ABSTRACT
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Fresh fruits and vegetables and other products of plant origin are available fresh only during a brief harvest period. It is necessary to keep supplies of harvested food edible over relatively long periods of time. Empirical preservation methods have been used since ancient times; more recently, increasingly sophisticated preservation methods have been developed (Lück and Jager, 1997).This chapter is not an exhaustive review of changes that occur in produce and preservative methods to minimize them, but a brief summary that serves as an introduction to the methods of food preservation. Generally, produce degradation begins after harvest and continues during processing and storage until the product is consumed or becomes inedible or unsafe for consumption. These changes could be generally classified to four groups: physiological, enzymatic, chemical, and microbial changes.
