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Lesson 9: Food Processing

Food Processing

Some foods can be made at home or made commercially, for example applesauce and whoopie pies (Ho Hos). What is the difference, if any, between foods made at home and their counterparts made commercially? Food processing has become a significant topic of conversation in the professional media as well as social media platforms. We will discuss examples of how food is processed as well as what happens to the nutritional value of food after processing.

It is likely that processing (cooking) food played a role in our biological development but it also serves other functions. First, raw commodities are sometimes toxic! Foods like raw beans, certain mushrooms, and cassava, (a root like potato, commonly eaten in Africa) can be toxic. Second, raw commodities are perishable. They don’t last forever; they’re essentially slowly dying after the point of harvest.

So we transform raw and perishable commodities so that they have and/or maintain their nutritional and economic value. For example, fresh green beans are often frozen. We also diversify large crops such as corn. We are very good at producing corn and there’s only so much you’ll eat of it in one form. We can create different types of foods and ingredients from the one starting material.

Another example is milk. We almost always pasteurize milk to make it less perishable (and safer) and we frequently transform it into other dairy products, such as cheese, sour cream, butter and yogurt.

Food processing has been performed for thousands of years. More than 10,000 years ago, we began drying, and baking food in a primitive way. 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, the first foods were fermented. We began salting and pickling food maybe 3,000 years ago. In the late 1800s, canning and packaging food became common. More recently, in the early 1900s, freezing food as a way of preservation was developed (although people living in the extreme north have been freezing food during the winter for thousands of years). New technologies continue to be developed.

Fermenting food is one of the earliest means of intentionally preserving foods! No purified or synthetic chemicals were available at that time. No plastic packaging, and little salt was around. It’s only more recently, as in the last century, that we developed more complex and energy intensive technologies like freezing.

Processing serves a lot of functions. Though it likely began as a way to prevent spoilage, not all processes help preserve food. We’ll discuss food spoilage more in a later lesson.

Processing has an effect on food cost. Figure 9.3 is a snapshot of the USDA’s food dollar.

Imagine you’re at the grocery store. Any given dollar you spend on food can be broken down as about 17% going to the farmer who raised the food/ingredients and 83% to other parts of the food system. More specifically, processing accounts for about 16% of your food dollars. These proportions have changed somewhat over time and more recently farmers have been recouping a bit more of our food dollars with movements like the trend towards local foods.

Reference

Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching fire. New York, NY: Basic Books.