Remembering respected food scientist Jack Pearce

Jack was a member of the Institute of Food Science and Technology and served as its president from 2005-2007. A Chartered Chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Jack was a stalwart of the local section. He was an office bearer and went above and beyond organising many events and his famous Christmas lectures which he hosted each year on beer or whiskey where always a highlight of our year. We have lost a great friend to Chemistry and Science in Northern Ireland.

In 2011, soon after Dr Andrew Cannavan gave a talk at a conference in Queen’s University Belfast, he was summoned back to his lab in Vienna. The next day he was on a plane to Japan to assist in managing the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The help and advice Andrew gave was largely based on what Jack Pearce had learned dealing with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

On 24 February 2017 we celebrated Jack’s life with a memorial lecture to an audience of over 100 people in Queen’s University Belfast as part of the Northern Ireland Science Festival. Prof Maureen Edmondson, president of the Institute of Food Science and Technology (IFST), welcomed the audience, including Jack’s wife Edith Pearce, their son Ian, and many of Jack’s friends and former colleagues. Maureen described Jack as an outstanding scientist, strategic thinker, generous teacher and a much missed contributor to IFST locally and nationally, before introducing the main speaker, Dr Andrew Cannavan, head of the Food & Environmental Protection Laboratory at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation/ International Atomic Energy Agency Joint Division (FAO/IAEA).

Andrew interwove aspects of Jack’s work with modern developments applying nuclear techniques to food authenticity and safety. Acknowledging that consumers are often suspicious of food irradiation, Andrew noted its beneficial contribution, properly applied, to food safety and pest eradication. He starkly described the huge multiple crises the Japanese government had to deal with in 2011 and his own experiences in Japan. Andrew then took us through the complex subject of food authenticity with examples of its subversion through food fraud. Andrew’s lab coordinates research in more than 40 countries, from China to the Americas, to improve traceability in the supply chain, putting multiple hurdles in the way of fraudsters. A number of analytical techniques including high end mass spectrometry and vibrational spectroscopy, are used to check the authenticity of substances such as fruit juices, honey and even rare and expensive edible birds’ nests.

Andrew’s talk drew many varied questions – from the science of his experiences in Japan to what consumers could do to avoid being duped by food fraud. In keeping with the clear and approachable delivery of his talk Andrew answered these questions with expertise and good humour. His take-away messages included looking forward to the deployment of hand-held devices to ‘fingerprint’ food and compare with spectral libraries in ‘the cloud’ via smart phones, to check nutrition, safety and authenticity. He also touched on the well curated databases needed for such a vision.

Concluding the evening Prof Paul Stevenson, chair of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Northern Ireland local section, recalled Jack’s contributions to the Royal Society of Chemistry, and presented Edith Pearce and Andrew Cannavan with engraved plaques commemorating the occasion. He also thanked Michael Walker, Dermot Hanna and I, for organising the lecture.