14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to sustainability and green living, not wasting food is a very important issue, especially since resources are getting scarcer by the day.
However, not wasting food can sometimes be quite tricky, especially if one is always on the go and whatever food gets bought for the house ends up sitting in the fridge or the cupboard for days on end simply because there is nobody around to eat it.
However, thanks to a new technology developed by a US research company, human society's daily bread might keep fresh for as much as 60 days.
In case anyone was wondering, ordinary bread goes bad in about 10 days or so, so this discovery might really come in handy, especially in developed countries where people more often than not purchase significant amounts of food only to throw it out sooner or later.
Gizmodo lets us in on the science talk surrounding this new method of making bread last forever: we are basically dealing with a rather large microwave device that can kill the mold spores found on your run-of-the-mill loaf of bread in just 10 seconds.
“We treated a slice of bread in the device, we then checked the mold that was in that bread over time against a control. And at 60 days it had the same mould content as it had when it came out of the oven,” Don Stull, one of the researchers who worked on this project, explains.
This device is referred to as “Microzap,” and it was originally designed and manufactured to kill bacteria such as salmonella.
However, it seems that it can also perform other very useful tasks quite successfully.
“We introduce the microwave frequencies in different ways, through a slotted radiator. We get a basically homogeneous signal density in our chamber - in other words, we don't get the hot and cold spots you get in your home microwave,” the specialists who developed Microzap argue.