Contest: Preserve Food, Preserve Life

We preserve food for future purpose, many household preserve food from getting spoil by bacteria and other germs that can contaminate the food.

Food preservation is very essential in this life and our mind will be at peace if we have enough food in the storage.

Image created in canva

What do you understand by food preservation?

Many farmers in Nigeria preserve their farm products after harvesting in order to ensure life long of the food from getting spoil. Food preservation is a good techniques which allows every family to have adequate food in the storage to eat throughout a week or some months.

Food preservation can be define as the process in which fruits vegetable, maize and others agricultural farm product are prevented from waste . Food preservation has been in existence for a long period of time where people use to treat their food against fungi and bacteria.

List and explain 3 reasons why we preserve and store food.

Humans preserve food to maintain the taste and flavor, the reason why we preserve food include the following:

• To save money

• To control bacteria

• It support local farmers

• To save money: Buying food in a large quantity save consumers a lot of money. Even if we cannot consume all the food that's available in our home we can preserve it for as long as we want.

• To control bacteria: Food preservation control bacteria in so many way by not allowing harmful bacteria or insect to spoil the food. The only way we can achieve that, is to preserve the food with appropriate method of food preservation.

• It support local farmers: Food preservation support local farmer, this happen when the farmers are not be able to transport their farms product especially to the cities. So these farmers preserve the from getting spoilage.

	Dry pepper preservation

	Dry Yam peeled preservation

List and explain any five methods you use to preserve food.

The food preservation method include the following:

• Drying

• Canning

• Smoking

• Salting

• Freezing

• Drying: This is one of the method of food preservation that have been used in the olden day, water in the food will decrease by not allowing bacteria or yeast to grow.

The above pictures showed drying method of food preservation which was done by my grandmother, she dry both the pepper and yam peeled for house use. After yam peeled successful dry she will now grind the things and process it into yam flour.

• Canning: Canning is very common in our house, this is done by boiling the food in a pot particularly grinded tomatoes in order to killed or weaken any bacteria from spoilt such food.

• Smoking: Smoking is another method of food preservation that's very common in Nigeria, we use wood to make a smoke so that fish and meat can last long in the house.

• Salting: This is the curing process of food preservation by destroying the moisture from spoil the food.

• Freezing: Freezing preservation method is to prolong life of the food by storing the food at a low temperature for future use.

I really appreciate the organiser @sahmie for hosting this interesting contest and I hope others will participate with amazing write up.

I would like to invite @vudeme123, @goodybest, @ridwant and @vickyson to share more knowledge to this contest.

Pictures taken with Itel S18

Best regards
@akareen