The aim of this book is to take what are fundamental analytical approaches centred on radiation-based spectroscopy and apply them to agricultural and food science scenarios. Given the breadth of these fields any such book could only achieve limited success at best. The opening chapters outlining the fundamental principles, mechanisms and methods of spectroscopy are laid out in a very engaging manner reflecting their basis as student lectures. The author goes on to expand upon some very specific applications of spectroscopy such as the analysis of milk and dairy products, eggs, honey, horse hair and agronomic plants. By and large these chapters are heavily weighted toward fluorescence spectroscopy, an approach only used by a minority of scientists. Only in selected cases, and even then with little depth, are the more common technologies such as near-infrared or mid-infrared spectroscopies applied and expounded. Current agricultural and food spectroscopy papers are dominated by mass spectrometry, infrared, Raman and NMR spectroscopies and only a couple of these feature here. In addition there is a complete absence of the application of the mathematical Fourier-transform approaches to applied spectroscopy. This is now de rigueur for spectroscopic analysis, regardless of the field, to ensure that signal to noise is maximized.

The book is extremely useful if the reader wishes to use fluorescence spectroscopy in an agricultural and food science environment and the applications of this specific approach are well fleshed out with informative figures and tables. However, this approach excepted, it is slightly dated and would have benefited from some more modern applications such as FT-IR/Raman NMR spectroscopy as applied to GM foods, food authenticity and risk assessment.