h a l f b a k e r yAsk your doctor if the Halfbakery is right for you.
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Food sometimes is contaminated on the surface by things like flies and dust. A normal microwave does not decontaminate the surface like a normal oven, but normal ovens cook/reheat slowly.
The solution to this is to have a rather bright UV light in the microwave. This light would either come on for
a few seconds at ~1000 watts or be on the entire time at
~50 watts.
The inside of the microwave would be uv reflective.
All seals would be wade of material not damaged by UV light.
The window would have a uv-proof plastic layer.
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"germ" was used to keep format of page intact.
Any mispellings are unavoidable as this computer crashes every time I try to load a word procesor with spelling correction.
Spelling errors should be put in seperate annotations - not with the acctual comments. |
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I don't think you should be eating too much food with flies stuck to it, regardless of UV exposure... |
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Not stuck to it. Landed on by them. |
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I thought plastic was one of the most succeptible materials to UV light. |
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Yes, but what about people who don't have a microwave, hu? |
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Microwave exposure isn't enough? What about the bottom of the food? |
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Seems to me flies only come around picnic and outdoors food, and certain restaurants, I wouldn't have my microwave handy. But nice idea. |
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Very intense light can 'penetrate' several centimetres into living tissue, but a cheese covered sardine lasagne is a different bucket of fish. |
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This reminds me of a time I was tubing down a river. I had an amazing sunburn. It hurt to use some of my muscles. Apparently, meat is subject to UV light too. |
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I like this because I saw them use UV light to sterilize apples on MythBusters on the Discovery Channel. |
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I suspect microwaves sterilize too. If anyone has a lab with culture plates this would be easy to test, as follows. |
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2: Make serial dilutions of bacterial chunk. Plate them on a petri dish. 5 dishes for each solution. This will determine how many colony forming units there are per ml of solution. |
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3: For each concentration, make a series of petri dishes that you then microwave. The growth medium of the dish will simulate food with surface contamination, because that is exactly what it is. |
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4. See how different durations of microwaving cut down the number of colonies produced, as compared with the unmicrowaved control plates. One could also test other methods of food sterilization: freezing, refrigeration, salting etc. See if it makes a difference whether the lid is on or off. |
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This same procedure could be duplicated with UV light, and a conventional heat lamp. Overall this would make a stellar science project for a junior high student. |
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Once they've been microwaved and
exposed to UV, those flies should be OK to
eat. I wouldn't worry about it. |
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Even though microwaves don't heat
from the surface inwards, the food
usually winds up hot enough on the
outside to kill most bugs. And, as
[phoenix] mentioned, what about the
underside of the food, or what if
bacteria are in crevices and crannies in
the food? |
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[bungston] //I suspect microwaves
sterilize too// I don't think so - why
would they, except through heating?
Anything much smaller than a
microwave wavelength (which is on the
order of a centimetre, I think?) is pretty
much not bothered by it. Ants are
generally quite content in a microwave
oven; bacteria would be even happier. |
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Home food irradiation kits. Get some nice hot-gamma emitting material like cobalt 60 or whatever, a lead lined box, and vio'la! vacuum seal and deep freeze the food immediately and it'll keep for years. |
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Or just leave it a few minutes to cool off any sympathetic radiation, then feast away in microbe-free bliss. Gone are all your "my UV won't penetrate my food" dramas. |
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//sympathetic radiation// Say what? |
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I read somewhere that after irradiation, you need to let food sit awhile. thinking aabout it, it's more likely to be a case of free-radicals, but I have some recollection that there is some residual activity for a short time. Nothing to back it up however. |
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////sympathetic radiation// Say what?// |
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Aw, you mean you've never been comforted by a friendly radioactive particle? |
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"There, there... it's alright... you'll feel beta soon. |
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"Let me tell you something my gamma told me once. I'd just been dumped again (thorium my life!), when she gave me some beryllium advice. She said, "Ray, you're not a dirty bomb, you're a nice guy - girls like you. I'm sure lots of girls would love to be with you given alpha chance. So forget about your ex, Ray; thermal fission the sea. Just stay positive, and UV okay."" |
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