-to-table food systems, global food cultures, and food engineering and innovation
  • Interactive MicroSims embedded in chapters — browser-based simulations you can manipulate to explore concepts without any setup or cleanup
  • Quizzes at the end of each chapter to self-assess understanding before moving on
  • Annotated References linking to Wikipedia and authoritative sources for deeper reading
  • Glossary with definitions for every key concept used in the book
  • FAQ with answers to the most common student questions
  • Learning Graph visualizing all 241 concept dependencies in an interactive explorer
  • Stories — twelve illustrated graphic-novel narratives about real food scientists and their discoveries
  • Search available from any page using the search bar in the upper right corner

The Learning Graph is a particularly powerful tool: it shows you exactly how concepts connect across chapters. If you want to explore non-linearly, check what you need to know before tackling a specific topic, or see the big picture of the entire course at once, start there.

About the Author

Dan McCreary is a semi-retired AI researcher, solution architect, and educator who has spent more than three decades helping Fortune 100 organizations reason over massive datasets. At Optum he founded the Generative AI Center of Excellence and led the team that built one of the world's largest healthcare knowledge graphs — spanning over 25 billion vertices — to unify member, provider, and patient insights. Dan's deep background in knowledge representation and systems thinking underpins the precise learning graphs and intelligent textbook workflows used throughout this course.

He is the co-author of Making Sense of NoSQL (Manning Publications), the founding chair of the NoSQL Now! conference, and a frequent keynote speaker on semantic search, ontology strategy, and AI hardware. Beyond industry, Dan has mentored students as a STEM volunteer since 2014 and now applies the same rigor to building open educational resources. You can visit the Intelligent Textbooks Case Studies to see over 87 textbooks that Dan has created or co-created with other authors.

Selected Credentials

  • B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Carleton College
  • M.S.E.E. from the University of Minnesota
  • MBA coursework at the University of St. Thomas
  • Patent holder in semantic search and ontology management techniques
  • Advocate for large-scale Enterprise Knowledge Graph adoption across healthcare and education
  • Long-time promoter of accessible, low-cost AI-powered learning experiences

Acknowledgement

This course was suggested by, Laura Kimball who is a science teacher at the Minnetonka Middle School East. She teaches this course for in her junior high school in Minnesota.

How to Cite This Book

If you reference this textbook in academic work, curriculum proposals, lesson plans, or other publications, please use one of the following citation formats.

APA (7th edition)

McCreary, D. (2026). Food Science for 9th Grade. https://dmccreary.github.io/food-science/

Chicago (17th edition)

McCreary, Dan. 2026. Food Science for 9th Grade. https://dmccreary.github.io/food-science/.

MLA (9th edition)

McCreary, Dan. Food Science for 9th Grade. 2026, dmccreary.github.io/food-science/.

BibTeX

@book{mccreary2026foodscience,
  title     = {Food Science for 9th Grade},
  author    = {McCreary, Dan},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://dmccreary.github.io/food-science/},
  note      = {Interactive intelligent textbook}
}

To cite a specific chapter, append the chapter number and title — for example:

McCreary, D. (2026). Chapter 1: Science in the Kitchen. In Food Science for 9th Grade. https://dmccreary.github.io/food-science/chapters/01-science-in-the-kitchen/

License

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the material for non-commercial purposes as long as you give appropriate credit and share your adaptations under the same license.

References

  1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Foodborne illness surveillance. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/ ↩

  2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). Occupational Outlook Handbook: Agricultural and Food Scientists. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/agricultural-and-food-scientists.htm ↩

  3. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. (2023). Food loss and waste in the United States. https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs ↩

  4. National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). NAEP Science: National Results Overview. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/science/ ↩

  5. World Health Organization. (2023). Food safety: Key facts. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/food-safety ↩

  6. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2009). How to Feed the World in 2050. https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/expert_paper/How_to_Feed_the_World_in_2050.pdf ↩