High-Pressure Processing of Food

Pasteurization is one of the great lifesavers of the modern age, akin to the initial use of fire to cook food. We in the west can afford to be obsessed with &quot;fresh&quot; because, thanks to modern scientific agriculture, we don&#x27;t have to deal with so many pathogens. But the bugs are still out there. Cook your food properly. I would be extremely cautious about any new sterilization tech. I want it tested not just on clean food from clean farms, but on the horrible stuff not normally seen in our food chains.<p>I like my steak overcooked, cooked to the point of wrecking it, because where I grew up eating under-cooked meat was a serious health hazard. We used to wash our vegetables in water with a bit of bleach. Whenever I see someone eating a bloody steak, or vegetables rinsed only in tapwater, I shudder a little.<p>Does it kill pork tapeworms?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;radio&#x2F;asithappens&#x2F;as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.5166570&#x2F;brain-surgeons-went-looking-for-a-tumour-but-found-a-tapeworm-instead-1.5166571" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;radio&#x2F;asithappens&#x2F;as-it-happens-friday-ed...</a><p>&quot;Some people get it by ingesting microscopic tapeworm eggs found in raw or undercooked pork, or unwashed fruits and vegetables from overseas. But Palma has never travelled outside the U.S.&quot;

HPP is awesome: extends shelf life with minimal flavor&#x2F;texture changes. Favorite HPP product: &quot;fresh&quot; coconut water esp Harmless Harvest.<p>(I founded 3 successful food distribution startups)

Fascinating.<p>So why exactly is this not widespread now?<p>Is it too new, too costly, or does it diminish the taste&#x2F;texture more than the slides indicate?<p>Or is it just not necessary, e.g. most people either eat their food before it goes bad, or forget about it for so long that this wouldn&#x27;t make much a difference anyways?<p>I have a hard time believing that subjecting, say, a crisp green pepper to pressure high enough to disrupt all bacteria wouldn&#x27;t noticeably alter the texture (perhaps similar to how freezing does)... or just as bad, make it implode and rupture. (Although I guess you could poke a small hole in produce with hollow interiors.)

The effects of (very) high pressure on life are relevant to SETI, since it probably rules out the existence of life deep in large water worlds, and in &quot;ice giants&quot; like Uranus and Neptune.<p>At very high pressure, it becomes energetically favorable for proteins to be broken down into individual amino acids. This is because amino acids are zwitterions, with a positive and negative charged ends. These charged parts pull in water molecules, which makes the Gibbs free energy of the reaction more favorable for solvolysis as pressure goes up.

Noticed the same thing with pressure cookers. Food that has been nuked with one will stay good at room temp for a surprising amount of time assuming no additional exposure to contamination

I&#x27;m a fan of irradiating food, but has never quite taken off.<p>Read through it all the way to see what it would do to beef, it looks like the meat will lose its color.

Pressures so high they aren&#x27;t found in nature create all kinds of denatured proteins our digestive systems have never seen before. Most I&#x27;m sure won&#x27;t do much, but some might turn out to harm us in unseen ways.<p>Is nobody just a little worried about consuming all those without some more serious safety tests first?

It&#x27;d be nice to compare the effects of HPP vs Pasteurization in milk, and whether it less disruptive.<p>Pasteurized milk doesn&#x27;t ferment as well as raw milk, suggesting lots of peptides are altered. And that is why some cheese DOPs mandate raw milk (only on hard cheeses, as on soft ones it&#x27;d not be safe).

&gt; Fresh or marinated meat: Iron in the myoglobin changes from ferrous to ferric and globin is denatured-the red color is lost.<p>For better or worse, it doesn&#x27;t seem likely that the bioavailability is identical between ferrous and ferric iron. How significant are such changes? It&#x27;d be nice to see the results of some RCTs on rodents comparing this process to fresh and heat treated. I imagine high pressure would be nutritionally better or worse depending on the food.<p>Does anyone know if a 600 MPa pressure chamber, DIY or not, is within reach of a garden variety prepper?

Diamond synthesis machines are at ~100 MPa. I wonder if these food ones are capable of making gems without high temperatures.

Wouldn&#x27;t the HPP process break the cell walls of the food being treated. This would lead to poor tasting and faster deteriorating of the food?<p>Freeze drying is a process for preserving food which shares the high pressure aspects of HPP. But apparently the pressure is not as high, and food can be stored for 20 years.

By the way, there&#x27;s also Pulsed Electric Field Pasteurisation.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newfoodmagazine.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2116&#x2F;pulsed-electric-field-pasteurisation-of-foods&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newfoodmagazine.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2116&#x2F;pulsed-electric...</a>

The other day I was thinking about the survivability of microbes inside ice moons at various pressures and came across the the above topic.<p>It may well be that exomicrobes can be adapted to live at high pressures but not be able to surive at low pressures.

I am assuming this is the same thing as Cold Pressure processing seen by this hummus brand? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluemoose.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bluemoose.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>

This site is unreadable on mobile. Does anyone have a link to a PDF version?

Does anyone have a sense for how much the machines cost?

We&#x27;ve been eating heat cooked food for millennia. We know it&#x27;s more or less safe, and we have evolved suitable enzymes.<p>We&#x27;ve never eaten stuff which went through such a high pressure process. This is not your average pressure-cooker, look at the numbers.<p>We have no idea what eating this stuff does long term, just like micro-plastics for example.<p>Yet people here seem to be cheering and jumping head-first just because it&#x27;s cool technology.