Mixtures and Compounds

Abstract

Urbanisation can be shown to be one cause of reduced variety in diet, and to be the primary cause of food preservation. The divorce of man from fresh food made it essential to establish processing-distributing organisations to provide at least the basic foods. It was desirable, but not always practical, to establish sister organisations to bring in any fresh food which would travel to consumers without excessive spoilage. The first stage was simple preservation based on precooking and enclosure in airtight containers. The subsequent stage was premixing, partly to widen the market but also to allow processing companies to profit from low-cost raw materials. Further stages took more responsibility away from the housewife-cook, the ultimate being modern convenience foods which are precalculated, premixed, precooked, etc., so that the housewife-cook has simply to heat to the required table temperature (predetermined and printed on the package). Recently, it has been realised that much of the malnutrition in famine areas is due to unsatisfactory handling of the food followed by poor cooking. Levels of health and welfare could be vastly improved by introducing factory-cooked meals but, for reasons not clear, projects do not appear to develop.