DailyDirt: Preserving Food For Posterity

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Modern civilization wouldn't be where it is today without the means to store food for long periods of time. Before refrigerators, food spoilage was a daily concern for just about everyone. Now, we can keep leftovers in a fridge for far too long -- and forget about it until some really furry mold is obviously thriving. Here are just a few links on keeping food from going bad.

• Food dehydration is an ancient technique that isn't just for Ronco infomercials. It's not all about beef jerky, but there is a lot of waiting around and chewy goodness. [url]
• Preserving foods can alter taste dramatically, especially when intense heat is used to sterilize delicate (and volatile) flavors. Adding artificial flavorings as masking agents doesn't sound very appetizing, but there are some alternative preservation methods that involve zapping foods with electrical current that might help retain fresher flavors. [url]
• A deep-sea submersible vessel accidentally sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic off the coast of Massachusetts, and the crew escaped... but their lunches didn't. When the ship was re-surfaced months later, the crew's lunches were almost perfectly preserved by the hyperbaric storage.[url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: dehydration, flavor, food, hyperbaric storage, pasteurization, preservation
Companies: ronco