Description
Foods materials are consumed for nutritional purposes in the form of fruits, vegetables, plants, and meat. These contain proteins, carbohydrates, and other useful nutritional compounds and these processed foods are rich source of nutrition. Food preservation is a technique to enhance the shelf life of food materials for long-term storage to provide variation in diet and to maintain the availability of agricultural products during the whole year. It can be done by various methods such as drying, freezing, chilling, chemical preservation, and pasteurization, etc. Drying can be done by solar drying, microwave heating, vacuum drying, and some other methods. Microwave heating is a fast-drying method. It utilizes electrical energy to generate heat energy. Microwave heating and other electricity or coal-based food drying methods are fully based on fossil fuels. Due to the shortage of fossil fuels, solar energy can be a better option to overcome the energy crisis. Solar drying is an economical way for food preservation method and it is available free of cost for everyone. Solar drying is categorized into direct sun drying (open sun drying) and indirect type solar drying.
