The technical papers included in this book are based on the presentations made by the invited speakers of First Thero-American Conference on Food Engineering that was held at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil, from November 5-9,1995.

This well attended meeting was organized to present recent advances and provide an adequate forum for developing a vision for future directions in food engineering education and research. In addition to the invited oral presentations, there were more than 300 volunteered contributions, most of these volunteered publications were published separately by the Valencia Polytechnic University.

The first chapter of Food Engineering 2000, authored by Dr. Marcus Karel, deals with the history and future of food engineering. The following chapters, authored by an outstanding group of food engineers, focus on five major areas of current interest: physical properties of foods, new food processing technologies, modeling of food processing operations, food packaging, and food engineering education.

The excellent quality of the Conference is clearly reflected in the articles included in this book. Some of them present the latest developments in a given field, while others effectively summarize the work done during the last few years.