Your choice: biological or chemical preservatives on your food?

Originally shared by EuroTech

Your choice: biological or chemical preservatives on your food?
German researchers found a way to use freely available natural preservatives to keep your food fresh without using chemicals and plastic foils.

Every health nut loves fresh produce: who wouldn’t? It has better taste, quality, nutrients and style. But it is also more difficult to bring to market: fresh produce goes bad quicker than preserved produce, and thus grocery stores end up throwing out a lot of “fresh” produce gone bad.

The challenge facing us today is to extend the shelf life of fresh produce while minimizing the number of preservatives added. Food conservation techniques range from maintaining constant temperature, to applying chemical coatings on fruits and vegetables, mixing stabilizers into food products and to using shrink-wrap foil coated with chemical compounds.

Researchers from the Frauenhofer Institute have found a scalable technique to use, a biological protein based on whey, to extend the shelf life of fresh produce.

Whey or milk serum is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained. It is a co-product of cheese production. Throughout history, whey was a popular drink in inns and coffee houses. Whey protein is currently discarded during commercial processing of whey. The only commercial use currently is as a protein for bodybuilders and similar sports.

Most of the whey is however discarded. That’s a big waste. But rather than throw it away, why not use it to replace expensive synthetic polymers in food packaging? That’s just what the Frauenhofer Group did: they found a solution allowing plastic films coated with whey proteins that can extend the shelf life of fresh produce in the same way that current packaging does (by blocking oxygen uptake through the packaging).

The difference is that their proteans are a natural by-product and not a potentially harmful, synthetic chemical cocktail. And not just that: they’ve also developed a commercially viable mass-production system for this new foil.

The remaining question is, what do consumers want? Given a choice between an apple without excess packaging and apples in a plastic bag or tray, which would you take? And if you knew that the packaged apples were coated with less chemicals than the non-packaged ones, would that change your mind?


Author: Sophie Wrobel

#food #bio #chemical #freshfood #fraunhofer #whey #produce
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