[music]
[sound of typing]
[music]
[typing]
Scientists are detectives.
Because to ask or are to answer a question, you have to know what question to ask.
Being a detective is a skill.
[typing]
[gagging sounds]
There's always food safety concerns and these concerns with food safety involve
bacteria being in or on the food products.
[squishing sounds]
Now there's a lot of work and emphasis focusing on how to prevent those bacteria on getting there.
You're probably familiar with the tomatoes and the reaclls around that
and spinach in the past and recalls around that.
There's always a low level of contamination, about 5-10% of fruits and vegetables
naturally have pathogenic, harmful bacteria on them.
They say why don't we get sick more often?
Well, the levels there are very low.
So just a couple of these harmful bacteria you won't necessarily get sick from it.
But if you cut that tomato and you let it sit on the counter, these couple of bacteria can
very quickly turn into hundreds, if not thousands of harmful bacteria and that's where the problem is.
[squishing sound] YUCK!
So the challenge is, we want to ensure the food we eat
are things we can enjoy safely and
prevent these bacteria from overtaking or causing illness and things like that.
[music]
Our lab here is the food technology development laboratory and
we develop food technologies.
[buzzing from lab instruments]
These are things that we look at ways to improve existing food processes.
So our work in this lab, one of the things was
are there ways or technologies we can utilize to reduce these bacteria.
[music and typing]
I had some very engaging teachers.
And so I was always had an interest in math and science.
Studying and understanding how things work.
Growing up it was interesting to take things that were broken apart to see how they work.
Not necessarily to be able to fix them, just to see how they work.
Record players or different kinds of mechanical things like alarm clocks,
you know kinds of things just common around your house.
[typing]
[music]
This is the transformer.
The need has been a continual need for doing something for these products
to kill further these low levels of contamination that have been continuing.
This is our plate.
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This is our sample.
So in looking at this technology if we can further reduce these safe products
and make them even safer.
So the process, what we have here.
What we're doing is taking the air, oxygen in the bag and that oxygen is being converted,
using an electrical voltage, is being converted in ozone.
That means bacteria can't live in the ozone.
The ozone actually attacks bacteria and kills it.
[zapping sounds]
For the exciting part of this technology is we can do it for a packaged food.
And if you think of all those foods in the grocery store,
they are all packaged food even those apples that are there stacked in those little trays
those little trays are packed in boxes when they are shipped to the grocery store and then the
trays of apples are served up or eggs that are in a carton.
All of these types of products are in packages.
So being able to treat foods in the package allows us a lot of variety of things
or diversify what we can treat.
So it really opens up a wide range of possibilities.
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