6 Practical Steps to Food Preservation will be listed and explicated in this article. This will guide you to preserve your foods and edibles properly.
Methods of Food Preservation
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Moving from scarcity to surplus has always been the greatest desire for a person, people, and nation. In a bid to get to scarcity, especially of food, a lot of agricultural activities are done to enhance maximum harvest, when the harvest is plenty, food items are sold at a subsidized rate to the masses at the market.
But either as a result of under-population or carelessness, food, and food items are still being wasted, hence the need for food preservation.
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It is very important to know that growing food for subsistence purposes is very good but having foreknowledge on how to preserve homegrown food is better.
Food preservation is the storing of food for future use. In a time of abundance, most people think of how they can keep their food safe until when they need it hence this article is written to bring to light practical steps to preserve food, especially in Nigeria.
Food preservation is very easy and simple to do, in ancient times, even before the advent of modern technologies, the ancient people used to preserve food proving that whether you are a teacher or farmer, or a school dropout, you should be able to preserve your foods after intensively reading this article. Let’s get started.
Practical Steps to Food Preservation
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1. Salting
In other to prevent food decay or food wastage, applying salt to the food helps in a big way to prevent wastage.
However, not all foods require salting, most of the food that requires salting include seafood like fish and meat.
Salting helps to make the food item stay fresh without becoming infected with worms of wastefulness, it has been in use even before 1858 when the refrigerator was first invented.
Our fathers trusted salting because it helps to dry off water from the meat and fish hence, making it dry and ready for consumption.
2. Canning
Another very good way of storing food is to put it in a can. Canning shields food from being exposed to some tiny organisms responsible for food spoilage.
Most of the foods we eat are canned at the production companies and sent back to us for consumption, for example, the sardines we eat are just fish that has been canned and packaged to prevent spoilage.
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3. Refrigerating
This is the most common method of food preservation these days when food is refrigerated, it is stored in a very cold freezer, this way, the food becomes frozen and free from the risk of getting spoilt.
Almost every food item today can be refrigerated to elongate the life span of the food. It is also very important to know that despite refrigeration, some foods have their life span.
When they get to the limit of their being preserved, whether they are in the freezer or not, they expire and get rotten.
4. Frying
The presence of moisture inside foodstuff makes spoilage possible. To reduce spoilage, you can fry your fish and meat with oil to replace the moisture in it with oil. Oil never gets dry as such, it helps that foodstuff stay in its fresh state.
5. Dehydration
For effective storage of some of our food items, they are stored in a cool dry place to avoid exposure to sunlight and moisture.
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6. Soaking in Alcohol
Some foods, to prolong their shelf life, need to be immersed in alcohol so that the alcohol can sap out the moisture content of the food.
The bottom line to the preservation of food is to ensure that either the water content in food is gotten rid of or to stiffen the food.
One other method people use is to smoke the roof over flames. These different methods, however, depend on the type of food to be preserved.
