Assembly of Structures in Foods

From a physical point of view, a natural way to describe a system is to define the macroscopic physical state it is in, that is, the solid, liquid or the gas state. These three states are differentiated from one another by the degree of order between the atoms or the molecules (a common denominator being constituents). The order is highest within a solid (where there exists a regular stacking) and lowest in a gas (where the probability of finding a neighbour of one constituent is only dependent, isotropically, on the density of the gas, which must be an average quantity) (de Gennes and Prost 1993). Systems composed of one type of atoms may even exhibit all three phases, depending on temperature and pressure. Another possible state is the liquid crystal state (de Gennes and Prost 1993), which, at least in one direction, exhibits liquidlike order and anisotropy.