Food processing is the transformation of raw ingredients into food, or of food into other forms. Food processing typically takes clean, harvested crops or butchered animal products and uses these to produce attractive, marketable and often long shelf-life food products. Similar processes are used to produce animal feed. Food processing dates back to the prehistoric ages when crude processing incorporated slaughtering, fermenting, sun drying, preserving with salt, and various types of cooking (such as roasting, smoking, steaming, and oven baking). Salt-preservation was especially common for foods that constituted warrior and sailors’ diets until the introduction of canning methods. This book focuses on the application of biotechnology to the processing of food. It discusses biotechnological tools and options that are applicable to the study and improvement of the quality, safety and consistency of foods. The contents of the book will be immensely helpful to students and researchers of biotechnology and food science.
