This old informercial for Western vegetables illustrates a refrigeration method that I hadn’t heard of. It’s a remarkably elegant way to apply a basic principle.
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Vacuum cooling works like a refrigerator except that it applies Boyle’s Law to the food itself instead of a gas contained in coils. A pallet of food boxes is moved into a vacuum chamber:
where the air pressure is gradually reduced to near zero.
As the pressure goes down, the surface of the veg is cooled, and water is sucked out and evaporated to pull out even more heat.
Of course the food wouldn’t stay cold. As soon as it resumed normal pressure it would start picking up heat from the air molecules. So the boxes were quickly transferred to already-cold reefer cars:
Flash freezing is the exact opposite of vacuum cooling. In flash freezing the food is blasted with supercold air to snatch out the heat quickly. Boyle’s Law isn’t involved here because pressure isn’t being manipulated.
In more modern terms, vacuum cooling is parallel to microwave cooking. Both change the internal temperature of the food itself without heating or cooling the container.
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The film also discusses modern food processing, using carrots as an example. One sentence shows the drastic change of fashion between 1950 and today:
Expert hands assure a further degree of perfection by passing only flawless carrots and tossing out offgrade offcolor ORGANIC carrots.
The word ORGANIC is given a nasty tone, like SHIT-COVERED.
Now, of course, NON-ORGANIC has the same nasty tone.
In reality breeding methods and farming methods are irrelevant to nutrition. GMO and Organic are brands, not differences. All cultivated crops have been GMO for thousands of years, and all food is organic. The tech devils keep trying to create purely synthetic food but haven’t succeeded yet. What matters for nutrition is simplicity. Our digestive system is meant to WORK for its living, processing fibers and stripping off the nutrients. If we pre-digest the fibers with too much cooking or chemistry, the enzymes and bacteria get restless and start rioting.
Polistra's Mill 