Think of what our "free" economic/business system has done for our food supply. The next time you're in a supermarket.....look around at the true marvel it is. Any day of the week.

Even with all this fresh availability......we still have a lot of waste due to spoilage, for our fruits and vegetables. The only waste that we usually see....is at our homes. But there are spoilage waste thru-out the whole chain......and we go to great costs to prevent it. Preservation chemicals, smart/fast harvesting and coordinated shipping, and refrigeration. A very cooperative chain. For fresh affordable food.

Some techniques are old such as drying/dehydrating, salting, and cooling. Some are newer like canning and pasteurization, and freezing.

The newest one I enjoy is ultra-pasteurized milk. I haven't seen spoiled milk for a few years now.

If one can get past the liberal goo in this article, this has much promise for a new technique.

https://us.cnn.com/2018/10/23/tech/apeel/index.html

Can you think of a time in the future, where refrigeration, is only used for food preparation and not as food freshness or preservation. Just spay the leftovers and put in cupboard.

A cooling MW perhaps. Or some such appliance. Cool for taste only. Cool a drink one glass at a time.

 

I sure hope homeless people are dumpster diving in grocery store garbage. Stores throw out too much edible produce. Fortunately, they've started to move away from expiration dates so people aren't convinced something is bad by looking at dates instead of using their eyes, nose, and touch to tell them if something needs to be tossed.

I got fed up with the amount of produce we were wasting just because things would get buried and forgotten or new stuff would be used before old. On shopping day, I make sure old stuff is positioned in the bin so it gets used first. I make it a point plan my meals to use up things that are about to go bad.

 

I'll bet the flower industry would be interested in something like this.

 

Sounds a bit like re-inventing the Chinese "century" eggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg ). Growing up in LA, we visited the Chinese area quite frequently. That is where I first saw the eggs.

Anther method is radiation to kill organisms involved in spoilage .

 

Sounds a bit like re-inventing the Chinese "century" eggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_egg ). Growing up in LA, we visited the Chinese area quite frequently. That is where I first saw the eggs.

Anther method is radiation to kill organisms involved in spoilage .

On a dare I ate one of those things. My old director was a chef for a while out of the country, he was all about getting people to eat things they've never heard of or knew existed. I about barfed it was nasty, I can't imagine why anyone other than protecting from spoilage would even contemplate those things as a food item, only if I was starving.

kv

 

I think I recall that they could vacuum pac a steak and gamma radiate it, and it had a shelf life of 20 years. No refrigeration required.

This was in the 50 and 60s. And if I remember is was for the military. I recall some test subjects saying how great the food was.

But the word radiation and past mistakes with it......they couldn't sell it as a practical storage method. That was the story anyhow. They could have been hiding a failure.

I think it would save a lot of energy, not the mention the freshness and nutrition of the food.

I always wondered about the validity of the process, because I would think that chemical reactions can still occur.

If we radiate fruits.......will they continue to ripen? Like a banana on the table or a tomato in a window sill?

 

Gamma radiation kills by disrupting nucleic acids in organisms (DNA and/or RNA). As I recall from years ago that action is mediated by radicals, particularly hydroxyl radicals, produced in water. By adjustment of the dose, tissue proteins, fats, and carbohydrates are relatively unaffected. Of course, free radicals can affect a lot of things, so the dose needs to be monitored. Prions, which are protein-like infectious particles, are less affected and would require higher doses.

Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/goronzy2/
To reduce the possibility of bacterial, fungal or viral disease transmission, tissue samples must be sterilized before introduction into the recipient. Gamma irradiation allows for targeted reduction of microbials and viruses, often without drastic alterations of tissue properties. However, radiation will induce some physical and chemical changes in the graft. A compromise is required to ensure high enough radiation for microbial deactivation but low enough radiation to maintain the properties of the allograft.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/public..._that_maintain_the_integrity_of_human_albumin
At a radiation dose of 50 kGy, viruses were inactivated by >/= 3.2 to >/= 6.4 log10 and scrapie by an estimated 1.5 log10, whereas albumin was only moderately aggregated and fragmented. gamma-Irradiation can preferentially inactivate viral and prion pathogens without excessive damage to albumin structure.

One common use today is irradiation of blood and blood components to kill the white blood cells, which reduces the risk of graft versus host reactions in immunocompromised patients.

As for meat preservation, I suspect the cooking process overwhelmed any taste changes produced by the irradiation of the raw meat. Of course, such treatment may require a Proposition 65 warning label. ( I don't know and haven't checked.)

 

If we radiate fruits.......will they continue to ripen? Like a banana on the table or a tomato in a window sill?

Yes, ripening will continue unless the fruit is irradiated beyond recognition. The dose of irradiation needed to "sterilize" is much lower than the dose it would take inactivate all the enzymes.

Irradiation is still used in the food industry. Dry spices for instance are chock full of microbes if they haven't been irradiated and few could be sold as "food grade" otherwise. The do-gooders in the world have made irradiation fairly rare though, because they demanded that it be labelled on many fresh foods such as packaged chicken. Despite the fact that it's cheap, effective and a great way to upgrade food safety and might save many lives, a big "radiation" icon on a label is too big a hurdle to overcome in the grocery store. That effectively killed the technology for wider use.