Food preservation and storage

Preserving and storing foods reduces reliance on long-distance transported food and the market industry. Home-grown foods can be preserved and stored outside of their growing season and continually consumed throughout the year, enhancing self-sufficiency and independence from the supermarket. Food can be preserved and saved by dehydration (e.g. solar food drying, freezing, vacuum packing, canning, bottling, pickling and jellying.^[1]

Food preservation is inseparable from where the food is stored. The storage of food is done in a suitable environment. This often means a dry, cool place. There are several places in which food can be stored. These include Food storage rooms as pantry's (rooms in the house, near the kitchen) or separate food storage rooms (ie above ground, earth bermed, or even underground (ie root cellars; store rooms, even mere burial is possible)). As such, at least 1 food storage technique is often employed (cooling). The following list describes the food preservation techniques we can use:

• Drying and drying with superheated steam
• Liquifying
• Sugaring (includes covering with sugar, making jam/jelly from fruit, etc)
• Pickling/Chutneyfication
• Curing (salting or brining)
• Cold smoking (note that this requires curing as a first step)
• Adding of other (artificial) food additives
• Canning and Home canning
• Biopreservation (ie keeping animals alive or using bacteria, ie fermentation)
• Stewing, jugging and hot smoking (techniques allowing preserving food for a limited duration)
• Vacuum packing, bottling and packing in a modified atmosphere (ie ULO)
• Refrigerating and Freezing
• Irradiation
• Nonthermal plasma (treating the food surface with ionised gas molecules)
• High pressure processing of food^[2]
• Pulsed electric field electroporation^[3]

It should be noted however that each foodstuff is more suitable to one or another type of food storage (not all types are suitable for every foodstuff). Tuberous root crops for example are best stored in a moist environment (as these crops are still alive and able to take up water). They can be buried in buckets filled with wet sand and stored below (see "root cellar") or above ground (ie during winter). As each food storage technique requires special equipment, the crops grown in each community are best selected carefully so that as little as possible different storage techniques are needed (hence allowing more cost-effective food storage).

Examples[edit | edit source]

• Canned vegetables and canned beans
• Bulk dried foods such as flour, milk powder, soya powder, whole grains (brown rice, white rice,...)
• Noodles^[4]
• jam (cooked, sugared fruit, with chunks of fruit, pulp) & jelly (cooked, sugared fruit, strained)
• Alcoholic beverages as wine, mead, beer, spirits,...
• Frozen fish/seafood/meat analogues (tofu, seitan, tempeh)/eggs, frozen vegetables
• Dried fruit and nuts
• Tea and coffee (unground)

See also[edit | edit source]

• Making yoghurt and cheese (a method to preserve milk)
• Making milk powder (another method to preserve milk)
• Making wine, beer and mead (a method to fruit, grain, honey)

References[edit | edit source]

External link[edit | edit source]

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food preservation
• Food Preservation Forums at Permies.com
• An example on how to combine crops, taking the food storage techniques/equipment into account