Stunningly Delicious Chocolate Candies
File under : General
March 9th, 2010
A lot has been made about processed foods and their effect on your health. However, in todays modern society, some degree of food processing is unavoidable. Let’s look into the common methods for food processing and preservation, and see what they actually mean , and see if they really do pose a threat to your health.
Food Processing is a technique used to convert raw food into edible food (or as I like to call it, REAL food). Let me give you an example. Take a raw chicken and convert it into chicken nuggets – Your food processing is complete. Kids especially would much rather prefer the nuggets as compared to the raw thing. So basically, food processing is used to make products more marketable and consumer friendly. As for food preservation; it is a method or a number of methods to slow down food spoilage. The main idea is to prevent the growth of bacteria, fungi and other organisms harmful for consumers.
Basically, the food processing industry uses both these methods to give us -the consumer- a nutritious, easy to store and easy to cook product. A number of techniques are used to get the final preserved product e.g. drying, freezing, vacuuming etc. and we will look at some of them below:
Lowering the temperature: Refrigerating or freezing is probably the most common method used, especially at home. It takes some time for food that is chilled or frozen to spoil. The cold temperature slows down bacterial action and therefore keeps your food unspoiled for longer. Freezing is even better, as the bacterial action goes down to negligible when frozen.
Dehydration: Some foods need to be dehydrated for preservation e.g. dried fruits, dried vegetables, powdered milk etc. When foods are dried, bacteria will become inactive. So, foods in air-tight containers will last a long time.
Freeze-drying: This is the next step on from dehydration and is a better process as it does not affect taste so much. This is widely used to preserve coffee and some fruits.
Salting: One of the oldest (one can call it ancient) methods for preservation of food (meats in particular) is salting it. This is because bacteria and other micro-organisms can’t survive in a salty environment. In addition, if meat is salted in cold weather, it can last for years.
Sterilization: Using heat to kill bacteria is a very good method of food preservation. This method is not only used for food but also in a number of hospitals to clean/sterilize the surgical instruments. People in the third world countries boil milk (and even water in some cases) to make sure that it is bacteria free.
Vacuum Packing: This is based on removing all air around the product, therefore removing the one thing bacteria need to survive. This is done with industrial food processing equipment which extracts all the air in the packaging around the food, using a vacuum packer machine. Food is first heated to kill the bacteria and then sealed. Canning was the original method used, but nowadays plastic packaging is just as common.
The use of food processing machinery in itself is not necessarily a bad thing : The key factor to look at when making your food choices, is how the food has been processed and preserved, and what – if any – chemicals have been added to it.
By John Tyrell. Learn more about modern food processing machinery at www.windsorfoodmachinery.com.