After reading this short article, students work in small groups to respond to the discussion questions. Most people have a preference for one or the other as far as taste is concerned but they realize that little is sacrificed in nutrition by either form of processing vegetables for our tables. Ice, therefore, does not harm processed foods. The answer lies in living tissue, which is made mostly of water. When the temperature drops to freezing, ice crystals form and the expanding water ruptures the tissues of the plant making them more susceptible to pathogens and to drying up.
Losses can be in the millions of dollars.
Until recently, farmers simply worried about their crops, burned smudge pots, or sprayed the crops with water to minimize the damage when frost hit the fields and groves. Now, a new tool of biotechnology called gene splicing has permitted scientists to produce bacteria that prevent plants from freezing when the temperature hits the freezing mark. As the story unfolds, we discover that bacteria were actually involved in two ways in this scientific breakthrough. The first discovery takes us back to 1961 and a botanist called Dr. Hall Hoppe who worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Hoppe worked with a corn fungus and each season would grind up the infected leaves to a powder which he applied to test corn the next season to follow the pattern of the disease.