Preface

 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that by 2050, food production should increase by 70% to feed the growing population. If we continue to produce the way we do, environmental pollution will undoubtedly be greater. It seems a perverse contradiction that while today there are more than 800 million undernourished or malnourished people in the world, a third of all the food produced is lost or wasted during the production process. This is by no means the cause of food injustice, but is certainly part of the problem. It is urgent that we rethink the way we are producing food, and especially our use of agro-industrial by-products. Whey - a cheese by-product - contains 50% nutrients and 90% water of original milk. However, whey is discarded as waste in most small and medium cheese industries throughout the world. The available technologies to process dairy industry by-products are expensive in terms of equipment acquisition and energy cost. This results in a dilemma: is it more profitable to discard whey as an effluent instead of elaborating it with added value. *Whey - Biological Properties and Alternative Uses* proposes to break this paradigm and has invited researches committed to this problem to present their proposals and results for the use of dairy byproducts beyond the traditional ones, such as direct use for animals, dehydration, or protein concentrate. This book is an excellent opportunity for graduate students and researchers to become aware of the problem of the misuse of agro-industrial by-products. Reducing food waste is everyone's responsibility. We must stop thinking about agro-industrial products as waste and find production alternatives.

> **Dr. Isabel Gigli**  Agriculture College, National University of La Pampa, La Pampa, Argentina

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Section 1

Whey

Section 1 Whey

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**Figure 1.**

**Chapter 1**

Care?

**1. Introduction**

*Isabel Gigli and Mario Calafat*

free beverage, and closes with a general conclusion.

*Alternative use of whey and buttermilk discussed in this book.*

Introductory Chapter: Dairy

By-Products - Why Should We

This book focuses on low investment alternative use of dairy by-products. Whey has application in both the pharmacology and nutritional industry. However, three main problems affront cheese makers when they try to process whey: the short half-life, the cost of refrigerating, and transportation cost. All these make the use of whey economically difficult for small and medium manufacturers. Therefore, in most cases, whey ends up as agro-industrial waste. This represents a loss of valuable opportunities and also, as explained below, represents a high environmental impact. In the different chapters, the authors offer alternative biotechnology processes (**Figure 1**). The ultimate goal of the book is to break the paradigm of considering milk by-product as a waste. This introductory chapter provides the global context in which the book was conceived: starts with a historical and current perspective of the consumption of dairy products, continues with the composition of the by-products, followed by our experience of using whey as culture media to produce mineral organic supplement and then isotonic lactose-
