EXPERIMENTS ON THE PRESERVATION OF FRESH FRUIT BY IRRADIATION
Soft fruits, such as strawberries, raspberries and plums, were irradiated by means of an electron accelerator. The fruits were placed in small plastic boxes and irradiated on both sides with 1 Mev-electrons. The irradiation dosages varied from 0 to 700 kilorads. The storage temperature was usually 15 deg C. In general the consistency of soft fruits, irradiated with dosages of 300 to 700 kilorads, was superior to that of the non-irradiated fruits. It seems that a medium dose treatment affects both the shelf-life time and the ripening of fruit. In order to investigate the effect of ionizing radiation on the ripening process of fruit, experiments were carried out with tomatoes in different stages of maturity. In these investigations tomatoes were used because they do not get mouldy during a long storage period. Consequently, there is no interference of the metabolism of the micro-organisms with that of the tomato. In measuring the CO/sub 2/ production, it appeared that with mature green tomatoes this was considerably increased immediately after irradiation. However, there was no difference between the CO/sub 2/ production of irradiated and non-irradiated tomatoes of the turning mature stage. (auth)
- Research Organization:
- Inst. for Atomic Sciences in Agriculture, Wageningen, Netherlands
- NSA Number:
- NSA-15-019699
- OSTI ID:
- 4002707
- Journal Information:
- Food Irradiation, Journal Name: Food Irradiation Vol. Vol: 1: No. 3
- Country of Publication:
- Country unknown/Code not available
- Language:
- English
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