Fresh fruits and vegetables are indispensable components
in our daily diet. Food safety incidents have increased
rapidly due to the widespread use of pesticides and due
to the contamination that occurs during food processing
[1,2]. Bacterial contamination accounts for 34% of
all global food safety issues every year [3]. The recent
Escherichia coli O157:H7 contaminations of cucumbers
in Europe and Listeria-tainted cantaloupe in the US
have raised renewed awareness to food safety across the
world [4]. Thousands of people were infected and dozens
ultimately died. Therefore, effective and easy-to-apply inactivation
approaches for fruits and vegetables have taken
on a high priority.
Conventional thermal methods of food sterilization,
while effective, are unsuitable for fruits and vegetables,
since heating causes inevitable changes of color, smell, flavor,
and a loss of nutritional value [5]. Many efforts to
develop alternative sterilization techniques have been proposed
and used, such as the use of ozone, UV radiation, ultrasound,
and other physical and chemical methods [6–8].
However, these approaches have drawbacks in terms of
cost, potential hazards, and maintaining controllable and
reproducible conditions of application, which limits their
large-scale practical utilization.