Food Irradiation: An Emerging Processing Technology to Improve the Quality and Safety of Foods

ABSTRACTNon-thermal processing technology has shown unparalleled advantages in improving food quality and safety, making it develop rapidly in recent years and become a new research hotspot in food processing. Food irradiation, a typical non-thermal food processing technology, has the advantages of rapid, efficient, low-cost, and pollution-free, which has received extensive attention and gradually become one of the widely accepted modern food processing methods. Especially in recent years, with the deepening of related research, food irradiation has made remarkable research progress in food preservation, sterilization, and degradation of harmful substances, showing a broad application prospect. In view of this, this article introduces the mechanism and characteristics of food irradiation technology in detail, reviews its related research on improving food nutritional value and reducing harmful substances, and illustrates to clarify the application potential of food irradiation technology in improving food quality and safety. The development direction of food irradiation technology was further discussed to provide theoretical guidance and reference for its further development and application in the food industry.KEYWORDS: Food irradiationnutrientscontaminantsfood qualityfood safety Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis research was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32272416 and 31972147), Project of Tianjin Science and Technology Plan (No. 22ZYJDSS00030) and Innovation Fund for Young Teachers of Tianjin University of Science and Technology (2015ZD01).