A congress on food science and technology sounds pretty dull – nevertheless, with 1,500 delegates attending from all over the world I went along to the RDS to get a flavour of what it was about.

In fact, the range of material covered and the subject matter itself was mind-blowing. What has happened has been extraordinary in the development of food science and technology. It’s only a little over 100 years that we saw the first shipments of lamb and butter from New Zealand and beef from Argentina coming to Europe.

The development of the technology to refrigerate and store was the first real sign that food markets in the future were going to be global rather than local but, side by side with the development of transport and storage technology, there developed a whole range of processes that again have transformed all sectors of our industry.

The most striking is probably in dairying – it’s not that long ago when whey from the limited amount of cheese that was made in Ireland was spread on fields and skim milk was fed to pigs. These in fact were the foundation stones of some very successful family pig enterprises in Ireland.

Whey and skim are now extremely valuable by-products. They are forming the basis of the extraordinary progress that Glanbia has made in the whole development of its sports nutrition business, while the Kerry Group fortunes were originally based on the supply of casein, another dairy by-product to the United States. Since then of course Kerry has become a world leader in ingredients and flavours, some but not all of which are derived from dairying.

Going to some of the sessions at the RDS, I was struck by how various amino acids could be extracted from ordinary wheat – the outer layer of the wheat or “bran” has a range of important amino acids that can be used as health supplements or as supplements to a diet that needs extra properties. What I found intriguing in that particular lecture was the fact that these important amino acids could only be extracted if the alkalinity or acidity of the extracting solution was at the correct level.

In another lecture, the benefits of a common EU approach came home to me as a representative of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) gave an outline of the lengthy discussions that took place among specialists in arriving at common standards for foodstuffs as they crossed European borders freely. As a major exporter, Ireland has a critical interest in ensuring that uniform standards apply to the products that we trade.

As the science of food develops, we see highly sophisticated drying technology to manufacture baby food that is subject to extraordinarily precise laboratory analysis. We see liquid milk being transported from Ireland to China and fresh beef from Ireland to Saudi Arabia. There is little doubt that Ireland has to keep to the forefront in developing both novel foodstuffs and novel ways of packaging and storage that allows us to return an income to workers in a high-wage economy like Ireland and to us as farmers that produce the basic ingredients.