Food processing or manufacturing is the pair of methods used to change components into meals or perhaps alter the form of the food itself. Examples of these techniques can include:

Drying
Salting
Canning
Fortifying
Preserving
Cooking
Freezing
The way butchered animal goods or harvested plants are utilized to create marketable food items are examples of food manufacturing, as is how ready meals, that then need to be re-heated before eating, are created.

Advantages and Disadvantages

There are both benefits and disadvantages of food production. A number of the most obvious advantages include...

Improved flavor of this food
Extended seasonal availability
Extended shelf-life
For instance, vegetables and fruit can only be chosen when they're ripe, but if they are canned or frozen they keep longer. The longer shelf lives reduce food waste and perishable foods are now able to be hauled to wider regions.

Manufacturing the meals also makes them safer, reducing incidences of disease brought on by eating the meals - for instance, a lot of farm-based products can contain potentially deadly microorganisms but the production procedure will eliminate these. Processed food can also cater to the needs of people who suffer from certain allergies.

Among the biggest disadvantages with food manufacturing is that there'll be a sizable influence on the nutrient density of the food item as it's been demonstrated that, although it varies from product to productup to a fifth of those nutrients may be lost.

An instance of how a nutrient could be lost is warmth ruining the material of Vitamin C in canned fruit. The manufacturing process adds unhealthy ingredients to improve taste and a higher consumption rate of those products can lead to an individual's taste buds to dull as for example they become used to the flavor of refined sugar. The high calorie content of the food that is manufactured, particularly given the lack of nourishment, can lead to obesity.

If the food manufacturing industry ceased to exist, there could be benefits with an absence of crap food, a decrease in obesity levels leading to a healthier population with less associated illness such as diabetes and heart disease and there would also be a reduction in contamination levels in fertilisers and pesticides.

However, there would be a much reduced food supply, a potential increase in infectious diseases, the supermarkets as we understand them would no longer exist and the end result would be dull diets and possibly famine. As we've seen that there are two sides to the food production story and it is all about getting the balance right.