Microwaving food

Abstract

Microwaving is a common means of heating and cooking a foodstu as well as being an important industrial process for heating materials such as ceramics. Whereas the physics of the latter process is well established and that of heating water easy to understand, the processes of heating foodstuffs are as yet rather poorly understood. This is because the response of a foodstuff to the energy in a microwave field depends upon many factors (such as temperature and moisture content) which depend critically on the heating process. As a result the literature on microwaving food is rather confused with poor agreement between theory and experiment. The objective of the Study Group was to obtain a model for heating a simple foodstuff such as a potato which allowed for the effects of a varying moisture content and which agreed more closely with experimental results than existing models.