Preserved importers, distributors and wholesalers
The food preservation processes
Agrelma, www.agrelma.com working with many preserved importers gives importance to the methods of food preservation.
Food Preservation, protecting food from deterioration and decay so that it will be available for future consumption, is the most important quality for the preserved importers.
Natural Processes
Human beings learned to gather naturally preserved foods and to assist nature in the preserving process about 10,000 years ago, before the dawn of agriculture and animal husbandry. Human beings in the Stone Age stored nuts and seeds for winter use and discovered that meat and fish could be preserved by drying in the sun. After the discovery of fire, cooking made food more appetizing and was an aid to preservation, since heating killed some of the micro organisms and enzymes that caused spoilage. Smoking meat and fish as a means of preservation grew out of cooking. After farming developed—the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age—human beings had more dependable surpluses for preservation. Native Americans subsisted on dry corn and beans that they had stored for winter use; Plains Indians cut buffalo meat into thin strips and dried it in the sun on wooden frames.
Salt was used for flavouring before it was learned that meat soaked in salt brine or rubbed with salt would keep for weeks or months. Brining, later called "pickling," became a favourite way to keep fruits and vegetables for winter use. Sugar was used as a preservative in ancient times, and making jam and marmalade was widely practiced. While spices were thought to preserve food, they mainly served to cover up unpleasant flavours.
Fermentation, the natural process of chemical change in food, was observed, probably by chance, and used thousands of years ago. Fermented fruit juices resulted in wine, a safe beverage in areas of uncertain water supply. Brewing came later. Another product of fermentation, vinegar, was useful for pickling meats, fish, fruits, and vegetables. The Chinese, and later the Germans and other Europeans, fermented cabbage or sauerkraut. About three thousand years ago milk, which does not keep well, was first fermented into cheese. About the same time, Egyptians developed raised sourdough bread, another result of fermentation. In some areas and during some parts of the year, people preserved food by freezing it, but thousands of years passed before freezing became available through man-made processes in all parts of the world throughout the year.
Processes Created by Humans
The preserve importers are looking for:
Canning. Until the nineteenth century human beings were dependent on the natural processes of drying, cooking, salting, pickling, fermenting, and freezing for food preservation. These had been only slightly modified over the ages. Then, in the early 1800s a French chemist and confectioner, Nicolas Appert, developed canning, for which he was awarded a prize by his government in 1809. Although a theoretical understanding of the benefits of canning did not come until Louis Pasteur observed the relationships between microorganisms and food spoilage some fifty years later, Appert's ideas were still valid. He placed wholesome food in clean metal containers, which were then sealed and boiled long enough to kill the spoilage-causing microorganisms.
Canning spread rapidly. In 1810 an Englishman, Peter Durand, patented a can of iron coated with tin. Today's cans are primarily steel, with a thin coating of tin and, usually, an enamel lining. Commercial canning began in the United States with pickles and ketchup in Boston in 1819 and seafood in Baltimore in 1820. The cooking in boiling water took five or six hours in the early days, but this was sharply reduced in 1860 when Isaac Solomon added calcium chloride to the water, raising its boiling point. The introduction of the pressure cooker, or retort, in 1874 was an even more important step, permitting much more rapid processing. Commercial canners then turned to machines that would do many of the tasks formerly done by hand, such as shelling peas, cutting corn from the cob, and cleaning salmon.
After 1900, enthusiasts of domestic science, agents of agricultural extensions, and others encouraged home canning of all types of food, mainly in glass jars, as a means of utilizing home garden products, providing better diets, and reducing the cost of living on farms. By the early 2000s the decline of the family farm, the low cost of commercially canned foods, and the widespread use of freezers had made home canning rare.
Drying. A sizable dried-fruit industry flourished in the United States long before the arrival of mechanical refrigeration. In colonial times great quantities of apples were dried in the sun and by artificial means. Prior to 1795 drying and the use of salt and sugar were the principal methods of preserving foods. In 1854, it was estimated, Maine could furnish the nation's supply of dried apples. The perfection of fruit evaporators in 1870–1875 increased exports of dried-fruit products. Thirty million pounds of dried apples were exported in 1880. Of nearly a half-billion pounds of dried apples exported in 1909, 83 percent came from California. Later, new drying processes and machinery enlarged outputs for domestic and foreign markets. Meanwhile, refrigeration and canning developed vastly to aid drying in preserving fruit, vegetables, meat, and other foods for human consumption. New methods of preserving foods in their fresh state reduced the need for dried foods, which became high-priced delicacies, served as appetizers or candied.
Refrigeration and freezing. As a means of commercial food preservation, refrigeration preceded freezing. In 1803 Thomas Moore, a Maryland dairy farmer who lived about twenty miles from Washington, D.C., began transporting butter to the new capital city in an icebox of his own design, getting a premium price for his product. Moore patented his refrigerator and published a pamphlet describing it. By the 1840s, American families were beginning to use iceboxes for food storage and preservation. One of the first recorded refrigerated rail shipments was a load of butter, packed in ice and shipped from Ogdensburg, N.Y., to New York City in 1851. In 1868 William Davis patented a refrigerator car with metal tanks along the sides that were filled with ice from the top.
Beginning in the 1830s, various systems of mechanical refrigeration were patented in the United States. Eventually both freight cars and trucks with mechanical refrigeration were developed. In the home the mechanical refrigerator began to replace the icebox in the 1920s. Mechanical refrigeration made possible another major advance in food preservation—freezing. This process decentralized storage and improved the taste and nutritive value of storable foods. In 1912 Clarence Birdseye, a graduate of Amherst College, was in Labrador and noticed that freshly caught fish pulled through the ice quickly froze solid. When thawed, the fish might revive because quick freezing prevented large ice crystals from forming and thus avoided the breakage of cell walls. The physical character of the tissue, and incidentally its taste, remained the same. After much experimentation, Birdseye invented a machine for quick-freezing food products. The machine froze by conduction—that is, by pressing the food directly between very cold metal plates. In 1923 Birdseye established a frozen seafood company that was eventually successful.
Frozen concentrated orange juice, based on a process developed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, became widely used after World War II. The freezing process also permitted the marketing of precooked food, sold ready to heat and serve. As frozen foods became more prevalent, deep-freeze compartments were included in many home refrigerators. Central frozen-food lockers became popular in many small towns and were widely used to preserve meat. After World War II frozen foods became even more popular and many families began purchasing separate deep-freeze units. These could be used for freezing home-produced foods or for storing commercially prepared products. By 1973 one household in three had its own deep-freeze unit; by the end of the century virtually all full-size domestic refrigerators included freezers.
Quick freezing led to the development of another means for preserving food—freeze drying. World War II supplied a strong impetus to the development of improved methods of drying food. In general the problem was to dry quickly without heat damage. Spray drying was particularly helpful in improving the quality of dried eggs and powdered milk. Other methods of drying produced potatoes, soup mixes, fruit juices, and other items that could be conveniently shipped and stored before being reconstituted for consumption. Freeze drying developed after World War II. In this process the product is frozen and the moisture is then removed as a vapor by sublimation. The resulting food, after reconstitution, retains much of its original flavor, color, and texture. By the 1970s freeze drying was widely used for coffee, soup mixes, and other dehydrated convenience foods. Some meat was freeze dried, and other developments kept meats edible for prolonged periods of time. Antibiotics introduced into chilling tanks, for example, prolonged the freshness of poultry.
Irradiation. The late–twentieth century saw the emergence of irradiation, or radurization, a pasteurization method in which food is exposed to low levels of high-energy ionizing radiation in an effort to kill microbial contaminants. If properly refrigerated and packaged, irradiated meat, fruit, and vegetable products enjoyed a significantly extended storage life. However, because of inherent concerns about radiation, and the tendency of irradiated foods to lose some of their nutritional value, irradiation was used only sparingly. Scientists, consumer groups, and the food industry continued to debate its effectiveness.
Bibliography
Anderson, Oscar E. Refrigeration in America. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972.
David, Elizabeth. Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices. Edited by Jill Norman. New York: Viking, 1994.
Woolrich, Willis R. The Men Who Created Cold: A History of Refrigeration. New York: Exposition Press, 1967.
