Advances In Food Processing Technology (ePub)

Consumers in both developing and developed countries demand high quality wholesome food products, at reasonable prices and which are to their full satisfaction. They also need to be protected from food-related illnesses and producers, handlers, processors and traders obviously benefit from increased consumer confidence and related sales. For these reasons all countries need to ensure that the supplies of food are not only acceptable and adequate from the point of view of nutritional and health aspects, and timely and opportune in terms of quantity, availability and affordability, but also of optimum quality and safety. A number of food control strategies have been proposed and carried out to ensure the quality and safety of food from production to consumption. Food safety and quality, as well as enterprise productivity, will also necessarily improve once they are seen as systemic products, as will sustainable natural resource use and environmental protection. There are many excellent texts available, which cover the fundamentals of food engineering, equipment design, modelling of food processing operations etc. There are also several very good works in food science and technology dealing with the chemical composition, physical properties, and nutritional and microbiological status of fresh and processed foods. This work is an attempt to cover the middle ground between these two extremes. The objective is to discuss the technology behind the main methods of food preservation used in today's food industry in terms of the principles involved, the equipment used and the changes in physical, chemical, microbiological and organoleptic properties that occur during processing. In addition to the conventional preservation techniques, new and emerging technologies, such as high pressure processing and the use of pulsed electric field and power ultrasound are discussed. The materials and methods used in the packaging of food, including the relatively new field of active packaging, are covered. Concerns about the safety of processed foods and the impact of processing on the environment are addressed. Process control methods employed in food processing are outlined. Treatments applied to water to be used in food processing and the disposal of wastes from processing operations are described.