INTRODUCTION:

Walking through down Abiola Gardens towards the Jakande Market at Ketu, Lagos one Sunday afternoon on my way back from church created a chain of thoughts and actions that lead to this proposal.

I got bewildered at a sight few meters across me. Hundreds of fruits ranging from watermelons, mangoes, apples to pears were been disposed into a LAWMA (Lagos State Waste Management Agency) truck. At that point my mind reeled back to a statistics which I read about in a newspaper some days ago which said that one-third of the Food produced for humans all over the world is either wasted or lost.

That sight lead me to take a series of actions that landed to the production of this proposal to reduce the amount we waste and then give it to people who dying all over the world from hunger.

According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the world population reached 7.3 billion as of mid-2015, implying that the world has added approximately one billion people in the span of the last twelve years. The world population is projected to increase by more than one billion people within the next 15 years, reaching 8.5 billion in 2030, and to increase further to 9.7 billion in 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

With this level of human increase on the face of the earth there is a sure need to ensure that we are not producing human beings who will die because of hunger. According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) of the United Nations, which keeps tabs on what is grown and eaten around the globe, one-third of food produced for human consumption worldwide is annually lost or wasted along the chain that stretches from farms to processing plants, marketplaces, retailers, food-service operations and our collective kitchens.

With the wasted food put at 2.8 trillion pounds, that is enough sustenance to feed three billion people. In the United States, the waste is even more egregious. More than 30 percent of the food produced which is valued at $162 billion annually, isn’t eaten.

There is however a difference between food loss and food waste. Waste occurs towards the back end of the food chain, at the retail and consumer level. In general, the richer the nation the higher its per capita rate of waste.

Loss, on the other hand, mostly occurs at the front of the chain – during production, postharvest, and processing – and it is far less prevalent in industrialized nations than in the developing world, which tends to lack the infrastructure to deliver all of its food, in decent shape, to consumers eager to eat it.

If you think the amount of food wasted in the United States is out of this world rather than wait till you hear this: 80% of the food produced in Nigeria is wasted. The founder Nigerian Women in Agriculture Research for Development (NiWARD) Professor Stella Williams lamented that three-quarter of the total food produced by farmers in Nigeria are wasted due to lack of processing and poor food security.

With the above stated facts and information, there is without doubt an urgent demand to stop this evil trend. It is for the cause that this proposal to save ten percent of the lost agricultural products in Nigeria was prepared. This is because the problem with the agricultural sector in Nigeria is not production but STORAGE and PRESERVATION.

2.0 HOW AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS ARE BEEN WASTED:

The main way we lose agricultural products in Nigeria is the lack of adequate storage facilities and transportation. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 10 to 20 percent of the continent’s Sub-Saharan grain succumbs to enemies such as mold, insects, and rodents. That’s four billion dollars worth of food, enough to nourish 48 million people for a year. In the absence of refrigeration, dairy products sour and fish ooze. Without the capacity to pickle, can, dry, or bottle foods, surpluses of perishables like okra, mangoes and cabbage can’t be converted into shelf-stable foods. Bad road and lack of rail slow tomatoes track from the North to the main markets in the South in Nigeria, poorly packed fruit gets jostled into mush, vegetables wilt and rot for lack of shade and cooling. Facing a similar challenge is India which loses an estimated 35 to 40 percent of its fruits and vegetables.

Even in developed nations, hyper-efficient farming practices, plenty of refrigeration, and top notch transportation, storage, and communication ensure that most of the food that is grown makes it to the retail level. But things go rapidly south from there.

According to the FAO, industrialized nations waste 1.5 trillion pounds of food a year, an amount almost equal to the entire net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Calories are wasted at restaurants that serve overly large portions or fashion elaborate buffets – where diners help themselves to excessive portions and employees dump everything at closing time, even if it’s under the sneeze guard for only five minutes.

American retailers particularly do their best to hide it from public view. Store managers routinely over-order, resulting in entire shelves of perfectly edible been transferred into dumpsters to make room for incoming ones. The British supermarket chain Tesco, which publicly committed to reducing waste in recent years, still admitted to throwing out more than 110 million pounds of food within their U.K. stores during the latest fiscal year.

Consumers are also complicit: We overbuy because relatively cheap and seductively packaged food is available at nearly every turn. We store food improperly; we take “use by” dates literally, though such stamps were designed to communicate peak freshness and have nothing to do with food safety. We forget to eat our leftovers, we leave our doggy bags in restaurants, and we suffer little or no consequence for scraping edible food into a bin. According to statistics, about 2.6 percent of fresh tomatoes in the United States never make it into consumer hands.

No matter where waste occurs, it represents a lost opportunity to feed people. And, on the home front, it is costing us plenty: An American family of four trashes an average $1,484 worth of edible food a year. Squandering food also squanders the vast quantities of fuel, agricultural chemicals, water, land, and labor needed to produce it. According to Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland, the production of uneaten food in the U.S. gobbles 70 times the amount of oil lost in the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In 2007, a collective 3.5 billion acres of land, an area significantly larger than Canada, was plowed to grow food – or to support livestock and diary production – that no one would eat. To compound the environmental insult, food buried in the airless confines of dumps generates methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. If global food waste were a country, it would be the third largest generator of greenhouse gases in the world behind China and the United States.

Eating the food we produce seems like a no-brainer – a perspective of a sustainable food system. But hard-nosed economics thwarts simple fixes. It is no secret that the more yogurt consumers toss after reading its “use by” date, the more yogurt retailers can sell. For supermarkets, it may make more sense to throw surplus apples into dumpsters than to lower their prices, which would undercut sales of full priced apples. Farmers will also leave entire blocks of fruit or vegetables in orchards and fields for fear of flooding the market and depressing prices. Yes, superior technology moves even more food to the market, by the resulting abundance – which keeps food prices low – only encourages more waste.

Weddings, where abundance is the hallmark of a good host, are among the worst sources of food waste in China, and uneaten food from all cafeterias and restaurants has increased along with urban incomes. In Nigeria, jollof rice, amala, etc are not considered enough during a wedding feast unless they are far more than enough than the available guests and therefore wasted.

3.0  CURRENT EFFORTS PUT IN PLACE TO STOP WASTAGE.

If there’s anything good about the shocking scale of global food waste, it is the huge number of opportunities it presents for improvement. In developing nations, for example, aid organizations are providing small-scale farmers with storage bins and multilayer grain sacks, tools for drying and preserving vegetables and fruits, and low-tech equipment for cooling and packing produce – with losses shrinking in the example of tomatoes in Afghanistan from 50 percent to 5 percent.

Farmers are also learning how to cure or pack their harvest for longer storage. “the farmers we work with in East Africa haven’t historically had a surplus – they ate everything they grew within three months,” said Stephanie Hanson, Senior Vice President of Policy and Partnerships for the Africa-based One Acre Fund. “Now that they’re able to grow more food, they need to learn new storage practices.”

After the FAO gave 18,000 small metal silos to farmers in Afghanistan, loss of cereal grains and grain legumes dropped form 15-30 percent to less than 2 percent. Storing grain also potentially allow farmers to sell crops for two or three times the price of harvest, when markets are saturated. In the U.S., scrutiny of food waste from the media, government agencies, and environmental groups had pushed a growing number of restaurants to start measuring what they toss, a crucial first step in curtailing loss. Dismayed by the amount of food their customers waste, TGI Friday’s now offers smaller portions. By removing trays form their cafeterias, scores of U.S. colleges have cut by 25 to 30 percent the amount of food that students take and waste. In Europe, some restaurants have even experimented with banning diners for leaving food on their plates or charging them extra.

A refrigerator spilling over with carryout containers makes it hard to keep track of food before it spoils. Using local vegetables while they are still fresh requires careful meal planning and proper storage. Bacteria that cause food borne illness are less likely to grow on food kept cooler than 40F.

Farther up the food chain, orchardists are working with juice companies and packers to develop more secondary markets for less-than-perfect fruit. Engineers at Georgia Tech’s Integrated Food Chain Center have devised sensors to be place on produce in the field, in the hope that knowing their strawberries temperature, humidity and travel history will help store managers better track and promote this perishable stock.

Innovation is saving eggs too. For years, Walmart found it expedient to dump an entire carton of eggs if one was cracked, rather than replacing the egg with one of equal freshness. Now the company is launching a pilot program that uses a laser system to etch individual eggs with product information, enabling workers to easily sub in a new egg with the same specifications. If adopted, Walmart suggest the system could save roughly five billion eggs a year from premature scramble.

There are other systemic fixes on the horizon. The Natural Resources Defense Council is urging the U.S. government to standardize the confusing jumble of “sell by”, “best by”, and “use by” dates, which leads to unnecessary refrigerator purges. And scholars and academics are lobbying schools to resurrect home economics classes, which could teach out youngest consumers to embrace oddly shaped produce, store food properly, preserve surpluses, request smaller portion in restaurants, eat leftovers, share food they cannot eat (often with the help of apps and social media websites), and compost everything that remains.

In the U.K., where government has made food waste reduction a national priority, a grassroots group called Feeding the 5000 collects high-quality produce from farms and packers that has been rejected by supermarkets and cooks it into elaborate lunches served to 5,000 lucky diners, for free, in the name of raising awareness and celebrating creative solutions.

Tristan Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the Food Scandal and founder of Feeding the 5,000, has called for groceries to discount good s close to expiration and to fairly share the cost of their over ordering with suppliers, and for processors and retailers to publicly divulge their food waste tonnages. Rising to these challenges, Tesco has shrunk its array of breads, removed “display until” dates form fruits and vegetables, hung its bananas in protective hammocks, and started buying more fruit directly from growers, which lengthens it shelf life.

More recently, Stuart launched the Pig Idea, which is pressing the EU government to lift its ban on feeding food waste to swine, enacted following a 2001 British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease linked with pigs eating uncooked scraps. Stuart, who is also a National Geographic emerging explorer, argues that collecting and sterilizing commercial food waste would lower feed costs for farmers, protect vast swaths of tropical forests from being cleared to grow soy for swine meal and save business the cost of food waste disposal. Feeding livestock on the food we currently waste, according to the United Nations Environment Program, would globally liberate enough cereals to feed three billion people.

Despite the 133 billion pounds of food that goes uneaten annually in the United States, some 18 million household struggle to eat at some time during the year. To help, food banks annually distribute more than three billion meals and 48 million Americans receive Federal SNAP assistance – less than $1.50 per meal in 2013.

Feeding all excess to animal makes good economic and environmental sense. But the best use for superfluous food is, of course, feeding the hungry, who globally number 805 million. In the U.S., 49 million people are officially food insecure: They don’t always know where their next meal is coming from.

To address this need, the charity Feeding America expects in 2014 to distribute around four billion pounds of food, most of it donated by manufacturers, supermarkets, large growers, and the federal government. At the grassroots level, gangs of Boy Scouts, Future Farmers of America, and church groups organized by the Society of St. Andrew inch through the nation’s farm fields, gleaning more than 20 million pounds of produce a year for food pantries and kitchens. And on some large California farms, field laborers pack ideal produce in to one box, bound for the market, and cosmetically challenged produce into another, bound for food banks, in an innovative approach called “un-current picking.” Still, says Ron Clark, a produce broker who pioneered this program in the Salinas Valley, the food that’s recovered by this process is just a drop in the bucket, with exponentially more left behind.

The first step in reducing food waste and food lost is getting people to realise that there is a problem. Denial reigns supreme. But attitudes are slowly changing as the price of food rises, and as we become more aware of the myriad ways that climate change will lower food production and the imperative to sustainably coax even more calories from land already under cultivation.

Having too much food sounds like a wonderful First World sort of problem. But filling cornucopias with an abundance that no one is even expect to eat is no longer something the world can abide. It’s too expensive, and it’s trashing the planet while millions go hungry. “Food waste is a stupid problem,” Nick Nuttal, of the UN Environmental Program, acknowledges. “But people love stupid problems because they know they can do something about it.”

4.0 FOOD PRESERVATION

The term food preservation refers to any one of a number of techniques used to prevent food from spoiling. It includes methods such as canning, pickling, drying and freeze-drying, irradiation, pasteurization, smoking, and the addition of chemical additives. Food preservation has become an increasingly important component of the industry as fewer people eat foods produced on their own lands, and as consumers expect to be able to purchase and consume foods that are out of season.

The vast majority of instances of instances of food spoilage can be attributed to one of two major causes: (1) the attack by pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms) such as bacteria and molds, or (2) oxidation that causes the destruction of essential biochemical compounds and/or the destruction of plant and animal cells. The various methods that have been devised for preserving food are designed to reduce or eliminate one or the other (or both) or these causative agents.

For example, a simple and common method of preserving food is by heating it to some minimum temperature. This process prevents or retards spoilage because high temperatures kill or inactive most kinds of pathogens. The addition of compounds known as BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) to foods also prevents spoilage in a different way. These compounds are known to act as antioxidants, preventing chemical reactions that cause the oxidation of food that results in its spoilage. Almost all techniques of preservation are designed to extend the life of food by acting in one of these two ways.

The search for methods of food preservation probably can be traced to the dawn of human civilization. People who lived through harsh winters found it necessary to find some means of insuring a food supply during seasons when no fresh fruits and vegetables are available. Evidence for the use of dehydration (drying) as a method of food preservation, for example, goes back at least 5,000 years. Among the most primitive forms of food preservation that are still in use today are such methods as smoking, drying, salting, freezing, and fermenting.

Early humans probably discovered by accident that certain foods exposed to smoke seem to last longer than those are not. Meats, fish, fowl, and cheese were among such foods. It appears that compounds present in wood smoke have antimicrobial actions that prevent the growth of organisms that cause spoilage. Today, the process of smoking has become a sophisticated method of food preservation with both hot and cold forms on use. Hot smoking is used primarily with fresh or frozen foods, while cold smoking is used most often with salted products. The most advantageous conditions for each kind of smoking – air velocity, relative humidity, length of exposure and salt content, for example – are now generally understood and applied during the smoking process. For example, electrostatic precipitators can be employed to attract smoke particles and improve the penetration of the particles into meat and fish. So many alternative forms of preservation are now available that smoking no longer holds the position of importance it once did with ancient people. More frequently, the process is used to add interesting and distinctive flavors to foods.

Because most disease-causing organisms require a moist environment in which to survive and multiply, drying is a natural technique for preventing spoilage. Indeed, the act of simply leaving food out in the sun and wind to dry out is probably one of the earliest forms of food preservation. Evidence of the drying of meats, fish, fruits and vegetables go back to the earliest recorded and vegetables go back to the earliest recorded human history. At some point, humans also learned that the drying process could be hastened and improved by various mechanical techniques. For example, the Arabs learned early on that apricots could be preserved almost indefinitely by macerating them, boiling them, and then leaving them to dry on broad sheets. The product of this technique, quamaradeen, is still made by the same process in modern Muslim countries.

Today, a host of dehydrating techniques are known and used. The specific techniques adopted depend on the properties of the food being preserved. For example, a traditional method for preserving rice to allow it to dry naturally in the fields or no drying racks in barns for about two weeks. After this period of time, the native rice is threshed and then dried again by allowing it to sit on and then dried again by allowing it to sit on straw mats in the sun for about three days. Modern drying techniques make use of fans and heaters in controlled environments. Such methods avoid the uncertainties that arise from leaving crops in the field to dry under natural conditions. Controlled temperature air dying is especially popular for the preservation of grains such as maize, barley, and bulgur.

Vacuum dying is a form of preservation in which a food is placed in a large container from which air is removed. Water vapor pressure within the food is pressure within the food is greater than that outside of it, and water evaporates more quickly form the food than in a normal atmosphere. Vacuum drying is biologically desirable since some enzymes that cause oxidation of foods become active during normal air drying. These enzymes do not appear to be as active under vacuum drying conditions, drying are that the process is more efficient at removing water from a food product, and it takes place more quickly than air drying. In one study, for example, the drying time of a fish fillet was reduced from about 16 hours by air drying to six hours as a result of vacuum drying.

Coffee drinkers are familiar with the process of dehydration known as spray drying. In this process, a concentrated solution of coffee in water is sprayed though a disk with many small holes in it. The surface area of the original coffee grounds is increased many times, making dehydration of the dry product much more efficient. Freeze-drying is a method of preservation that makes use of the physical principle known as sublimation. Sublimation is the process by which a solid passes directly to the gaseous phase without first melting. Freeze-drying is a desirable way of preserving food because at low temperatures (commonly around 14°F to -13°F [-10°C to -25°C]) chemical reactions take place very slowly and pathogens have difficulty surviving. The food to be preserved by this method is first frozen and then place in to a vacuum chamber. Water on the food first freezes and then sublimes, leaving the moisture content on the final product of as low as 0.5%.

The precise mechanism by which salting preserves food is not entirely understood, it is however understood that salt binds with water molecules and this acts as a dehydrating agent on foods. A high level of salinity may also impair the condition under which pathogens can survive. In any case, the value of adding salt to foods for preservation has been well known for centuries. Sugar appears to have effects similar to those of salt in preventing spoilage of food. The use of either compound (of certain other natural materials) is known as curing. A desirable side effect of using salt or sugar as a food preservative is, of course, the pleasant flavor each compound adds to the final product.

Curing can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Meats can be submerged in a salt solution rubbed on the meat by hand. The injection of salt solutions into meats has also become popular. Food scientists have now learned that a number of factors relating to the food product and to the preservative conditions affect the efficiency of curing. Some of the food factors include the type of food being preserved, the fat content, and the size of treated pieces. Preservative factors include brine temperature and concentration, and the presence of impurities.

Curing is used with certain fruits and vegetables, such as cabbage (in the making of sauerkraut), cucumbers (in the making of pickles), and olives. It is probably most popular, however, in the preservation of meats and fish. Honey-cured hams, bacon, and corned beef (“corn” is a term for a form of salt crystals) are common examples.

Freezing is an effective form of food preservation because the pathogens that cause food spoilage are killed or do not grow very rapidly at reduced temperatures. The process is less effective in food preservation than are thermal techniques such as boiling because pathogens are more likely to able to survive cold temperatures than hot temperatures. In fact, one of the problems surrounding the use of freezing as a method of food preservation is the danger that deactivated (but not known) by the process will once again become active when the frozen food thaws.

A number of factors are involved in the selection of the best approach to the freezing of foods, including the temperature to be used, the rate at which freezing is to take place, and the actual method used to freeze the food. Because of differences in cellular composition, food actually begin to freeze at different temperatures ranging from about 31°F (-0.6°C) for some kinds of fish to 19°F        (-7°C) for some kinds of fruits.

The rate at which food is frozen is also a factor, primarily because of aesthetic reasons. The more slowly food is frozen, the larger the ice crystals that are formed. Large ice crystals have the tendency to cause rupture of cells and the destruction o t texture in meats, fish, vegetables, and fruits. In order to deal with this problem, the technique of quick-freezing has been developed. In quick-freezing, a food is cooled to or below its freezing point as thickly as possible. The product thus obtained, when thawed, tends to have a form, more natural texture than is the case with most slow-frozen foods.

About half dozen methods for the freezing of foods have been developed. One, described as the plate, or contact, freezing technique, was invented by the American inventor Charles Birdsaye in 1929. In this method, food to be frozen is placed on a refrigerated plate and cooled to a temperature less than its freezing point. Alternatively, the food maybe place between two parallel refrigerated plates and frozen. Another technique for freezing food is by immersion in very cold liquids. At one time, sodium chloride brine solutions were widely used of this purpose. A 10% brine solution, for example, has a freezing point of about 21°F     (-6°C), well within the desired freezing rage for many foods. More recently liquid nitrogen has been used for immersion freezing. The temperature of liquid nitrogen is about -320°F (-195.5°C), so that foods immersed in this substance freeze very quickly.

As with most methods of food preservation, freezing works better with some foods than with others. Fish, meat, poultry, and citrus fruit juices (such as frozen orange juice concentrate) are among the food most commonly preserved by this method.

Fermentation is a naturally occurring chemical reaction by which a natural food is converted into another form by pathogens. It is a process in which food spoils, but results in the formation of an edible product. Perhaps the best example of such a food is cheese. Fresh milk does not remain in edible condition for a very long period of time. It pH is such that harmful pathogens begin to grow in it very rapidly. Early humans discovered, however, that the spoilage of milk can be controlled in such a way as to produce a new product, cheese.

Bread is another food product make by the process of fermentation. Flour, water, sugar, milk and other raw materials are mixed together with yeasts and then baked. The addition of yeasts brings about the fermentation of sugars present in the mixture, resulting in the formation of a product that will remain edible much longer than will the original raw material is used in the bread-making process.

Heating food is an effective way of preserving it because the great majority of harmful pathogens are killed at temperatures close to the boiling point of water. In this respect, heating foods is a form of food preservation comparable to that of freezing and much superior to it in its effectiveness. A preliminary step in many other forms of food preservation, especially forms that make use of packaging, is to heat the foods to temperatures sufficiently high to destroy pathogens.

In many cases, food is actually cooked prior to their being packaged and stored. In other cases, cooking is neither appropriate nor necessary. The most familiar example of the latter situation is pasteurization. During the 1860s, the French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur discovered that pathogens in foods could be destroyed by heating those foods to a certain minimum temperature. The process was particularly appealing for the preservation of milk since preserving milk by boiling is not a practical approach. Conventional methods of pasteurization called for the heating of milk to a temperature between 145 and 149°F (63 and 65°C) for a period of about 30 minutes, and then cooling to room temperature. In a more recent revision of that process, milk can also be “flash-pasteurized” by raising its temperature to about 160°F (71°C) for a minimum of 15 seconds, with equally successful results. A process known as ultra-high-pasteurization uses even higher temperatures, of the order of 194-266°F (90-130°C), for a period of a second or more.

One of the common methods for preserving foods today is to enclose them in a sterile container. The term “canning” refers to this method although the specific container can be glass, plastic, or some other material as well as a metal can, from which the procedure originally obtained its name. The basic principle behind canning is that a food is sterilized, usually by heating, and then placed within an air-tight container. In the absence of air, no new pathogens can gain access to the sterilized food. In most canning operations, the food to be packaged is first prepared in some way – cleaned, peeled, sliced, chopped, or treated in some other way – and then placed directly into the container. The container is then placed in hot water or some other environment where its temperature is raised above the boiling point of water for some period of time. This heating process achieves two goals at once. First, it kills the vast majority of pathogens that may be present in the container, second, it forces out most of the air above the food in the container.

After heating has been completed, the top of the container is sealed. In home canning procedures, one way of sealing the (usually glass) container is to place a layer of melted paraffin directly on top of the food. As the paraffin cools, it forms a tight solid seal on top of the food. Instead of or in addition to the paraffin seal, the container is also sealed with a metal screw top containing a rubber gasket. The first glass jar designed for this type of home canning operation, the Mason jar, was patented in 1858.

The commercial packaging of foods frequently makes use of tin, aluminum, or other kinds of metallic cans. The technology for this kind of canning was first developed in the mid-1800s, when individual workers hand-sealed cans after foods had been cooked within them. At this stage, a single worker could seldom produce more than 100 “canisters” (from which the word “can” later came) of food a day. With the development of far more efficient canning machines in the late nineteenth century, the mass production of canned foods became a reality.

As with home canning, the process of preserving foods in metal cans is simple in concept. The foods are prepared and the empty cans are sterilized. The prepared foods are then added to the sterile metal can, the filled can is heated to a sterilizing temperature, and the cans are then sealed by a machine. Modern machines are capable of moving a minimum of 1,000 cans per minute through the sealing operation.

The majority of food preservation operations used today also employ some kind of chemical additive to reduce spoilage. Of the many dozens of chemical additives available, all are designed either to kill or retard the growth of pathogens or to prevent or retard chemical reactions that result in the oxidation of foods. Some familiar class of food additives are sodium benzoate and benzoic acid; calcium, sodium propionate, and propionic acid; calcium, potassium, sodium sorbate, and sorbic acid; and sodium and potassium sulfite. Examples of the latter class of additives include calcium, sodium ascorbate, and ascorbic acid (vitamin C); butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT); lecithin; and sodium and potassium sulfite and sulfur dioxide.

A special class of additives that reduce oxidation is known as the sequestrants. Sequestrants are compounds that “capture” metallic ions, such as those of copper, iron, and nickel, and remove them from contact with foods. The removal of these ion helps preserve foods because in their free state they increase the rate at which oxidation of foods takes place. Some examples of sequestrants used as food preservatives are ethylenediamine-tetraacetic acid (EDTA), citric acid, sorbitol, and tartaric acid.

The lethal effects of radiation on pathogens have been known for many years. Since the 1950s, research in the United States has been directed at the use of this technique for preserving certain kinds of food. The radiation used for food preservation is normally gamma radiation from radioactive isotopes or machine-generated x-rays or electron beams. One of the first applications of radiation for food preservation was in the treatment of various kinds of herbs and spices, an application approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) IN 1983. In 1985, the FDA extended its approval to the use of radiation for the treatment of pork as a means of destroying the pathogens that cause trichinosis. Experts predict that the ease and efficiency of food preservation by means of radiation will develop considerably in the future. That future is somewhat clouded, however, by fears expressed by some scientists and members of the general public about the dangers that irradiated foods may have for humans. In addition to a generalized concern about the possibilities of being exposed to additional levels of radiation in irradiated foods (not a possibility), critics have raised questions about the creation of new and possibly harmful compounds in food that has been exposed to radiation.

5.0 CONCLUSION.

The essence of food preservation in 21^st century is no more a theoretical plan or program but a priority if we are to stamp out hunger and poverty. Hence this  article seeks to contribute a role in this fight against hunger and is in line with Goal 2 (end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture) of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG’s) Agenda from 2016-2030. Therefore,  the 10 agricultural products that are commonly wasted especially in Nigeria are hereby listed and the ways of preserving them:

• Tomatoes: It can’t be preserved long enough when it’s plenty. The only option is to ensure food security for tomatoes is to try out dry season farming or change the form in which it original is in (by blending, freezing, canning, etc).
• Pepper: Pepper would take the same form of preservation as tomatoes.
• Onions: Can’t be preserved in its original form but needs an aerated environment. Thinking of creating a huge wire gauze kind of net with rollers underneath to move it (if necessary). The idea of preserving onions is a commercially viable option.
• Yams: Yams can be preserved in the same manner as onions.
• Cocoa Yam: Cocoa yams can be preserved in the same manner as yams.
• Mangoes: Can’t be preserved long enough for it to be a commercially viable business. I’m thinking of extracting the paste inside of it, and then turning it to something close to butter. Not sure yet.
• Oranges: Oranges can’t be preserved long enough in its natural form during it season of plenty but the juice inside of it can be extracted on a commercial scale and sold to juice producing companies.
• Tangerine: Tangerines can be preserved in the same manner as oranges.
• Cherries (Agbalumo): Cherries can’t be preserved long enough its natural form during its season of plenty but can the paste/juice inside be extracted? Not sure yet.
• Garlic: Garlic could be stored in the ceiling of the house (a cool, dry place) or any other place with a similar temperature.