Feel free to correct me but If I recall correctly that’s basically what a microwave is.
Nah, microwaves are non-ionizing. They basically heat things up by pointing a super powerful flashlight at them. They’re no more sterilizing then anything else that gets your food warm.
They basically heat things up by pointing a super powerful flashlight at them.
I guess I don’t know much about microwaves or flashlights, but that sounds way off.
I mean, it is certainly a gross oversimplification, but the principal is actually the same. Pump enough electromagnetic radiation into something, and it’ll warm up. Microwaves, visible light, gamma rays, radio, x-rays, uv, infrared. It’ll all work the same way. Now, shorter wavelengths than visible light will also give you cancer, or radiation poisoning in high enough doses, but microwaves are actually longer wavelengths than visible light. They’re actually less dangerous than a flashlight. There is that whole bit about the actual kitchen devices being powerful enough to cook meat, so I wouldn’t recommend sticking your hand in one or anything, but only because it would be cooked.
There’s also stuff about Faraday cages and standing waves and crap, but that’s not really important to the point I was making. The only thing less dangerous than microwaves are radio waves, and those are just physically too large to fit in a little box in your kitchen. Seriously, you can’t have a wave trapped in a box smaller than the wavelength.
Different frequency, microwaves are lower frequencies, between radio and infrared. UV is the next group higher than visible light.
(Radio->microwave->infrared->visible->UV->X ray-> Gamma ray)
Is there an Ultrasonic sterilization technique ? I mean, I thought that even UV weren’t considered as a sterilization technique for being notoriously inefficient.
I don’t think ultrasonic cleaning is sanitizing. It essentially shakes the thing so that dust and dirt falls off, at least for solid things. It can break up cells (living or otherwise) by shaking them aggressively and breaking them apart; I believe there is an ultrasonic fat reduction technique that utilizes this, where the subdermal fat breaks down and the components and broken cells can be reabsorbed.
Ultrasonic cleaning devices usually use water as a medium to transfer the vibration to whatever it is you are trying to clean. If you, for example, put a pot roast with all the juices in an ultrasonic cleaner, it would probably break down and eventually turn to mush, from the outside in, likely breaking down softer material first such as any vegetables it was cooked with.
UV light would not have effect on the physical form, and would likely not have any effect on a cooked/already sanitized item, at least not for the shorter periods of time we use for sanitizing. UV is usually only surface deep though. If you were to n use it on yogurt, the bacteria exposed would die and the coagulated proteins may start to break down. If you were to expose something to UV for a long time, such as fruit or vegetables over a month at room temperature, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to mold or be broken down in the same way. I expect they would either colonize something more capable of living in the UV exposure which would aid their break down, or they would just dehydrated into a rock.
My understanding is that it depends on how efficiently the food matter absorbs the radiation and for how long. At a certain point you’re looking at it becoming carbon (ash) or a degree of it becoming carbon and stopping.
Tbh, I’m more interested in whether ultrasonic sanitization fucks up the food somehow
This would depend on a lot of things. Time, intensity, UV-a/UV-b, or even “natural sunlight”… ambient temperature and everything else going on around.
I’m not sure what the point would be, though. If it’s already fully cooked, it’s reasonably sterilized. And UV won’t penetrate very far at all, so it’d only sterilize the exterior surface.
But, like, anything that would do enough is going to cause some changes to texture. (Ie probably dry it out. Like sundried things- sunlight has some UV in it.)
So, your uncooked minced/ground beef patty then for example, wouldn’t benefit from some wacky “UV food sanitizer”. The uncooked mixed parts are still inside/underneath and still uncooked and capable of delivering undesirable biological entities.
If you had it thin enough it could, just uv penetration x2 because use uv on both sides. Not sure how thin the pieces would have to be though.
Who wants a dried out super thin nuclear patty for their burger? 😷
