Do you know that most of the food we see on the shelf of the supermarkets today, wasn’t available a 100-150 years from now?
This was because there were very few techniques to preserve the food. The food would spoil very fast and a lot of people suffered from food poisoning and even death.
The food we eat today, is completely taken for granted because it is cheap and easily available.
The food you and I are eating today has been possible because of the efforts of a lot of scientists, researchers, engineers, food technologists, nutritionists so that the food you are eating is safe and healthy.
But the process of developing food wasn’t invented overnight. So, what is the history and how food technology originated?
Well if you ask me, I think the preservation of food has been abundant since early human started farming. Early humans realized the fact that they could not always hunt for animals or pluck fruits from trees every day.
And if they stored the food like meat, it spoiled very fast. So, they had to develop some preservation techniques for eating the food even when they could not hunt, or the fruits and vegetables weren’t available.
Some of the earliest preservation techniques include Sun-Drying, freezing, salting, fermentation and so on. The downside of the early preservation techniques was that they changed the flavour and texture of the food along with huge loss of vitamins most of the time.
These techniques were not very effective for travellers and soldiers who needed a healthy diet.
During the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815), the French Government offered 12,000 Francs to anyone who could develop a method for preserving food for the military.
In 1809, a French confectioner and chef developed a method of sealing the food in glass jars. The name of that French man was ‘Nicholas Appert’. The process was simple. He sealed the food in a glass jar and then heated the jar for some time depending upon the food. The method proved to be successful and he was awarded 12,000 Francs.
The invention of canning is considered as the major turning point in the history of food technology and food science. Because of his remarkable contribution, Nicholas Appert is also known as the ‘Father of Canning’. And even canning is sometimes referred to as ‘Appertization’.
Although canning was successful but the science behind its success wasn’t known until 50 years later, when a French microbiologist and chemist showed that growth of micro-organisms is responsible for the spoilage of beverages.
He also invented a process where milk was heated to a specific temperature for a specified time to kill the spoilage micro-organisms. That French microbiologist was none other than Louis Pasteur.
The process he invented is still prevalent in the dairy industry and wine industry as well. And in the honour of Louis Pasteur, the process is known as ‘Pasteurization’.
In 1895, almost a 30 years later in Boston, Massachusetts, William Lyman Underwood of a canning company worked with Samuel Prescott to develop the research which would further lead to the concept of ‘Thermal Death Time’.
A lot of people don’t consider this event when it comes to the history of food technology, but this was also one of the turning points in the history as their research was important to determine the time-temperature combination for a food. That means, for how long a food will be cooked at what temperature.
Since then, a lot of research and discoveries had been done but in the 20th century, food safety was still an issue.
In 1960, the Pillsbury company, NASA and the USA army labs collaborated to develop safe and healthy food for the astronauts.
Eventually, they developed a systematic preventive approach to ensure food safety and that came to be known as ‘HACCP’.
HACCP is a preventive tool used in food industry to ensure safety of the food.
HACCP is prevalent today in every food industry and food safety is incomplete without the implementation of the HACCP program.
Since the development of HACCP, there have been a lot of rapid growth in the food technology. Industrialists have adopted newer technologies to process the food in a faster and efficient way.
So, these were some of the major breakthroughs in the history of food technology.
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Please watch: "What Is Food Safety & Why You Need to Know About It?"
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