While I am not into food additives I am also not fundamentally against food preservation. Food preservation has been done for as long as people have dried, fermented and salted food.
Gamma radiation destroys enough proteins to kill pathogens, it is probably not good for the food value as it will break chromosomes and proteins, cooking in …
While I am not into food additives I am also not fundamentally against food preservation. Food preservation has been done for as long as people have dried, fermented and salted food.
Gamma radiation destroys enough proteins to kill pathogens, it is probably not good for the food value as it will break chromosomes and proteins, cooking in a sense but it does not leave any radioactive residue.
Pasteurisation destroys proteins to kill viable cells, the same way cooking does so it can be thought of as precooking, the high temperature methods may be less healthy but they are used because it is FASTER=cheaper and does not change the flavour as much.
Pressure treating seems like a handy way of killing pathogens that does not denature many of the flavour chemicals by heating. Obviously the pathogens are no longer viable so we loose their bad AND GOOD effects and there may be broken proteins in the same way cooking breaks proteins.
So out of all the preservation methods I would choose those that do NOT ADD chemicals and would prefer those that in essence pre-cook the food enough to kill pathogens and seal the product well enough to prevent new pathogens from contaminating it.
The alternative is to refrigirate or freeze the products but these require a cold chain that costs money that not everyone can afford or drying that costs energy and changed the flavour and can make food preparation harder.
So I do not think it is fair to paint non-chemical food preservation with the same brush as various antimicrobial products.
Oh, I just remembered that many fresh products are also preserved under inert gas (Nitrogen) so they do not spoil, this is technically a chemical but mostly safe as air breathing pathogens cannot survive, however some anaerobic ones might and if it is a bag of lettuce the lettuce might make oxygen from photosynthesis and feed some pathogens.
This is a baby/bathwater discussion, it is nuanced.
While I am not into food additives I am also not fundamentally against food preservation. Food preservation has been done for as long as people have dried, fermented and salted food.
Gamma radiation destroys enough proteins to kill pathogens, it is probably not good for the food value as it will break chromosomes and proteins, cooking in a sense but it does not leave any radioactive residue.
Pasteurisation destroys proteins to kill viable cells, the same way cooking does so it can be thought of as precooking, the high temperature methods may be less healthy but they are used because it is FASTER=cheaper and does not change the flavour as much.
Pressure treating seems like a handy way of killing pathogens that does not denature many of the flavour chemicals by heating. Obviously the pathogens are no longer viable so we loose their bad AND GOOD effects and there may be broken proteins in the same way cooking breaks proteins.
So out of all the preservation methods I would choose those that do NOT ADD chemicals and would prefer those that in essence pre-cook the food enough to kill pathogens and seal the product well enough to prevent new pathogens from contaminating it.
The alternative is to refrigirate or freeze the products but these require a cold chain that costs money that not everyone can afford or drying that costs energy and changed the flavour and can make food preparation harder.
So I do not think it is fair to paint non-chemical food preservation with the same brush as various antimicrobial products.
Oh, I just remembered that many fresh products are also preserved under inert gas (Nitrogen) so they do not spoil, this is technically a chemical but mostly safe as air breathing pathogens cannot survive, however some anaerobic ones might and if it is a bag of lettuce the lettuce might make oxygen from photosynthesis and feed some pathogens.
This is a baby/bathwater discussion, it is nuanced.