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From Napoleon to NASA

One term that has acquired a particular air of consumer suspicion in recent years is “processed food. ” Processing is seen as being something that is used to make food less fresh, less natural, and so more suspicious. However, even though we say we don’t want processed food, every food product, before it gets to your mouth, has been subjected to some form of processing and treatment that has a scientific basis. Even washing an apple, chilling sushi, or peeling a banana are forms of food processing, while the bag of salad we buy in a shop or market isn’t full of air as we might expect. All of these phenomena I will discuss in coming chapters. Before dealing with the science of food processing, it is worth discussing what exactly that highly loaded term means. To a food scientist (well, me anyway), food processing means subjecting foods or raw materials to external forces designed to cause a desirable change in the food, typically in terms of its safety and stability, and also in many cases its flavor, texture, and color. In many cases, the primary target of food processing is the resident population of contaminating microorganisms that, if not dealt with, might otherwise cause the food to spoil, or else spoil the day of consumers who finds themselves with a range of symptoms of food poisoning, up to the most lethal. The force most commonly applied in processing is temperature, whether low (refrigeration), very low (freezing), high (for example, pasteurization or cooking), or very high (canning or sterilization). Temperature is indeed probably the key physical variable of significance to food, as almost everything that happens in and to food is influenced by temperature, and most changes take place optimally in a relatively narrow band around body temperature (37 °C). If temperature is pictured as a line scale, the zone of greatest danger and likelihood is centered around that point, but food processors look far below and above that zone and have come to understand how we can work around the optimum temperatures for various reactions and biological changes in order to make our food safer and more stable.