To ALL: USA TODAY Getting Ad of the bugs with rays, gas and heat
Scientists and entrepreneurs are proposing a variety of ways to separate bacteria and other bad bugs from food and beverages. These include:
ú Steam pasteurization. Already in use in some meat processing operations, in which whole beef carcasses are suspended and passed through a steam cabinet where they're blasted for a few seconds with steam. This kills nearly all microbes on the surface.
~ Flash pasteurization. A process adopted after an out-break of E. cold poisoning last year traced to fresh apple cider, is a rapid, brief heating of juice that kills bacteria without significantly altering flavor or nutrients.
Also in development are vaccines to protect poultry from salmonella and a strategy called "competitive exclusion" in which poultry or cattle are exposed to benign bacteria that crowd out more dangerous microbes.
But one of the new proposals for sanitizing food is the use of a gas most often associated with environmental hazards: ozone. Produced by lightning in the atmosphere, where it protects humans from ultraviolet rays, or in car engines, where it gets mixed with hydrocarbons to cause smog, ozone can also sanitize water, food and medical supplies.
Long used in the United States to disinfect bottled water and municipal water systems, ozone was not approved for use on food here until last summer, when the Food and Drug Administration officially declared it safe.
Advocates say ozone is faster and more effective at kill-ing disease causing microbes than chlorine, and a lot safer.
Ozone is commercially produced by passing air through an electric arc, creating a gas that is then dispersed in wa-ter. Food scientists say when it is properly used-evenly dispersed through water at high enough concentration-it destroys bacteria, viruses, molds and fungus.
Currently, food processors use chlorine washes or sprays on food, especially poultry and produce, but there have been concerns about health and environmental hazards from chlorinated hydrocarbon byproducB and chlorine gas. Ozone's only byproduct is oxygen, says Bill Stoddard, president of Cyclopss Corp., a Utah company that makes ozone-generation equipment.
"Ozone's real place is in the processing of fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh mead," Stoddard says. It can "replace a number of dangerous chemical processes with a chemical that does a superior job with no environmental impact." |
