ABSTRACT
Interest in the electrical conductivity of foods, once primarily restricted to various testing applications, has increased in recent years, in response to the development of ohmic heating and pulsed electric field (PEF) processing technologies. Ohmic heating relies on the flow of alternating (or other waveform) current through a food material to heat it by internal generation. PEF processing applies high intensity electric field pulses of short duration (~2 to 10 µs), to cause microbial inactivation via membrane rupture. Ohmic heating is a necessary consequence of PEF processing but is minimized by external cooling methods. In recent years, both these technologies have been explored for a variety of other applications, hence a class of processes known as moderate electric field (MEF) processes is emerging.
