Louise Slade, Scientist Who Studied the Molecules in Food, Dies at 74
By Clay Risen, 10/30/21, New York Times

It has been said that cooking is an art but baking is a
science, & perhaps no one understood that adage better
than Slade, whose research focused on how to keep dough,
bread, cookies & crackers tasting delicious even after
weeks on a grocery store shelf.

Traditional food science was sometimes derided, even by
its own practitioners, as “cook & look,” with researchers
testing different ingredients while adjusting countless
variables to get different results — a time-consuming &
expensive process that revealed little about the
underlying chemistry.

Slade’s great insight, which she developed over some
25 years as a scientist at General Foods & Kraft, was to
consider food not as a combination of discrete ingredients
but as a system of interacting molecules. By understanding
those interactions, one could build predictive models for
how, for example, to tweak a bread recipe to make it stay
fresh longer without chemical preservatives.

“She was the only person I knew who could swim among the
molecules & understand them at their most fundamental level,”
Hamed Faridi, the executive director of the McCormick Science
Inst, said in an interview. “Her strength was her impressive
knowledge of how those molecules interact to create flavor
& texture.”

Specifically, she recognized that natural polymers, like
proteins & starches, are everywhere in food, & that they act
in similar ways to synthetic polymers, like plastics & many
fabrics. As a result, she found, many of the same principles
that are applied in synthetic polymer science could be used
in food science as well. Among other advances, Slade was
able to show how ice cream could be formulated to stay soft
in the freezer — much the way some plastic stays flexible
even in the cold.

Her insight likewise proved valuable when it came to packaged
baked goods like cookies, potato chips & crackers, which need
to retain their respective chewiness & crunch thru temp
swings & exposure to moisture, light & air.

And those qualities need to be consistent. Despite being
made from organic materials like flour, which can vary widely
from crop to crop, every single Oreo cookie needs to take &
retain an exactingly specific shape & texture thru production,

shipping, storage &, finally, dunking in milk.

“A lot of what Louise established was how to make products
consistent & stable without putting in a lot of additives
consumers don’t want,” Todd Abraham, who worked with Slade
at Kraft, said in an interview.

Slade provided not just a framework for answering those
challenges but also a voluminous amount of research: She &
Levine, who worked together for much of their professional
careers, published some 260 papers & received 47 patents.
She once estimated that the patents she received for her
corporate employers were worth over $1 billion.

Louise Slade was born on Oct. 26, 1946, in Florence SC.
Her father, Charles, ran a lumber-treatment factory, & her
mother, Loraine (Browning) Slade, was a homemaker.

Louise showed early promise as a ballet dancer, so much so
that her parents arranged for her to study at the Juilliard
School in Manhattan. Although she easily held her own among
her elite classmates, she became convinced that she was too
tall & ill proportioned to make it as a prima ballerina.

She left ballet to attend Barnard College, where she
received a bachelor’s in biology in 1968. She had wanted
to study botany as a grad student, but there was little
funding for the field available at the time, so she took
up biochemistry. She received her master’s & Ph.D. from
Columbia in 1974, after which she moved to the U. of
Illinois as a postdoctoral fellow.

Slade went to work in 1979 as a scientist for General Foods
(which later merged with Kraft), where she met Levine. It
was a perfect pairing: She was working on frozen dough, he
was working on frozen desserts — two types of food that,
because of their high water content, stood to benefit from
a systematic molecular understanding.

Over the next two decades, they developed what they called
food polymer science. Considered novel at the time, it now
provides the basic research paradigm for an estimated 75%
of processed foods.

After Slade retired in 2006, she founded the Food Polymer
Sciences Consultancy, with Levine as an associate. In 2018
the American Chemical Society held a 3-day symposium in
recognition of the transformative role she & Levine had
played in their field.

She also began to work with the Monell Chemical Senses
Center, an independent research institution in Philadelphia
that studies taste & smell; she eventually joined its board.

Personally frugal & well compensated for her corporate work,
Slade became one of Monell’s chief donors, giving over
$2 million in her lifetime, Dr. Gary Beauchamp, the
center’s emeritus director, said.

Much of her later work focused on making everyday foods
healthier by finding novel ways to reduce salt & carbohydrate
content without sacrificing taste, texture or structure.

Over the last decade she investigated anti-inflammatory
compounds in extra-virgin olive oil, which she contended
were a critical part of the oil; her final paper, published
this year, demonstrated how those compounds are bound to
proteins within olives.

In 2005 the Dept of Agriculture & a group of universities
in the Northwest honored Dr. Slade by naming a new wheat
strain Louise in her honor. Developed according to her
research, it is described, in the scientific literature,
as “biscuit friendly.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/dining/louise-slade-dead.html