Agri-food
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History of food technology
Humans have been manipulating and creating new food sources for thousands of years. Whether through cooking, preserving with salt and spices or ‘domesticating’ crops like rice, we’ve been trying to find new ways of feeding ourselves more efficiently.
Louis Pasteur. He should look happier. He potentially saved millions of lives by inventing pasteurisation and providing the basis of modern preventative medicine.
But it really is in the last hundred years, that food technology as we know it was developed. Processes like the invention of canning in 1810, pasteurisation and refrigeration have revolutionised the provision of food to the world.
With the population of the world increasing, the need to develop new types of food, or ways of producing or processing existing food, has become even more urgent. People are also becoming more health conscious, more aware of nutrition and diet and the affect it has on their quality (and longevity) of life.
Nicolas Appert’s development in 1810 of the canning process was a decisive event, although at the time he wasn’t aware at the time of what an amazing impact it would have on being able to store food.
In 1864, another trailblazer was Louis Pasteur. You might know about his work with milk, we owe the fact that we can keep milk for a week or so down to the process of pasteurisation, which he invented. He developed a process of heating milk and milk products to destroy food spoilage and disease-producing organisms, But his first research project was one of the first scientific-based projects on food technology and looked at how to avoid spoilage of wine. Although he focussed on food, as a result of his research Pasteur became the pioneer into bacteriology and of modern preventive medicine.
History of food technology
Humans have been manipulating and creating new food sources for thousands of years. Whether through cooking, preserving with salt and spices or ‘domesticating’ crops like rice, we’ve been trying to find new ways of feeding ourselves more efficiently.
[caption id="attachment_2867" align="alignright" width="216" caption="Louis Pasteur. He should look happier. He potentially saved millions of lives by inventing pasteurisation and providing the basis of modern preventative medicine."][/caption]
But it really is in the last hundred years, that food technology as we know it was developed. Processes like the invention of canning in 1810, pasteurisation and refrigeration have revolutionised the provision of food to the world.
With the population of the world increasing, the need to develop new types of food, or ways of producing or processing existing food, has become even more urgent. People are also becoming more health conscious, more aware of nutrition and diet and the affect it has on their quality (and longevity) of life.
Nicolas Appert’s development in 1810 of the canning process was a decisive event, although at the time he wasn’t aware at the time of what an amazing impact it would have on being able to store food.
In 1864, another trailblazer was Louis Pasteur. You might know about his work with milk, we owe the fact that we can keep milk for a week or so down to the process of pasteurisation, which he invented. He developed a process of heating milk and milk products to destroy food spoilage and disease-producing organisms, But his first research project was one of the first scientific-based projects on food technology and looked at how to avoid spoilage of wine. Although he focussed on food, as a result of his research Pasteur became the pioneer into bacteriology and of modern preventive medicine.