Nobody wants to eat poultry with Salmonella and die. Good thing some food researchers at Drexel University have figured out how to use plasma to blast the bacteria off raw chicken so that not only is your food safe, but so is your kitchen.
The Drexel study published in the Journal of Food Protection highlights a proof-of-concept procedure that "eliminated bacteria in low levels from skinless chicken breast and chicken skin, and significantly reduced the level of bacteria when contamination levels were high."
Here we were beginning to think that plasma was only good for building plasma gunsand shooting aliens with.
Using plasma to kill the pathogens is desirable because it doesn't alter the food — the tech is non-thermal and doesn't "cook" the meat.
The only barrier plasma torches making their way into everybody's kitchen is production. In its current technology, plasma is too expensive to mass produce.
But in the future, things could change and when it does, we'll all be eating healthier raw chicken that will have longer shelf-lives than today. Which means we'll all live longer lives, too, maybe.
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