Food preservation is the process of treating and handling food to stop or slow down Food spoilage, loss of quality, edibility or nutritional value and thus allow for longer food storage.
Preservation usually involves preventing the growth of bacteria, fungi (such as yeasts), and other micro-organisms (although some methods work by introducing benign bacteria, or fungi to the food), as well as retarding the oxidation of fats which cause rancidity. Food preservation can also include processes which inhibit visual deterioration, such as the enzymatic browning reaction in apples after they are cut, which can occur during food preparation.
Many processes designed to preserve food will involve a number of food preservation methods. Preserving fruit by turning it into jam, for example, involves boiling (to reduce the fruit’s moisture content and to kill bacteria, yeasts, etc.), sugaring (to prevent their re-growth) and sealing within an airtight jar (to prevent recontamination). There are many traditional methods of preserving food that limit the energy inputs and reduce carbon footprint.
Maintaining or creating nutritional value, texture and flavour is an important aspect of food preservation, although, historically, some methods drastically altered the character of the food being preserved. In many cases these changes have now come to be seen as desirable qualities – cheese, yoghurt and pickled onions being common examples.
Read more about Food Preservation: Drying, Refrigeration, Freezing, Vacuum Packing, Salt, Sugar, Smoking, Artificial Food Additives, Pickling, Lye, Canning and Bottling, Jellying, Jugging, Irradiation, Pulsed Electric Field Processing, Modified Atmosphere, High Pressure Food Preservation, Burial in The Ground, Controlled Use of Micro-organism, Biopreservation, Hurdle Technology
Famous quotes containing the words food and/or preservation:
“To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a credit system in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If there is ANY THING which it is the duty of the WHOLE PEOPLE to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity, of their own liberties, and institutions.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)