Recently, the environmental impact of large amounts of waste and by-products generated from agricultural products has become a serious issue. Food waste, in particular, presents not only environmental challenges but also economic concerns. As part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a target has been set to halve per capita global food waste by 2030. In this context, ongoing research aimed at the effective utilization of unused plant resources, including food waste, non-edible parts of agricultural products, and by-products, has been carried out. For over 20 years, the author has conducted various studies, primarily from an analytical chemistry perspective, focusing on unused food resources often discarded or underutilized. The research has specifically targeted unused plants, analyzing their components (including polyphenols) and evaluating their functional properties to provide scientific evidence for their biological activities. This article highlights some of these research findings. In particular, the studies have focused on unused agricultural products such as wasabi leaves, fruit peel of akebi, anthocyanin-rich food materials like berries, and bee products such as propolis and bee pollen.

Recently, numerous high-quality rice varieties have been bred and introduced to the market, and the distribution of cooked rice for commercial use has increased. In this context, there is a growing demand for detailed evaluation and description of the sensory characteristics of rice. This study aimed to develop a sensory lexicon for cooked rice to guide sensory evaluations and communicate quality information. Through sensory evaluation of 32 varieties of cooked rice samples, supplemented by discussion and/or evaluation of 36 cooked rice samples for commercial use and a literature survey of 252 articles and 26 books, 329 sensory descriptors for cooked rice were identified. Following discussions among an expert panel, the terms were organized, classified, and defined, resulting in a sensory lexicon comprising 120 terms: 31 for appearance, 23 for aroma, 31 for taste/flavor, and 35 for texture. The lexicon was presented as a reference material, and an untrained sensory panel evaluated 15 cooked rice samples using Check-All-That-Apply method. The resulting data space adequately captured the sensory characteristics of each sample. These findings suggest that the developed lexicon is a valuable tool for creating sensory profiles of rice and for providing accessible information on the sensory characteristics of rice without requiring expert knowledge.

The purposes of this study were to develop a method that can predict age gelation at an early stage during long ambient storage of directly heated UHT milk, and to verify suppression effect of heating conditions before sterilization. To analyze the casein degradation that cause gelation, sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) were performed after milk was stored at 5, 25, and 37 ℃ for 2 and 4 weeks. Also, each milk sample was stored at 25 ℃ for 6 months to confirm the occurrence of gelation. Age gelation that occurred after 5-6 months at 25 ℃ could be predicted by SDS-PAGE and HPLC analyses of the milk stored for 2 and 4 weeks at 25 or 37 ℃. We also confirmed that heating conditions before sterilization which had not been previously reported, could suppress gelation.