The history of Food Preservation

14 Mar , 2022 History

Since ancient times man has experimented and developed techniques for storing food as long as possible. The first Food Preservation attempts date back to prehistoric times, where man observed nature to learn from it and understand how to preserve its fruits.  Just think about salting, smoking, pickling, drying, freezing etc. 

Vacuum packaging is of course one of the most recent methods: the Vacuum Technique was patented in 1932 in France, but only in the Sixties the vacuum bag, which is used today, began to be marketed 

But who was the first to work on an element whose existence was not even known? The credit goes to Otto von Guericke who invented the vacuum pump. 

Around 1650 Von Guericke, a scholar of air and vacuum, demonstrated the enormous pressure exerted by air on all the bodies contained in it using vacuum. 

Among his most famous experiments we remember “the Magdeburg hemispheres” where Guericke brought two bronze hemispheres, made them fit together and eliminated the air inside them thanks to the vacuum pump. Not even the physical strength of 3 pairs of horses managed to divide the two hemispheres, while as soon as the air was fed back the hemispheres separated themselves. 

Later Robert Bolele perfected the vacuum machine and performed new experiments that he described in a script called “The sceptical chymist” 

It is therefore thanks to the studies of these illustrious scientists that we owe the development of vacuum theories and thanks to the technology of industry and research that today we can extract as much air as possible from a container, seal it hermetically and maintain the “vacuum” for a long time. 

Because if it is the air that gives life to everything, unfortunately it also gives life to bacteria. 

The elimination of air as the enemy of food has become the keystone of our nutrition. The development of aerobic microorganisms that would alter the nutritional properties of food is reduced, the quality, flavor, color and smell of food are safeguarded, multiplying from three to five times the usual storage times. 

And it is also thanks to the vacuum if today we can do many of the things that we take for granted: we can taste in our home a food produced in Asia or America, taste when we want that cheese or ham brought home from a trip and that we eat after months, as if we had bought it the day before. 

What world would it be without vacuum?!