Understanding food shelf-life is important for a number of reasons.
But most importantly, it’s important because you don’t want to eat spoiled food by accident.
Eating spoiled food can lead to food poisoning and/or other illnesses.
It can also lead to some pretty weird flavors (along with some unpleasant physical symptoms to go along with them).
With that being said, it also makes sense that we would want our food to last as long as possible.
When you buy or prepare some kind of food, it’s always a better deal to figure out how to make it last on the shelf without having it go bad.
This cuts down on food waste, and also carries the upside of not putting you at risk for consuming spoiled food.
With that being said—it’s not always clear how to make food last longer.
So in this blog post, you’re going to learn the 5 most important tips necessary for prolonging the shelf-life of food.
Here’s the most important stuff that you need to know.
1. Freeze It
There are many different methods that you can use to prolong the shelf-life of the foods you buy and consume.
But one of the simplest and easiest methods for doing this is to freeze it.
Freezing food helps to stop the formation of micro-organisms.
It also stops the growth of bacteria and mold.
All things considered, this is truly one of the best ways to increase the shelf-life of the foods you buy—including leftovers.
This method is super effective on most things—but be warned that it doesn’t work well on everything.
For example, you don’t want to freeze cannabis flowers.
Freezing your cannabis flower can cause the trichomes to become brittle and break off—which is definitely bad news.
2. Some Items Can Be Heat Treated
Before storage, some food items can be heated to pre-emptively stop bacteria, mold, and microorganisms from growing in the first place.
This is commonly referred to as ‘hot filling.’
This practice is commonly employed when people make jams, syrups, and sauces that are going to be stored in air-tight jars.
You heat it, first, to kill off all bacteria and micro-organisms.
Then, you store it in an air-tight container—thus, prolonging its shelf life.
3. Drying
Drying is an age-old method for storing and prolonging the shelf life of many different types of foods.
It basically works like this.
Removing the moisture from different food items helps to prolong their shelf life because it cuts way down on bacteria and micro-organisms (which usually need moisture to live and thrive).
Salt and/or sugar solutions can also be added to tie up the water, thus making it unavailable for microorganisms (hence why ‘salt pork’ used to be a method for preserving meat on long ship voyages back in the day).
4. Chemicals
There are a number of chemical preservatives that can be used to prolong the shelf-life of food.
In fact, whenever you buy processed food from the grocery store, odds are good that one or more chemical preservatives were used to produce it so that it would last long enough to be shipped and sit on store shelves until it sold.
5. Modifying The Atmospheric Pressure
Sometimes, the best way to preserve foods that are prone to oxidation is to pack them in an environment where they won’t be exposed to oxygen.
Vacuum packaging is a form of ‘atmospheric pressure’ packaging, as it eliminates at least the majority of the oxygen packed inside with the food—thus preventing the food from oxidizing and spoiling.
Note that this technique doesn’t work for all foods. For example, it doesn’t work well with fruits and vegetables.
But it does work for some things.
Conclusion
There you have it.
5 tips for how to prolong the shelf life of food, thereby empowering you to keep your food fresh and edible for longer periods of time.
This will help you to cut down on food waste and decrease the risk of food poisoning—which is really important.
Now that you have the information, the only remaining step is to make use of it.
So try out some of these methods to help you preserve some of your own foods for longer periods of time.
