In food processing, harvested crops or slaughtered animals are used as raw ingredients to make and package attractive, marketable food products with a long shelf life.
Attractive means that the product tastes and looks good. To be marketable, it must match the types of food that consumers demand. Food products that have a long shelf life reduce wastage costs for producers, distributors and retailers.
Food processing development
Food processing dates back to our prehistory, when fire was discovered and cooking was invented. The various ways that food can be cooked are all forms of food processing.
Food preservation also began in prehistoric times, and the first ‘long shelf life’ foods were produced by drying food in the sun and preserving food with salt. Preservation with salt was common among soldiers, sailors, and other travelers until canning was invented in the early 1800s.
Ancient Bulgarians invented the first instant food (bulgur) nearly 8,000 years ago, when they found a way to parboil and dry whole wheat so that the grain only had to be reheated before it could be eaten.
One of the first ready-to-eat meals was devised by the ancient Celts when they invented haggis and what is now known as Cornish pie.
Another processed food, cheese, was invented by the nomads of Arabia when they noticed the milk curdle as they jogged all day on their camels and ponies.
Prehistoric methods of cooking and preserving food remained largely unchanged until the industrial revolution.
The development of modern food processing technology began in the early 1800s in response to the needs of the military. In 1809 a vacuum bottling technique was invented so that Napoleon could feed his troops. Canning was invented in 1810, and after can makers stopped using lead (which is very poisonous) for the inner lining of cans, canned goods became common throughout the world. Pasteurization, discovered in 1862, significantly advanced the microbiological safety of milk and similar products.
Cooling decreases the rate of reproduction of bacteria and therefore the rate at which food spoils. Cooling as a storage technique has been used for hundreds of years. The ice houses, filled with fresh snow during the winter, were used to preserve food by cooling it from the mid-18th century onwards and performed quite well most of the year in northern climates.
Commercial refrigeration, which uses toxic refrigerants that make the technology unsafe in the home, was in use for nearly four decades before the first home refrigerators were introduced in 1915.
Home refrigerators gained wide acceptance in the 1930s when non-toxic and non-flammable refrigerants like Freon were invented.
The expansion of the food processing industry in the second half of the 20th century was due to three needs: (a) food to feed troops efficiently during WWII, (b) food that could be eaten under conditions of zero gravity during forays into outer space, and (c) the pursuit of convenience demanded by the busy consumer society.
To answer these needs, food scientists invented freeze drying, spray drying, and juice concentrates, among a host of other processing technologies. They also introduced artificial sweeteners, colorings, and chemical preservatives. In the last years of the last century they came up with dry instant soups, reconstituted juices and fruits, and ‘self-cooked’ meals (MRE), so appreciated by the military but not by the grunts.
The ‘search for convenience’ has led to the expansion of frozen foods from simple bags of frozen peas to concentrated juices and complex television dinners. Those who process food now use the perceived value of time as the basis for their business appeal.
Benefits of processed foods
Initially, processed foods helped alleviate food shortages and improve overall nutrition by making new foods available globally. Modern food processing offers many additional benefits:
- Deactivating pathogenic microorganisms found in fresh vegetables and raw meats (such as salmonella) reduces foodborne illness and makes food safer.
- Because processed foods are less susceptible to spoilage than fresh foods, modern processing, storage, and transportation can provide a wide variety of foods from around the world, giving us options in our supermarkets that would have been unimaginable for our ancestors.
- Processing can often improve the taste of food, although it can also have the opposite effect.
- The nutritional value of foods can be increased by adding additional nutrients and vitamins during processing.
- The nutritional value can also be made more consistent and reliable.
- Modern processing technologies can also improve the quality of life for allergy sufferers by removing proteins that cause allergic reactions.
- Mass food production means that processed foods are much cheaper to produce than the cost of preparing meals with raw ingredients at home.
Processed foods are also extremely convenient. Households are freed from the laborious tasks of preparing and cooking food that is in its natural state … the food processing industry makes everything from ready-to-boil peeled potatoes to ready-made meals that only have to be heated in a microwave. oven for a few minutes.
Dangers
Processed foods are, without a doubt, a great help. But not everything is sweet and light.
Generally speaking, fresh unprocessed food will contain a higher proportion of natural fiber, vitamins and minerals than the same food after being processed by the food industry. Vitamin C, for example, is destroyed by heat, so fresh fruit will contain more vitamin C than canned fruit.
In fact, nutrients are often deliberately removed from foods during processing to improve taste, appearance, or shelf life. Examples include bread, pasta, and ready meals.
The result is empty calories. Processed foods have a higher ratio of calories to other essential nutrients than fresh, unprocessed foods. They are often energy dense and nutritionally poor.
Processing can introduce hazards not found in unprocessed foods, due to additives, preservatives, chemically hardened vegetable oils or trans fats, and excess sugar and salt. In fact, additives in processed foods … flavors, sweeteners, stabilizers, texture-enhancing agents, and preservatives, among others … may have little or no nutritional value, or may actually be unhealthy.
Preservatives used to extend shelf life, such as nitrites or sulfites, can cause health problems. In fact, the addition of many chemicals to flavor and preserve has been shown to cause human and animal cells to grow rapidly, without dying, thus increasing the risk of a variety of cancers.
Cheap ingredients that mimic the properties of natural ingredients, such as trans fats made with chemically hardening vegetable oils, have been shown in numerous studies to replace natural saturated fats or cold-pressed oils, which are more expensive, cause serious health problems. . But they are still widely used due to their low cost and consumer ignorance.
Sugars, fats, and salts are generally added to processed foods to improve flavor and as preservatives. As diabetics, we are all well aware of the effects of excess sugar, and fat on our already damaged systems. Eating large amounts of processed foods means consuming too many sugars, fats and salts, which, even if you are in full health, can lead to a variety of problems such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, ulcers, stomach cancer, obesity and of course diabetes.
Another problem with processed foods is that when low-quality ingredients are used, this can be disguised during manufacturing.
In the processing industry, a food product will go through several intermediate steps in independent factories before being finalized at the finishing factory.
This is similar to the use of subcontractors in car manufacturing, where many independent factories produce parts, such as electrical systems, bumpers, and other subsystems, to the final manufacturer’s specifications. These parts are then sold to the car factory, where the car is finally assembled from the purchased parts.
Because ingredients in processed foods are often made in large quantities during the early stages of the manufacturing process, any hygiene issues in facilities that produce a basic ingredient that is widely used by other factories in the later stages Production can have serious health effects. the quality and safety of many final food products.
Despite the dangers, today everyone eats processed foods almost exclusively. As a result, people eat faster and no longer seem to be aware of the way food is grown and that it is a gift of nature.
It also seems to me that food has become more of a necessary interruption in our busy lives and less of a social occasion to enjoy.
Eat processed foods
You can’t stop eating some processed foods … the convenience is irresistible.
When you eat processed foods, you reduce the chance of food poisoning or a foodborne illness. The nutritional value of what you eat can be more consistent, and you probably get more nutrients and vitamins than you would if you only ate unprocessed foods.
On the other hand, by eating processed foods, you expose yourself to a possible loss of heat-sensitive vitamins and nutrients that are removed to improve shelf life, taste, and appearance. You are also exposing yourself to the potential adverse effects on your health from various additives and preservatives, some of which can be very serious.
The calorie-dense nature of processed foods, due to the large amounts of sugars and fats they contain, makes them extremely problematic for diabetics and those with high cholesterol and blood pressure levels.
The only solution is to choose the processed foods you buy carefully, reading the labels on the packaging, and focus your diet on fresh or frozen products as much as possible.
