Substances added to food or other products to prevent them from spoiling or going bad.
From preserve (Latin praeservare 'to guard beforehand') + -ative (tending to). The term became common as food chemistry developed in the 1900s.
Preservatives are kind of a deal-with-the-devil situation—they let food travel the world and stay on shelves, but some people worry about health effects. Salt and sugar were the original preservatives (and still are), but now we have chemistry to fight bacteria at microscopic level.
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