Passage Two
The value of heat for the preservation of food has been known for thousands of years, but it was not realized until the nineteenth century that a very mild heat treatment far below the boiling point, made liquid foods such as milk keep much longer. The discovery followed the work of the French scientist Louis Pasteur on wine and beer.
The process, called after him 'pasteurization', is a carefully controlled mild heat treatment. It was found that the process served two purposes, it prevented the souring of milk, and it destroyed the dangerous disease germs which sometimes occur in this product.
It has long been known to bacteria experts that the tubercle bacillus is the germ in milk which host strongly resists heat treatment. To destroy this organism it is necessary to heat milk to about 60 degrees centigrade for 15 minutes, and its destruction has always been taken as a way of testing the efficiency of pasteurization. A heat treatment of this kind destroys about 99 percent of the common bacteria in milk, including nearly all those which cause milk to turn sour.
To ensure the certain destruction of tuberculosis and other disease germs in milk, it must be held at a fixed temperature for a fixed time. In Britain, for example, these conditions were defined-coy law in 1923 as 63-66 degrees centigrade for 30 minutes. This became known as the 'holder' process, since the raw milk had to be pumped into a large tank, heated to just over 63 degrees centigrade, held in the tank for half an hour and then pumped out and cooled. This was a slow process and required a very large plant, so scientists worked for many years to produce a simpler, more convenient method, with less large equipment.
The latest method, officially approved in Britain in 1949, is known as the high-temperature-short-time, or H. T. S. T. method. It has now almost entirely replaced the 'holder' process. In the H. T. S. T. system, the milk flows continuously through many sections of thin stainless steel pipes, During the process, the milk is held at 72 degrees centigrade for at least 15 seconds then, as it-cools, the heat is used, in part, to raise the temperature of the incoming milk in a device called a 'wheat exchanger'.
Efficient pasteurization may reduce the bacteria in raw milk from, say, one million to only a few thousand per cubic centimeter. The bacteria left are chemically mostly of the inert type, thatis, they either do not.