FOOD STORAGE AND PRESERVATION

Foods eaten for nutritional purposes are organic substances derived from the origin of plants and animals containing minerals, lipids, carbohydrates, moisture, and protein with different organic substances. In order to preserve food from spoilage it should be stored as the nutritional information on the label suggests to intact its physical, chemical, sensory, and microbiological characteristics in a given period of time. Preserving and processing food is an essential part to increase shelf life, quality maintaining, and good morphological conditions management so that taste will not be changed and humans can safely consume it. According to the shelf-life food is divided into 3 types perishable, semi-perishable, and nonperishable. Various reactions lead to the deterioration of the quality of food that includes chemical, physical, microbial, and enzymatic reactions. Spoilage due to these reactions that microorganisms caused can be avoided to a large extent by using various types of food preservative techniques that slow down the growth of microbes and prevent food from spoilage including canning, freezing, fermentation, drying, pasteurization, food irradiation, pulsed electric field, food additives, pickling, salting, heat treatment, and hurdle technology, etc. There are various factors that affect the food spoilage rate including microorganisms such as fungi & bacteria, storage temperature, pH, water availability, load of microbes, and the processing of food. There are 3 types of spoilage mechanisms that include physical spoilage such as temperature, moisture content, crystal growth & crystallization, and glass transition temperature and emulsion breakdown, Chemical spoilage such as oxidation, proteolysis, pectin hydrolysis, non-enzymatic browning, and hydrolytic rancidity, and Microbial spoilage by the various kinds of microorganisms that include moulds, bacteria, and yeasts along with the recent trends is explained in this chapter.