How Our Food Rots: Part IV

CBS's Survivor is a very popular television show in the United States. Many other countries have similar "real-life" adventure shows. In fact, these shows were actually going on in other countries much earlier than the current Suvivor series here in the US.

The current Survivor is being filmed in an arid area of Africa. The first thing the members of each group were instructed to find was their "camp." They were then allowed to get certain items for their stay in this inhospitable land and a map that showed them where to find the water hole. The first emotion they demonstrated when finding their camp was joy at getting there and the very next sensation was that of extreme thrist. They had to find that water hole -- and soon.

In fact, many hours were spent in making fire so they could boil the water they had gathered because the water was contaminated with various disease-causing microbes. The need for water drove these TV campers to do a lot of work. They were thristy and knew they could not survive long in that hot and arid land without it.

Thrist is a very important sensation. Without it we would not realize our bodies are short on water and we would die from dehydration. All life requires water to live. Even microorganisms need water to live and multiply. Many bacteria can survive for a long time in a dried state; however, they cannot grow in this state.

One way to keep microbes from growing in our food is to dry the food and thus slow the food-spoiling microbes' ability to cause our food to decay. Examples of food drying are abundant. Raisins are excellent examples of how grapes can be stored for long periods of time without significant spoilage. Drying the grapes removes the water the microbes need to grow and it concentrates the sugar in the grapes, which will also inhibit -- and in some cases kill -- microbes on the fruit. Milk, cheese, butter, coffee beans, wheat, corn, instant coffee, various dried fruits (prunes, raisins, apricots, etc) and beef jerky are all examples of dried foods.

There are several ways to dry food. One very old way is to use the natural energy of the sun. The sun's rays cause the food to get hot and the water evaporates from the food drying it. That is a very common but slow way to dry food. Food can also be dried in a warm room with a good air exchanger in it to take out the moist air and bring in more warm dry air. Some companies also sell small food dryers

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