PKSC 4640: Food and Healthcare Packaging Systems

Reflection:

In PKSC 4640, also known as Food and Health Care Packaging Systems, this course covers the characteristics, engineering properties, and applications of various materials and systems used in the packaging of foods, pharmaceuticals, and medical decides. It also touches on packaging systems for specific food and medical applications. Like PKSC 2010, this course once again covers the scope of the industry that pertains to food and pharmaceuticals. Unlike PKSC 2010, this course talks about the packaging systems themselves rather than tackling the scientific topics like in PKSC 2010. This class was a nice combination of material because I was able to see the concepts and material from PKSC 2010 brought back up but this times in regard to food or pharmaceutical packaging design. This class to me was a nice "coming-together" class where everything I had learned in previous courses had resurfaced in one way or another and helped me better understand what goes into packaging for foods, pharmaceuticals, etc. This class will always stick with me as know every time I go grocery shopping, I'll be able to look at the packaging used for food/pharmaceuticals and be able to figure out why the packaging may be designed a certain way and possible reasons as to why they did it this why. To me, that is the best take-away from this class.

Unfortunately regarding this most recent fall semester when I am taking the course, COVID-19 related issues prevented the required lab for this course from taking place. Since students were never able to complete this lab, we were unable to complete the traditional semester long project on shelf life. In place of that project, I decided to include an assignment regarding the argument for or against plastics. For this assignment, we had to read three separate articles from three different sources and see what their opinions on plastics were. From reading through these three varying articles, I was able to distinguish that some people are afraid or against of plastics because of the stigma surrounding them and like to use "buzzwords" in order to dissuade others from thinking plastics are safe. When in actuality, several official studies have been conducted and found the amount of plastic we use for packaging or microwave reasons is safe and we have no reason to worry. Even the plastics that are known to not be safe if placed in microwave have disclaimer statements explaining to consumers why this plastic container should not be placed in the microwave.