FermenteaWhere food goes to change
Source-linked articles on foods, ingredients, traditions and equipment.
A vacuum pack keeps meat purple and spoilage slow, and it suits a bacterium that grows without air. What the seal does, what UK rules say about 3 °C and 10 days, and where packing joins a cure.
Ceramic and polymer membranes hold microbes back instead of killing them, which gives milk extra weeks and makes beer and wine stable. The pores are far too wide to stop a virus, and filtration alone does little against a dissolved toxin.
Pulses lasting a few microseconds, at tens of kilovolts per centimetre, punch holes in microbial cells. They help pasteurise juice and extract colour from grapes. They cannot kill spores unless heat does the work.
Apples keep longer in air with less oxygen. Researchers tested that in Cambridge and Queensland, and packers now use it for salads and meat. What the gases do, what they cost and what they cannot make safe.
From Gunditjmara eel traps to Chinese carp ponds, Dutch eel bins and British well-smacks, people have stored fish by keeping them alive. The method works until the water fails.
Every preserved food is a stack of barriers against microbes, enzymes, air and time. This is how they work, what a recipe's numbers measure, and how cooks worldwide build them.
Benzoate, sorbate, sulphite and saltpetre work at tiny doses, and they lean on the same thing a good ferment does: acid. How they work, where they stop working, and why the nitrite limits fell.
Food makers add protective bacteria, the antimicrobial peptides those bacteria make, and even bacteria-killing viruses to hold back Listeria. Each is chosen, dosed and aimed at a narrow target, which is what sets it apart from fermentation.
A measured dose of radiation can cut back insects, moulds and bacteria in food without cooking it. US ceilings run from 1 to 30 kGy, and the rules grew out of a mid-century Army programme.
A dug cassava root starts to spoil within a day, so farmers leave it in the earth. Parsnips under straw, yams in pits and carrots in a cellar follow the same idea: keep the food alive and slow it down.