TY - JOUR
T1 - Food Spoilage, Storage, and Transport
T2 - Implications for a Sustainable Future
AU - Hammond, Sean T.
AU - Brown, James H.
AU - Burger, Joseph R.
AU - Flanagan, Tatiana P.
AU - Fristoe, Trevor S.
AU - Mercado-Silva, Norman
AU - Nekola, Jeffrey C.
AU - Okie, Jordan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/7/29
Y1 - 2015/7/29
N2 - Human societies have always faced temporal and spatial fluctuations in food availability. The length of time that food remains edible and nutritious depends on temperature, moisture, and other factors that affect the growth rates of organisms that cause spoilage. Some storage techniques, such as drying, salting, and smoking, date back to ancient hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies and use relatively low energy inputs. Newer technologies developed since the industrial revolution, such as canning and compressed-gas refrigeration, require much greater energy inputs. Coincident with the development of storage technologies, the transportation of food helped to overcome spatial and temporal fluctuations in productivity, culminating in today's global transport system, which delivers fresh and preserved foods worldwide. Because most contemporary humans rely on energy-intensive technologies for storing and transporting food, there are formidable challenges for feeding a growing and increasingly urbanized global population as finite supplies of fossil fuels rapidly deplete.
AB - Human societies have always faced temporal and spatial fluctuations in food availability. The length of time that food remains edible and nutritious depends on temperature, moisture, and other factors that affect the growth rates of organisms that cause spoilage. Some storage techniques, such as drying, salting, and smoking, date back to ancient hunter-gatherer and early agricultural societies and use relatively low energy inputs. Newer technologies developed since the industrial revolution, such as canning and compressed-gas refrigeration, require much greater energy inputs. Coincident with the development of storage technologies, the transportation of food helped to overcome spatial and temporal fluctuations in productivity, culminating in today's global transport system, which delivers fresh and preserved foods worldwide. Because most contemporary humans rely on energy-intensive technologies for storing and transporting food, there are formidable challenges for feeding a growing and increasingly urbanized global population as finite supplies of fossil fuels rapidly deplete.
KW - Malthusian-Darwinian dynamic
KW - food security
KW - human macroecology
KW - sustainability
KW - technological innovation
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U2 - 10.1093/biosci/biv081
DO - 10.1093/biosci/biv081
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84938863214
SN - 0006-3568
VL - 65
SP - 758
EP - 768
JO - BioScience
JF - BioScience
IS - 8
ER -