Featured image by Jessica To’oto’o on Unsplash.
Today, we constantly hear concerns about the dangers of processed food and it is sometimes portrayed as opposite to natural and healthy food. Is this warranted? What does food processing even really mean?
To a food scientist, food processing is any method used to make food safe to eat, enhance its stability, or change its form. Humans are the only species that processes its food, rather than eating plants or animals in the form in which they are found in nature. Learning to cook food was a key step in human evolution, as this made food far more digestible, and freed up energy and metabolic activity to allow development of higher intelligence and all that followed.
Later, rudimentary food processing that allowed food to be stabilised and transported is proposed to have been a key step in the establishment of civilisations and cities, allowing people to become less dependent on finding and producing food. This allowed for the diversification of roles in society beyond primary producers and hunter-gatherers.
Early human migrations also depended on groups being able to transport food. Indeed, the discovery of cheese is attributed by legend to the use of containers made from calf stomachs, from which was extracted an enzyme called chymosin which converted milk therein to a mixture of curds formed from enzymatically destabilised milk protein and surrounding fluid whey. Later migrations in the form of great voyages of exploration required food to be preserved by means such as pickling and salting, while the need for Napoleon to feed his armies on their campaigns led him to offer prizes for solution to this problem, one of which was won by Nicholas Appert for the discovery of what became canning. Most recently, many developments in food safety and packaging which have become commonplace were spurred by the very specific needs of NASA for ultra-safe food for space travel, in easy to open pouches, which were resistant to spills and didn’t produce crumbs in zero-gravity.
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