Vegetable-Based Nitrates Can Help Preserve Pork, Organically

A common trouble with organic food, and you don’t have to be an expert to guess what it is, is how to preserve and protect it.

For years, pesticides and chemicals have been seen as the guardians against food-borne illness, and food “going bad.”

All this probably goes double for meat products. So how do you protect foods, in this case pork, from spoiling, and making you sick?

Researchers have an idea, using vegetables.

Organic meat cannot contain contaminates. And traditional curing involves nitrates, a chemical preservative, i.e. an organic no-no.

So if chemical preservative aren’t allowed, vegetable-based nitrates from organic plants is being looked at as a solution.

Items being considered are lemon powder and natural vinegar, even lactic acid, the stuff in milk might work.

What’s spurred the desire to better preserve organic meats is people don’t realize organics usually don’t last as long as regular meat.

So they save them longer than they should, and often abuse them the same as traditional products. You can’t leave organic meat out too long.

But people often don’t realize this, meaning they increase contracting some sort of food-borne pathogen.

Via Newswise.

Image credit: The Pug Father

Tags: organic meat

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 2:28 am and is filed under Health, Organic, Organic Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.