The growth in the whole ‘eat local’ movement is spurring a revival of another traditional food practice: the art of food preservation, known as canning. With all that fresh local food becoming available in more cities and towns, it offers a solution to something you might call, ‘a good problem to have;’ what to do with all that fresh food? Robbie Harris reports.
At the Mount Pleasant Fellowship Hall in Wytheville, is a table groaning with glass mason jars full of bright colored salsas, pickles and jams, meats, chow chows and more - most of them made by people who took canning classes last summer from Sandy Stoneman, the Food Safety Extension Agent for six south western Virginia counties.
“In every community, there’s farmers markets," Stoneman Says. "So we see this growing and blossoming in availability of produce just for the average person who may not have a big garden but they want to put up salsa. They can go and buy all those ingredients in bulk at the farmers market from local growers and know where it came from.”
This most recent resurgence of interest in canning and food preservation can be traced to the financial crisis of 2008, when people were looking for ways to take control of their own sustenance and that of their communities.
Stoneman says there's something hospitable about canned goods, too. "There’s something really good about being able to give a canned good to someone who might need it, or a neighbor, who’s sick. You can bring them a jar they need is to heat up your jar of soup.”
Yes, it’s most often a jar, not a can. Because what we refer to as canning, is a process of using heat to form a seal on that jar to keep microbes out. Some trace the name to the word ‘canister’ for the glass canisters also known as mason jars.
"There's something really good about being able to give a canned good to someone who might need it, or a neighbor, who's sick. You can bring them a jar they need is to heat up your jar of soup."
Eva Morrison is one of the people who came here to share their food and their stories about canning. She tells the group of canners assembled, “My mother didn’t can because she worked all of her life and she always had an outside job but I got some of the old 'Ball Blue Book' Depression-era canning books, and taught myself how to can tomatoes and make jelly and it’s just that sound of the popping lid that sound of success it just does something for you.”
That sound of the jar is not only satisfying, it’s vital to the safety of storing food.
And like Morrison, many people there in the Fellowship Hall that evening said they attended classes on canning not only to learn the latest techniques for preserving food safely, but also because it wasn’t something they learned from their parents at home.
Danille Christensen is folklorist and assistant professor in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. She’s writing a book about the meaning of canning in American culture.
“I would say that nearly any cultural practice that has an historical precedent skips a generation so the immediate (next) generation may not want to do what their parents did because it’s a chore," she says. "But then the third generation is able to see it as sort of a skill. So it’s the idea that it’s part of their heritage, so there’s a reclamation.”
Christensen traced the practice of canning back to home kitchens the late 17th century long before it was scaled up for commercial industry in the early 19th. She suggests renewed interest in at home canning, could become a cottage industry and help revive local economies.
Christensen adds, “I think there’s a resurgence in food preservation in general. And also in post coal economies, how do we create resources in the region that can help people be self-sufficient but also generate surpluses that will become an economic base of the region?"
Danille Christenen’s forthcoming book is called Freedom from Want: Home Canning in the American Imagination. It will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. She also writes a blog on the topic.
You can also find the latest tips and recommendations for safe canning at The National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia
