What do microwaves do to food?

Answer 1

A hospital autoclave sterilizes with pressurized steam heated up to 270 F (132 C), something your microwave simply cannot do. Microwave radiation and the associated heat may kill some bacterias and/or germs, but, no, microwaves do not sterilize food.

Answer 2

They produce waves of microwaves that heat the food from the inside out. The microwave was invented in military weaponry.

A microwave raises the temperature of food by subjecting it to a high-frequency electromagnetic field. The microwaves are absorbed by water, fats, sugars, and certain other molecules, whose resulting vibrations produce heat. The heating thus occurs inside the food, without warming the surrounding air

To elaborate a little further, the radiation that is generated is at a very specific frequency (in the microwave region) that hits the resonant frequency of water, causing the molecules of water to vibrate much more quickly than other substances at that wavelength and thus why the air is not heated as well.

Answer 3

Water molecules are dipolar molecules. This means that they organise their electrons in such a way as to make one side of the molecule positively charged and the other side negatively charged.

Microwaves are actually radio waves in a specific wavelength and frequency band. In microwave ovens this is usually around 12.2 cm and 2.45 GHz. Microwaves (and all other electromagnetic waves) form oscillating electric fields which go from positive to negative and back again in this case 2.45 billion times a second.

Because opposite charges attract and like charges repel and the electric field keeps changing from positive to negative and back again, this forces the water molecules to continuously realign themselves to try and keep up (or more technically to try and minimise the force on their positive and negative poles).

Now this rotational motion causes the molecules to bump into each other increasing their random (movement or) kinetic energy. The random kinetic energy of molecules is another way of decribing heat! So the more kinetic energy the molecules have the hotter the material becomes.

Answer 4

The microwave heats the food faster than other methods, it doesn't generate as much ambient heat so it doesn't heat up the kitchen as much as a stove or oven, and you can heat food in the same dish you serve in if it's microwave safe.

Answer 5

vibrate ...... and the friction of the molecules vibrating causes heat, which cooks the food

Answer 6

they cause it to heat up and the molecules go wild because they are being heated and it causes them to bubble up