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Food processing is the set of methods and techniques used to transform raw ingredients into food for consumption by humans. The food processing industry utilizes these processes. Food processing often takes clean, harvested or slaughtered and butchered components and uses these to produce attractive and marketable food products. Similar process are used to produce animal feed.
Vegetable packing plants
Vegetable packing plants dispatch packaged vegetables to retail outlets for subsequent sale to consumers.
Spalding
Spalding, Lincolnshire is very well known for its numerous vegetable packing plants.
Examples
Following are common food processing techniques:
Extreme examples of food processing include the delicate preparation of deadly fugu fish, preparing space food for consumption under zero gravity, winemaking, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets.
History
Prehistoric food processing incorporated slaughtering, various types of cooking, such as over fires, smoking, steaming, oven baking), fermenting, and preserving with salt.
More recently the field has expanded to include techniques such as canning (invented by Nicolas Appert), pickling, pasteurization, and packaging.
Benefits
Benefits of food processing includes toxin removal, preservation, improving flavor, marketing, distribution, and increasing food consistency.
Proponents of the raw food diet advocate consumption of foods prepared with very little food processing.
See also
External links
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing under GFDL
