- An extra sentence or two talking about the majesty of the HPP machine.
- An extra section at the end talking about how it’s used for things like guacamole so you don’t have to ruin it by cooking.
- Link out to Maryland Packaging.
HOLY S—, YOU CAN CRUSH BACTERIA TO DEATH
I still remember my first tour of Maryland Packaging.
I was interviewing for a job and when we were done, the food safety compliance officer showed me around. His name was Dan.
If you’ve never toured a food packaging facility before, I fully recommend it – it’s kind of exciting. It feels like a secret. There are so many little rules, regulations, and procedures that go on behind the scenes to keep your food safe and prevent outbreaks. It’s the kind of stuff you’d never think about.
I still remember seeing an HPP machine for the first time.
There was a window between the HPP room and a lushly furnished breakroom. We watched employees on the other side of the glass load up the machine.
Dan explained to me that food products in flexible packaging went inside and were subjected to pressures of over 87,000 psi – which is more pressure than exists at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
At these pressures, the bacteria are essentially crushed.
They die.
In a moment of oddity, I watched the machine in the other room, imagining all those poor little bacteria feeling more and more pressure, until… pop.
I guess, technically they don’t pop because the pressure is isostatic – which means that it’s applied equally on all sides – but it does obliterate their ability to make you pray to the porcelain god.
I kept asking questions about it. I couldn’t get it out of my brain.
“Crushes them?”
“Yep.”
“But like… what? That kills them?”
“They’re just cells filled with water and chemicals like anything else. If you crush them… yeah. The end.”
“And then you can just eat it?”
“Bacteria only make you sick through their biological processes. If they’re inert… no biological processes. They don’t make you sick.”
“Excuse me. What.”
“Yep.”
“And then what?”
“They last a long time. The food has to be refrigerated but lasts around four months.”
“What do you mean four months?”
He shrugged. “Depending on the food. Most of it lasts right around four months.”
If you told me in school that you could just smash a bacteria to death and that’s one of the tools humans have in their arsenal to vanquish our eternal microscopic enemies, I would’ve been paying a lot more attention.
Why does no one tell us these things?
