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MICROWAVE ovens began outselling gas ovens for home cooking in the US in 1975. So how long before there is an ohmic oven on every kitchen bench? In ohmic heating the food is a resistor of an electric current passing through it. Its proponents say it results in meals of greater nutritional value than conventional methods.

In its Autumn bulletin, Food Standards Australia New Zealand says it is one of several food processing technologies that have been under development for up to ten years but have yet to be applied commercially. Some can be applied before harvesting, such as growing celery with a high level of natural nitrate. Dried and added to processed meats it may reduce the need to use sodium nitrate as a preservative. Non-thermal antimicrobial technologies under development include high pressure, pulsed electric fields and ultrasound.

Treating a food’s surface with ultraviolet light, or pulsed light 80,000 times brighter than sunlight for a few hundred microseconds, has an antimicrobial effect. So does “cool plasma”. Ionised gas is conventionally created in high temperature vacuums such as in fluorescent lights, but now can be created at 60^oC at atmospheric pressure and could replace antibacterial treatments such as ethylene oxide or irradiation.

FSANZ says it is keeping a watch on these technologies which will require new regulatory measures. “When considering risk management of new technologies, a critical component is equivalence of outcome of processes, particularly where the traditional process is operating specifically for food safety reasons,” FSANZ said in a statement.