Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And often on the Invention podcast we explore
Speaker 1: inventions in the realm of getting food into your body.
Speaker 1: That's right, And this is the perfect month to discuss
Speaker 1: some food technology, right, because it's it's November, where in
Speaker 1: the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving, which is, of course,
Speaker 1: is a time when you were thankful for your food ideally,
Speaker 1: but also you engage in some gluttonous or semi gluttonous
Speaker 1: behavior to celebrate said food. You're thankful for the elasticity
Speaker 1: of your stomach lining, right, and I should go deeper that,
Speaker 1: I mean, ultimately, it is a you see this in
Speaker 1: various cultures, right, it is the It is the the
Speaker 1: final big feast before winter truly sets in and threatens
Speaker 1: your survival. Yeah, the end of harvest feast day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, Uh, but you know so. One of the
Speaker 1: overarching stories we often tell l about the correlation between
Speaker 1: technology and and the timeline of human history has to
Speaker 1: do with nutrition. Of course, like to sustain a civilization
Speaker 1: in which most people don't spend the vast majority of
Speaker 1: their time on food procurement and production. You need a
Speaker 1: lot of specialized knowledge and a lot of technological leverage,
Speaker 1: which humans did acquire in stages over the past ten
Speaker 1: thousand years or so, largely in the form of agricultural innovations.
Speaker 1: How to farm, how to get bigger crop yields, how
Speaker 1: to grow better food products, etcetera. But when you think
Speaker 1: about the problem of how to feed the humans of
Speaker 1: the world, there's a whole second part of the equation
Speaker 1: that has nothing to do with the initial production of
Speaker 1: the food products we eat, because there is this vast
Speaker 1: terrain of obstacles and challenges between the moment and egg
Speaker 1: is laid or the moment of potato is harvested, or
Speaker 1: the moment a cow is milked, and the moment that
Speaker 1: that final food product is eaten by a human. In fact,
Speaker 1: you might be shocked to discover how much perfectly good
Speaker 1: food is produced on planet Earth, only to never be
Speaker 1: eaten by anyone. I'm embracing myself because this stuff always
Speaker 1: makes my skin crawlity here, yeah, it's it's it's shocking actually,
Speaker 1: so according to the u N Food and Agricultural Organization,
Speaker 1: it's estimated that roughly thirty percent, or about one third,
Speaker 1: of the food produced by humans on Earth every year
Speaker 1: is wasted by major food category. That's about forty to
Speaker 1: fifty percent of root crops, fruits and vegetables, about twenty
Speaker 1: of oil seeds, meat and dairy products. About thirty five
Speaker 1: percent of fish are lost or wasted annually. And that's
Speaker 1: that's now. That's like with twenty one century technology for preservation,
Speaker 1: cold storage, mechanized transport and all that. You know. This
Speaker 1: this lines up nicely with a recent discussion we had
Speaker 1: on our other podcast, Stuff to Blow your mind about
Speaker 1: rats and how rat thrive on disruption and how they
Speaker 1: have they have done amazingly well living in the shadow
Speaker 1: of human civilization. And this this is one of the reasons,
Speaker 1: oh exactly now that waste occurs at all kinds of
Speaker 1: stages throughout the chain of supplying food. In more developed countries,
Speaker 1: a lot of times there is less waste. A lot
Speaker 1: of the waste takes place at the consumer side, including
Speaker 1: like the leftovers on your plate that you scrape off
Speaker 1: into the trash, waste produced during the food preparation process
Speaker 1: in the kitchen, like peeling off totally edible bits of
Speaker 1: food cutting off crusts, etcetera. Um, and then also just
Speaker 1: the idea like less than perfect produce that sits unbought
Speaker 1: at the market because of aesthetic defects. Yeah, speaking of
Speaker 1: I remember correctly, there's like a box service you can
Speaker 1: get now where it's just the ugly vegetables. Yeahah, like
Speaker 1: someone said, hey, we're throwing all these ugly vegetables away.
Speaker 1: We should be selling these two hipsters for an inflated price.
Speaker 1: That's a great idea. Yeah, safe to eat, doesn't look
Speaker 1: could bring it on. I I prefer funny looking carrots myself.
Speaker 1: The more they look like like pants, the better I
Speaker 1: like it too. Now, in the developing world, more food
Speaker 1: loss occurs actually earlier in the supply chain, mostly due
Speaker 1: to a lack of infrastructure for storing and transporting food
Speaker 1: products in a way that preserves their quality. So like
Speaker 1: a huge part of this food loss is due to spoilage,
Speaker 1: food going bad, and much of the spoilage occurs early
Speaker 1: in the supply chain because food rots and containers while
Speaker 1: it's waiting to be shipped to market, or spoils in
Speaker 1: the sun on the back of an unrefrigerated truck on
Speaker 1: the way to a storage facility. UM. Food spoilage is
Speaker 1: of course a double problem because on on one end,
Speaker 1: you might say, the more minor end, of course, this
Speaker 1: is a huge problem worldwide. It wastes valuable food resources
Speaker 1: that could, if the distribution channels were working efficiently, get
Speaker 1: to the people who need them, especially to hungry people.
Speaker 1: But on the other end, of course, uh, if food
Speaker 1: spoiled by micro organism Z is eaten, it can potentially
Speaker 1: make you sick or kill you. And these are not
Speaker 1: new problems. So today we're gonna be talking about an
Speaker 1: invention that played a major role in the history of
Speaker 1: this food supply chain and in preventing some of this
Speaker 1: food waste along the distribution chain from you know, food
Speaker 1: production to eating the food, and that invention is canning
Speaker 1: the process of preserving foods by heating them in a
Speaker 1: hermetically sealed container. I have to say I always enjoy
Speaker 1: discussing hermetically sealed anything because it always brings to mind
Speaker 1: like this phantom of of of like a like alchemy
Speaker 1: and an actual hermit. I love it. Yeah, yeah, Because
Speaker 1: of course, her hermetically sealed in this context means air tight.
Speaker 1: Sealed air cannot penetrate. But of course it has the
Speaker 1: other connotation of like hermetic philosophy, hermetic religion. All right, well,
Speaker 1: before we get to the canning, though, we're gonna do
Speaker 1: what we normally do. We're gonna talk about what came before,
Speaker 1: what came before this technology, this food technology of canning,
Speaker 1: and there was a lot that came before. If you
Speaker 1: if you wanted to preserve food in the ancient world,
Speaker 1: you had to turn to four different sources sort of
Speaker 1: four different powers. Uh. This according to Brian M. Fagan,
Speaker 1: author of the excellent The Seventy Great Inventions of the
Speaker 1: Ancient World. He classifies them as snow, ice, smoke, and wind.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the like the snow and the ice,
Speaker 1: because that's probably the one of the ones. We have
Speaker 1: some some some really robust evidence for Ice Age. Hunters
Speaker 1: in what is now Ukraine use perma frost storage some
Speaker 1: fourteen thousand years ago. We have evidence of this. They
Speaker 1: would dig deep pits in the frozen tundra and they
Speaker 1: would store mammoth flesh and other foods in there. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this would have been, you said, during the Ice Age.
Speaker 1: So this is when like the like the polar regions
Speaker 1: that sort of extended down closer to the equator and
Speaker 1: you had ice sheets and perma fross lower at lower latitudes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you had a lot of basically, you had a
Speaker 1: lot of ice on hand, you had a lot of
Speaker 1: snow on hand, you had a lot of UH. You
Speaker 1: had a cold environment that was readily available in which
Speaker 1: to hide away your excess mammoth flesh for later. But
Speaker 1: that's not the only environment which we saw this strategy
Speaker 1: excel in modern day Syria. For example, ice house technology
Speaker 1: goes back to at least BC, and it was also
Speaker 1: well established in China by the seventh century BC. Now,
Speaker 1: an ice house is a building design for storing ice
Speaker 1: and UH and then storing things that need to be
Speaker 1: cooled buy that ice. And we've touched on this a
Speaker 1: bit in past episodes, so specifically our episode on air conditioned.
Speaker 1: You know, how do you how do you store ice
Speaker 1: and keep it cool? Yeah? And I think there were
Speaker 1: some allegations that say, for example, in ancient Persia, you
Speaker 1: could have sellers that were cooled by wind catchers and
Speaker 1: cannots that would would stay very cold and you could
Speaker 1: store you know, cold like foods or ice or whatever
Speaker 1: in them. Yeah, but in the other cases you just
Speaker 1: had access to say, mountain ice. Even we saw this
Speaker 1: in the the Aztec world. The Aztecs would bring ice
Speaker 1: down from the mountains. It would be carried down by runners,
Speaker 1: and then it would be sold to, you know, members
Speaker 1: of the of the royal houses, uh there in the market.
Speaker 1: This allegedly happened in the ancient Roman world as well, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the Chinese utilized it as well. The the the
Speaker 1: different ice houses that the Chinese used, you know, they
Speaker 1: often had you know, ornate doors, they had a draining
Speaker 1: system for when the ice is melting, and it would
Speaker 1: be used as a place to store ice or even
Speaker 1: a royal body after the the individual had passed away.
Speaker 1: And by the way, all of this is one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why the history of ice cream goes back,
Speaker 1: you know, far further in time than I think a
Speaker 1: lot of us might think. The Chinese, for instance, are
Speaker 1: thought to have produced the earliest example of a sweet
Speaker 1: ice milk concoction as early as the seventh century PC. E.
Speaker 1: When we're gonna do the full episode on ice cream, well,
Speaker 1: we thought we were gonna have maybe a sponsor for
Speaker 1: a little bit. We're like, bring us the ice cream sponsor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: k bar, you're out there, hit us up. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: do an ice cream episode tomorrow if you would like.
Speaker 1: So that's ice and snow, But let's get to that
Speaker 1: smoke and that wind. Meat. The drawing of meat has
Speaker 1: also long been practiced, either drying meat in the sun
Speaker 1: or drying it with smoke and uh and and ultimately
Speaker 1: with with wind and smoke certainly goes back smoke smoke
Speaker 1: curing goes back at least to the late ice age.
Speaker 1: Salting would come in later, becoming an established technology by
Speaker 1: the time of the Romans, and we touched on that
Speaker 1: a little bit in our recent episode on Catchup. Sure,
Speaker 1: but these technologies all alone only get you so far.
Speaker 1: What you need is some sort of magical container, right,
Speaker 1: something that preserves food within it without having to freeze
Speaker 1: it or dry it out, to reduce it, to alter it,
Speaker 1: you know, in some way shape or form, and and
Speaker 1: and and ideally do so in a way that like
Speaker 1: truly laugh because a lot of these food preservation techniques
Speaker 1: were discussing here, either they require ice to be continually
Speaker 1: added to the ice house or even you know, a
Speaker 1: salt cured meat is only going to last so long
Speaker 1: that and I mean another concern is just the pleasure
Speaker 1: people take in eating. I mean, to thoroughly salt meat
Speaker 1: in order to preserve it. That will have some good
Speaker 1: preservative properties and not a dent, but you know, mostly works.
Speaker 1: But it changes that it changes the nature of the meat,
Speaker 1: and it makes it very salty and dried out. It's
Speaker 1: not like eating fresh meat. Yeah, I mean in the
Speaker 1: same way that we often discuss cooking itself as a
Speaker 1: partial digestion, like a pre digestion of the meat to
Speaker 1: make it easier for our digestive systems. You might look
Speaker 1: at preservation of these various foods is additional digestion that
Speaker 1: in some cases can reduce some of the beneficial aspects
Speaker 1: either uh, you know, from a you know, vitamin and
Speaker 1: nutritional standpoint, or from just the experience of eating uh standpoint. Uh.
Speaker 1: It further digested the food and and at the end
Speaker 1: of that you might you know, grow tired of your
Speaker 1: hardtack or whatever. I feel like one of the most
Speaker 1: standard bits of like a slice of military life you
Speaker 1: get when you look back over the centuries, like what
Speaker 1: the soldiers are talking about and stuff. It's complaining about
Speaker 1: the food. That's like so often what's going on even
Speaker 1: as a technology advance is because certainly m you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of jokes are often made about spam, right,
Speaker 1: Spam is a canned meat that is ultimately, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the hallmarks of the the age of canning,
Speaker 1: which we'll we'll get to in a bit, but we
Speaker 1: you know, we've touched on some of the ideas you know,
Speaker 1: just about why one preserves food. Of the big one
Speaker 1: is we have all this food now, but we can
Speaker 1: only eat so much. Some of it's gonna spoil. How
Speaker 1: do we say of that? Yeah, part of it is
Speaker 1: just sort of top level flexibility within the supply chain,
Speaker 1: Like if you can preserve the food, that gives you
Speaker 1: more time to figure out where you're gonna send it,
Speaker 1: who you're going to sell it to, and all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. If you know, you're talking about a
Speaker 1: lot of fresh foods, that question is always an emergency.
Speaker 1: You need to have the final destination figured out for
Speaker 1: the food immediately. Yeah, But even on like a household level, right,
Speaker 1: it's like we have we just harvested, we have plenty
Speaker 1: of food. Now we can have a big feast, but
Speaker 1: it's about to be winter, and we need to continue
Speaker 1: to eat through the winter. So we need a food
Speaker 1: preservation system so that we can have that food to
Speaker 1: to feast upon, were not to feast upond but just
Speaker 1: to live upon heading into the new year. Right, So
Speaker 1: there's like supply chain flexibility, there's getting through the winter months.
Speaker 1: Another big one is, like we already hinted at this,
Speaker 1: like armies and expeditions exactly if you're like on the move, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're sending your army to conquer an adjacent kingdom
Speaker 1: or sending ships to discover new lands. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately we can look at those two things and say
Speaker 1: they're basically the same. There's not really a lot of
Speaker 1: difference in the way those two efforts shake out. But anyway,
Speaker 1: it pays to have improved food store ridge technologies on
Speaker 1: your side if you were engaging in any of those
Speaker 1: long distance of sometimes long distance travel scenarios. Now, just
Speaker 1: to provide a better idea of what was possible pre
Speaker 1: canning and what the sort of the pre canning world was, Like, Uh,
Speaker 1: I wanted to consider life aboard a seventeenth or eighteenth
Speaker 1: century sailing ship. I was looking into some of this
Speaker 1: we know, we all have sort of the idea in
Speaker 1: our mind, right of sailors and going down, they're pulling up,
Speaker 1: you know, a bucket of provisions. They're definitely eating hard tack.
Speaker 1: Hopefully they have some limes or lemons to stave off scurvy.
Speaker 1: But I was looking at an excellent website called Savoring
Speaker 1: the Past, and they they had they managed to pull up, uh,
Speaker 1: the list of provisions aboard a couple of different ships,
Speaker 1: and one of them is a British sloop UH called
Speaker 1: Alert from seventeen seventy seven, and it was a sloop
Speaker 1: of sixty men, and it contained the following beef four
Speaker 1: d and sixty two pieces and six barrels, pork seven
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy seven pieces and five barrels. Then twelve
Speaker 1: barrels of beer, uh fifty six hogsheads, and twenty five
Speaker 1: casks of eighteen gallons each of water. And then you had,
Speaker 1: you know, like six thousand pounds of bread, You had
Speaker 1: four pounds of butter, twenty bushels of oatmeal, sixteen bushels
Speaker 1: of peas, thirteen hundred pounds of flour, eighty two pounds
Speaker 1: of suet, two hundred pounds of raisins, four half hogsheads
Speaker 1: of rum they don't have enough rub, I know, and
Speaker 1: one hogshead of vinegars. Uh. So that meat that we
Speaker 1: discussed up top, the beef, the pork, that's definitely salted meat,
Speaker 1: which would not have had a tremendous shelf life either.
Speaker 1: I was reading a cool source on this. Uh there's
Speaker 1: Anatlas Obscure article titled the grim food served on the
Speaker 1: seventeenth century sea voyages Wasn't all bad, And it's about
Speaker 1: a Texas A and M University project that recreated some
Speaker 1: of these foods using the pre canning food preservation techniques.
Speaker 1: You know, they would give you, say, a barrel of
Speaker 1: salted beef. Oh, this reminds me of when we talked
Speaker 1: about the life aboard the nuclear submarines that would spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time. So like, early on the food
Speaker 1: is really good, but things get weirder as time goes on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's still you've got to eat. And so you're
Speaker 1: eating the weird salted meat. They pointed out quote after
Speaker 1: two months, the salted beef smelled gnarly and didn't look fresh,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't quite rotten either, So like that's kind of.
Speaker 1: I think that's a good way of summing up where
Speaker 1: you are with even like the height of pre canning, uh,
Speaker 1: preserved foods is that it might not be killing you,
Speaker 1: it might not be actually rotten, but it's certainly not fresh.
Speaker 1: And it's also again it is not going to last
Speaker 1: for an extended period of time. And these were often
Speaker 1: extended voyages. Um hard tack they mentioned though, which is
Speaker 1: that dried bread type substance, essentially like hardened bread rock. Uh.
Speaker 1: They said that that lasted pretty well though throughout the
Speaker 1: length of a voyage. So if nothing else, you could
Speaker 1: count on your attack as long as you had enough
Speaker 1: of it delicious. I guess you dip it in the
Speaker 1: vinegar hardtack with suet and vinegar. Well, I mean part
Speaker 1: of this too is that, of course then to carry
Speaker 1: out these voyages, you know, and part of this is
Speaker 1: just you don't It comes down to like how much
Speaker 1: room you have to carry, uh, you know, additional provisions.
Speaker 1: You know you're gonna have to acquire new food as
Speaker 1: you go, right, and uh, that becomes one of the
Speaker 1: difficulties of traveling. It committes one of the difficulties of
Speaker 1: traveling as a ship going from Port A to Port B.
Speaker 1: It also is one of the problems of a of
Speaker 1: an army, you know, transporting itself across the continent. Some
Speaker 1: of the one of the friendlier phrases is that armies forage, right,
Speaker 1: you know that they can't take all the food they
Speaker 1: need with them. But a lot of times this spent, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, especially more in the past, it would mean
Speaker 1: like seizing local farms, taking their crops and their livestock
Speaker 1: and stuff, and saying, you know, we need to appropriate this.
Speaker 1: All right, we need to take a quick break, but
Speaker 1: we'll be right back with more on the invention of canning.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So I think maybe a good
Speaker 1: way to do this is to start with what we
Speaker 1: know now about canning and then go back to before
Speaker 1: the invention. Uh so, why does canned food resist spoilage?
Speaker 1: Obviously there are multiple causes of spoilage. We know that,
Speaker 1: like you know, light, exposure to light can affect foods,
Speaker 1: exposure oxidization can affect foods. And these are different than
Speaker 1: what we're focusing on. We're focusing on the microbial variety
Speaker 1: of spoilage. Um, it's because spoilage is caused by micro
Speaker 1: organisms like bacteria, yeasts, and molds. Now, of course, we
Speaker 1: know that microorganisms like this are ubiquitous on planet Earth.
Speaker 1: There everywhere. Even if you generally keep things clean in
Speaker 1: your kitchen, there are some small numbers of micro organisms
Speaker 1: in and on your food and all over the environment
Speaker 1: in which that food is handled, prepared, and stored. And
Speaker 1: over time those micro organisms that get on your food
Speaker 1: get to feed and multiply they're releasing potentially toxic waste
Speaker 1: products in the process. Uh, this is one thing that's
Speaker 1: important to remember is that like cooking food. I think
Speaker 1: sometimes people think, oh, you know, even if food is
Speaker 1: a little bit old, I can cook it and that
Speaker 1: will kill all the microbes on it and then I'll
Speaker 1: be safe. But microbes also release waste products that can
Speaker 1: be harmful to you that are not destroyed by the
Speaker 1: cooking process. But anyway to keep your food from spoiling,
Speaker 1: you have to prevent the growth of microbes like fungal,
Speaker 1: molds and bacteria. But since again these microbes are nearly
Speaker 1: everywhere in our environment, what can you do? I think
Speaker 1: canning is a very simple, elegant solution to that. And
Speaker 1: the solution is you seal the food in an airtight
Speaker 1: container so that nothing can get in or out, and
Speaker 1: then you kill any living thing that's already inside the
Speaker 1: container by heating the container to a temperature that nothing
Speaker 1: relevant can survive. For example, the boiling point of water
Speaker 1: a hundred degreased C or two D and twelve degrees
Speaker 1: fahrenheit uh, and the modern canning process often gets things
Speaker 1: even hotter than that by the use of pressure kettles uh.
Speaker 1: And you hold it at that temperature for a specified
Speaker 1: length of time so you can be sure the temperature
Speaker 1: is permeated through the whole thing and it has killed
Speaker 1: anything that's in there. When done properly, canning can preserve
Speaker 1: food for an extremely long time. In fact, though we
Speaker 1: are not recommending you eat old canned food, as long
Speaker 1: as the can is not breached in any way, properly
Speaker 1: canned goods should resist spoilage basically indefinitely, Like if if
Speaker 1: a can of corn was heated correctly and the air
Speaker 1: tight seal has never been broken, it should, in theory,
Speaker 1: still be safe to eat decades later, though the taste
Speaker 1: and the texture of the food inside can can and
Speaker 1: almost certainly will deteriorate with time. Just one real world
Speaker 1: example of this I want to read from an article
Speaker 1: in the Sioux City Journal by Terry Turner from August.
Speaker 1: Turner is describing the nineteenth century wreck of a steamboat
Speaker 1: called the Bertry and the Bertrand sank in the Missouri
Speaker 1: River after hitting a submerged log on April first, eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty five. Uh and the boat sank within ten to
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes of the impact, meaning there was no time
Speaker 1: to offload its cargo, which included many canned goods and
Speaker 1: Turner rights quote. Canned goods removed from the shipwreck were
Speaker 1: tested in nineteen seventy four by the National Food Processors Association.
Speaker 1: The cans contained such things as brandied peaches, oysters, plum, tomatoes, honey,
Speaker 1: and mixed vegetables. The test determined that although the appearance, smell,
Speaker 1: and vitamin content of the food had deteriorated, it was
Speaker 1: all still safe to eat. Oh man, there's nothing like
Speaker 1: a hundred year old can of oysters. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that does sound pretty nasty, even if it was ruled safe.
Speaker 1: Now again, we are not advising you to eat one
Speaker 1: hundred year old canned food because there could be risks
Speaker 1: of for example, the air tight seal and the can
Speaker 1: being breached in ways that aren't vous to you. The
Speaker 1: most common warning signs that the can has been breached
Speaker 1: in some way are leaking, rust or especially bulging cans
Speaker 1: do not even go near that. Dents could also be
Speaker 1: a sign of worry, but then again, slightly dented cans
Speaker 1: are usually safe. Um. There's no there's no single rule
Speaker 1: that you can always look at a can and know
Speaker 1: for sure. But generally, if most food hasn't been breached,
Speaker 1: the airtight seal hasn't been broken, and it was it
Speaker 1: was heated properly in the first place, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1: I was even reading another article about a team that
Speaker 1: was exploring somewhere in the Arctic and they came across
Speaker 1: like decades old cans that had been left there by
Speaker 1: a previous expedition and found that they were still safe
Speaker 1: to eat. Um. So, when considered as an invention, canning,
Speaker 1: of course is more of a process than a material product.
Speaker 1: It's not all that much that's really particular about the
Speaker 1: design of the can, though those the word can design
Speaker 1: and vatitions that came along in the history of canning.
Speaker 1: I think the main things to consider here that canning
Speaker 1: involves knowledge of what types of containers are appropriate, the
Speaker 1: fact that they must be sealed airtight and how to
Speaker 1: seal them, the fact that they must be heated, and
Speaker 1: knowledge of what temperature they must be heated too, and
Speaker 1: the time that they must be kept at that temperature.
Speaker 1: I should also throw in that, you know, you hear
Speaker 1: talk about canning, and uh, you know, I've heard talk
Speaker 1: about canning my whole life, and I have to admit
Speaker 1: that for a long time, I just assume we call
Speaker 1: it canning because you put things in cans, right, But
Speaker 1: that's not where the word word canning comes from. It
Speaker 1: comes from the Greek canastron, which is in the Latin
Speaker 1: h canistra. It's a wicker basket used for holding bread,
Speaker 1: fruit and flowers. Beautiful. Try canning in a wicker basket, though,
Speaker 1: and I think you'll encounter problems. Yeah, I just didn't.
Speaker 1: Didn't work all that well. Now, before we get to
Speaker 1: the most commonly cited inventor of canning, I think we
Speaker 1: should mention that there was some work preceding the invention
Speaker 1: of canning that sort of led up to it, especially
Speaker 1: in the early So the invention was generally considered to
Speaker 1: be in the early eighteen hundreds. But one example of
Speaker 1: work leading up to Canning is the are the experiments
Speaker 1: of the Italian physiologist Lazaro Spalonzani fantastic multi syllabic name
Speaker 1: spalon Zanni. He lives seventeen twenty nine to seventeen nine.
Speaker 1: And spalon Zani was opposed to some of the spontaneous
Speaker 1: generation theories that were popular in his time. Spontaneous generation,
Speaker 1: of course, concerned various ideas about ways that life forms
Speaker 1: would sort of arise from vital atoms that were there
Speaker 1: in the soil or in the water. Uh. It was
Speaker 1: it was against the idea that there were life forms
Speaker 1: all over the place that were microscopic and would multiply
Speaker 1: uh and of course uh. And spalon Zanni was supporting
Speaker 1: the theories of the early microscopist Anthony van Lewin Hook
Speaker 1: UH when these ideas where that the tiny cells seen
Speaker 1: floating around in pond water were in fact life forms
Speaker 1: which gave rise to macroscopic effects through their multiplication. And
Speaker 1: in a group of experiments in the eighteenth century, spalen
Speaker 1: Zani showed you could fill up a glass vial with
Speaker 1: gravy and if it was sealed air tight and then
Speaker 1: boiled for some reason afterwards, it did not show any
Speaker 1: signs of spoilage. Thus, he concluded from the great gravy
Speaker 1: experiments that under normal non sealed conditions, microbial life forms
Speaker 1: must somehow enter the gravy through the air and cause
Speaker 1: the spoilage that we recognize in most food that sits
Speaker 1: around for a while. So he basically had like a
Speaker 1: miasma theory of how the gravy shooter was going to
Speaker 1: be corrupted. Well, no, I mean I think he. I
Speaker 1: don't know to what degree it overlapped with me asthma,
Speaker 1: because miasma theory was absolutely still in vogue at the time,
Speaker 1: Like we wouldn't get to the work of say John
Speaker 1: snow and and uh and Louis pass Stewar until later
Speaker 1: in the eighteen hundreds, you know, cementing the idea that like,
Speaker 1: there are these micro organisms out there, they are the
Speaker 1: cause of infectious diseases. Uh. But spalon Zanni I think
Speaker 1: was sort of on the right track. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: do think he attributed it to life forms, tiny microscopic
Speaker 1: life forms, and not necessarily say the fumes coming off
Speaker 1: of rotting vegetation, as many miasma theorists. But he realized
Speaker 1: that the the these organisms were going to reach the
Speaker 1: gravy shooter via the air right if you couldn't, if
Speaker 1: you didn't seal it off and sterilize it with heat,
Speaker 1: then they would eventually get in there and spoil it.
Speaker 1: But he did not invent anything cooking wise or food
Speaker 1: storage wise from this insight. But that brings us to
Speaker 1: one Nicolas a Pair, that's right, Nicholas a Pair who
Speaker 1: lived seventeen forty nine through eighteen forty one. He was
Speaker 1: accounts apparently differ whether he was the son of a
Speaker 1: woolcomber or a hotel keeper, and as possible that you
Speaker 1: know his his father was both. But he started work
Speaker 1: early on in life as an apprentice cook, so he
Speaker 1: he was a chef, he was a distiller, he was
Speaker 1: a confectioner. But through all this time he experimented with
Speaker 1: the preservation of food and UH and he especially got
Speaker 1: interested in it after the French Directory offered a prize
Speaker 1: in anyone who could develop and an improved method of
Speaker 1: food preservation, and so he set to work on the
Speaker 1: problem for something like fourteen years. And the French Directory
Speaker 1: issue I think was mainly military focused. Right. It's the
Speaker 1: idea of how can we get well preserved foods that
Speaker 1: still taste good and don't go bad and make people
Speaker 1: sick for the navy, right though also, I mean this
Speaker 1: was the period of the revolution and the Revolutionary wars.
Speaker 1: There was there were food shortages as well, so there
Speaker 1: was you know, the focus was also domestic, you know,
Speaker 1: just you know, whatever we can do to preserve food
Speaker 1: better to to survive these uh you know, these crunches. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then also we we mentioned the similarity but between
Speaker 1: military needs and like, uh, the expeditions that are going
Speaker 1: on at the time. Like many early stories about the
Speaker 1: successes of canned food mentioned it being used on, for example,
Speaker 1: polar explorations. In the early eighteen hundreds, Sir John Ross,
Speaker 1: the Arctic explorer, took canned food with him on his
Speaker 1: expedition to the Arctic. Otto van Kutzebue also did the
Speaker 1: same while searching for the Northwest Passage. So what a
Speaker 1: pair did is he developed a method using glass containers,
Speaker 1: wire and wire reinforced corks sealing wax in a bath
Speaker 1: of boiling water. And he tested this over the years
Speaker 1: on a number of different types of foods, including soups
Speaker 1: and what was, you know, essentially a hermetically sealed bottle.
Speaker 1: He was then able to claim an eighteen ten prize
Speaker 1: of twelve thousand francs with this method. And this was
Speaker 1: all published in the Art of Preserving All Kinds of
Speaker 1: Animal and Vegetable Substances for several years nice for several years. Now.
Speaker 1: This is interesting because so this guy who is credited
Speaker 1: with inventing canning here was not putting things the metal
Speaker 1: cans we think of today. He was more like, uh,
Speaker 1: ceiling and sterilizing soup in wine bottles, like glass bottles,
Speaker 1: right like some of the ones you see pictured in
Speaker 1: the history books. They essentially look like dark, old timy
Speaker 1: milk glasses, you know, with the with the wide brim,
Speaker 1: and U fill that with soup, seal it up, use
Speaker 1: this method and then it would be good to go. Uh.
Speaker 1: These were the four steps that he outlined in the
Speaker 1: Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances
Speaker 1: for several years. Uh, and it's basically what we've been
Speaker 1: talking about. Step one to place in the bottles or
Speaker 1: glass jars the substances to be preserved. Step two to
Speaker 1: cork these different vessels with the greatest care, because success
Speaker 1: chiefly depends on the closing. Okay, step three to submit
Speaker 1: these substances thus enclosed to the action of boiling water
Speaker 1: in a water bath for a more or less time
Speaker 1: according to their nature, and in the manner that I
Speaker 1: shall indicate for each kind of food. And then step
Speaker 1: four to remove the bottles from the water at at
Speaker 1: the time prescribed. So he got that, he got this
Speaker 1: prize money and he put it to you. So he
Speaker 1: established the first commercial cannery with this money in eighteen twelve,
Speaker 1: and the house of a pair operated until nineteen thirty three.
Speaker 1: And he can't all manner of food, so including at
Speaker 1: one point a whole sheep for purely promotional purposes. I know,
Speaker 1: I was looking for, like at least an illustration of this,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't find anything. He also applied himself to
Speaker 1: other inventions, including he a perfection of the autoclave, which
Speaker 1: is a device that uses you know, boiling conditions to
Speaker 1: sterilize instruments, the boulong tablet booleyon tablet for making soups.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, okay, so like uh oh, I always wonder
Speaker 1: how they made the earliest ones of those what do
Speaker 1: you just boil down broth until you've got a solid Yeah? Basically,
Speaker 1: I mean we have to remember the like broth is
Speaker 1: essentially what you have like a turkey carcass. After you've
Speaker 1: gotten the meat off of it, you put the carcass,
Speaker 1: what's left of it in the pot. You just boil
Speaker 1: it until you have the stock and then the stock
Speaker 1: can to utilize. But then if you reduce the stock
Speaker 1: down to it's like there, uh, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: completely dried essentials. You have that tablet uh. And that's
Speaker 1: what he came up with. Um. And then he he
Speaker 1: also worked on a non acid gelatin extraction method, which
Speaker 1: is you know, maybe less exciting now, I know what
Speaker 1: you're thinking, especially if you've listened to past episodes. Okay,
Speaker 1: sure the French celebrate a pair, but what what what
Speaker 1: he did? Wasn't that revolutionary? Right? Surely other individuals and
Speaker 1: and other nations make claims on canning technology. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is very often the case. Even when there's usually an
Speaker 1: identified inventor of a technology, they weren't like it didn't
Speaker 1: come out of the blue. Usually Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: even though it wasn't the you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: hyper connected world we have today, you still had people
Speaker 1: communicating with each other throughout a country and then cross country.
Speaker 1: So I was reading a piece on this from J. C. Graham.
Speaker 1: This was published in nine in the Journal of the
Speaker 1: Royal Society of Medicine, titled The French Connection in the
Speaker 1: Early History of can Um. I like that he put
Speaker 1: the movie reference in there, but he writes that yes, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, based on what we know is su does
Speaker 1: that the theory was widely known before the time of
Speaker 1: a pair. However, he points out that a Pair went
Speaker 1: above and beyond by testing different foods to figure out
Speaker 1: how long he needed to heat them. Even though he
Speaker 1: didn't understand the reason for air tight containers, he'd figured
Speaker 1: out through trial and error and experimentation that it was essential.
Speaker 1: So even if you know, there were other people who
Speaker 1: were onto something, they realized, oh, there's there's something to
Speaker 1: this boiling ceiling and boiling of the container. A pair
Speaker 1: really did the leg work, you know, spent again allegedly
Speaker 1: fourteen years uh figuring it out and devising his own
Speaker 1: recipes for how long things needed to be uh, you know,
Speaker 1: exposed to the heat and then and then you know,
Speaker 1: how exactly to go about it like he took more
Speaker 1: or less a scientific approach to it. But what but
Speaker 1: it was very different than like what we saw with
Speaker 1: Small and Zanni. Right, Small and Zanni got some correct
Speaker 1: approximation of the underlying reasoning, right, But but a pair
Speaker 1: did not. A pair just figured out what worked right.
Speaker 1: And again he didn't really understand why it worked. You know,
Speaker 1: the theory of spontaneous generation still still held sway at
Speaker 1: that time, and Pasteur's revelations about the role of microbes
Speaker 1: and decomposition would come some fifty years later. But Graham
Speaker 1: considered that his method was keeping decay at bay, and
Speaker 1: and that was enough. And he had It's like, he
Speaker 1: had the recipe for it, he had the instructions, and
Speaker 1: time after time he was able to prove that it worked.
Speaker 1: So a pair didn't necessarily have the insight about microbial life,
Speaker 1: but he knew that, like you can't let air get
Speaker 1: in right after you've heated it up. Yeah, he kind of,
Speaker 1: I mean essentially had kind of like the workhorse like
Speaker 1: kitchen knowledge of how this was gonna work. Like he
Speaker 1: didn't have to explain that, he didn't need to know
Speaker 1: how the microbes worked. He knew that if you if
Speaker 1: you follow these steps, then yes you could. You could
Speaker 1: store away a soup and a bottle and it would
Speaker 1: remain uncorrupted for a lengthy period of time. Now, I'm
Speaker 1: sure once we had a more fully realized and accurate
Speaker 1: theory of microbial decomposition and food spoilage, we could pair
Speaker 1: that with our like industrial and technical knowledge to to
Speaker 1: get better results overall. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. I mean it's
Speaker 1: the it's canning and fruit food preservation in general, and progresses.
Speaker 1: It greatly benefits from that new information. Right. A big
Speaker 1: point there, of course, being Louis pasteur as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: the pasteurization of of milk. All Right, I think we
Speaker 1: need to do a quick break and when we come
Speaker 1: back we can talk a little bit about the early
Speaker 1: years of canning and some of the legacy. Alright, we're back,
Speaker 1: So a number of you might be wondering, all right,
Speaker 1: we're talking about canning, and we're talking about bottles full
Speaker 1: of soup and whole sheep and so forth, but we're
Speaker 1: not talking about tin cans. Oh I'm sorry. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to formulate some kind of like Scottish accent joke about
Speaker 1: a ship in a bottle shape and a bottle. Never mind,
Speaker 1: I think it needs some work, but we can get there.
Speaker 1: We can get there with that joke. Okay. So basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: a Pair's book comes out and it's it's a big hit.
Speaker 1: It's such a big hit that Englishman Peter Durand buys
Speaker 1: a copy of it, uh and brings it to England
Speaker 1: in eighteen ten, and then seeks and obtains a patent
Speaker 1: on on an exact copy of a Pair's method. He
Speaker 1: obtains the like the English patent for the method h
Speaker 1: and he mentions in the application that he obtained the
Speaker 1: idea from a friend traveling abroad. So he's not he's
Speaker 1: not too cagy about the fact that he basically just
Speaker 1: took the idea and he's just going to patent it
Speaker 1: for use in England. But as J. C. Graham points out,
Speaker 1: he covered his grounds in the patent to include quote
Speaker 1: bottles or other vessels of glass, pottery, tin, or other
Speaker 1: metals or fit materials. So basically, you know, he he
Speaker 1: had an eye on the financial possibilities here, like he
Speaker 1: was kind of a patent troll. I guess he would say,
Speaker 1: you know, he was like, oh, this was this was
Speaker 1: working great in France. I'm gonna get it in England,
Speaker 1: and I'm also going to add in some additional language
Speaker 1: to ensure that we have, you know, all the various
Speaker 1: UH material iterations of this covered. But those material changes
Speaker 1: would actually come through in in the big early successful
Speaker 1: models of kens, which were the tin coated iron can,
Speaker 1: which replaced a pair of sealed glass jars for industrial
Speaker 1: production exactly now. So so I guess you could say
Speaker 1: that Durant saw the future like he at least knew
Speaker 1: like these are some of the materials that could be
Speaker 1: the future of canning. I'm going to include them in
Speaker 1: the patent. But then he was himself not an inventor.
Speaker 1: He was a merchant. So after receiving the patent, he
Speaker 1: promptly sold it off for thousand pounds and the buyers
Speaker 1: were Brian Donkin and John Hall, and they set up
Speaker 1: a commercial cannery in eighteen thirteen and it took off.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile Durand said about obtaining his patent in America
Speaker 1: so you could continue this this process. In his book Connections,
Speaker 1: James Burke at this point talks about UH an influential
Speaker 1: moment in the early days of canning, when some canned
Speaker 1: meats were served to the royal family and then I
Speaker 1: think it a maybe at a feast at the Duke
Speaker 1: of York was hosting or something, and apparently the royals
Speaker 1: greatly enjoyed the canned meats that were served to them,
Speaker 1: and this was like a big thumbs up for the
Speaker 1: new technology. Well, you have to you have to think
Speaker 1: about it. I mean, we've been eating out of cans
Speaker 1: our whole life, so there's not really much novelty to
Speaker 1: it for the most part. But imagine encountering a can
Speaker 1: of food for the first time. Here's this sealed object
Speaker 1: and uh, when it is opened up, there is a
Speaker 1: rich soup inside. Uh, there's a there's a prepared meal
Speaker 1: inside this object. I mean, it's It's one of those
Speaker 1: things that makes me wonder. Generally, was food just really
Speaker 1: bad and the past I don't know, But maybe maybe
Speaker 1: these early canned foods were just really good. There is
Speaker 1: such a thing as good canned food. I think we
Speaker 1: often associate can food with being bad, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be whereight, I mean, because the thing is
Speaker 1: like canned food. Processed food does not begin with canning,
Speaker 1: but but canning does bring about a revolution in processed food.
Speaker 1: And you and and becomes like a hallmark of processed food. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know. But that being said, there are varying degrees
Speaker 1: of of quality to be had there and there there
Speaker 1: is such thing as a good can soup. I would
Speaker 1: presume that if they were serving it to the royal family,
Speaker 1: they would have they would have picked a good one,
Speaker 1: they would have marked. I was like, this is the one, Uh,
Speaker 1: this is the can that needs to be put in
Speaker 1: front of the queen. It was in fact Campbell's split
Speaker 1: pe and Ham. But yeah, one thing you mentioned is
Speaker 1: that Duran was looking to obtain a patent in America,
Speaker 1: and of course America. In America, shortly after this, canning
Speaker 1: became huge business. And generally everywhere, like anywhere you were
Speaker 1: producing food, there's a high probability that you're also gonna
Speaker 1: have a cannary because you need to to to actually
Speaker 1: you know, ship the the product out. But you look
Speaker 1: back at particularly with America, you look back at a
Speaker 1: cookbooks from say around nineteen and you have books like
Speaker 1: how to Make Good Things to Eat, uh and and
Speaker 1: it's mostly recipes for how to utilize canned goods. But then,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, canning wasn't just a way of
Speaker 1: obtaining commercial foods. It wasn't just a way of of
Speaker 1: obtaining foods that came from over there. No, it was
Speaker 1: also a breakthrough in in household food preservation. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a way to preserve your own food, but then also
Speaker 1: to engage in like minor food trading and selling in
Speaker 1: your own community. Consider canned fruit preserves and jellies Household
Speaker 1: Methods of Preparation from nineteen o four by Maria PARLOA. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was just another cookbook that I ran across, and
Speaker 1: it's all about ways to can, ways to preserve food
Speaker 1: in your house. Uh. And I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but I mean I I grew up around canning. Like
Speaker 1: canning was always occurring, either with my grandparents or my
Speaker 1: aunts or my my mom would can stuff, and uh,
Speaker 1: it was just it was part of the tradition of life.
Speaker 1: I wish i'd been around it more. I mean, I
Speaker 1: love those kind of traditions. No, we we didn't do
Speaker 1: it a lot in my household. But I want to
Speaker 1: come back to home canning because I think, uh, that's
Speaker 1: an interesting development in this process because what you see
Speaker 1: early on is like canning begins as this very centralized activity,
Speaker 1: which is for like the needs of the state, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you've got the state prize paying out for
Speaker 1: But of course, gradually over time it becomes like industrial
Speaker 1: products for the consumer and then finally democratized to something
Speaker 1: you can do in your own kitchen, which is only
Speaker 1: fair because the need for the reservation of food and
Speaker 1: the various some methods to preserve it like that was
Speaker 1: a pre state um initiative in human civilization. Oh, of course,
Speaker 1: But I want to talk a little bit about I
Speaker 1: mentioned James Burke writing about canning and connections. There's a
Speaker 1: section where he talks about several problems encountered by the
Speaker 1: earliest consumer canned goods. Uh So, First of all, you
Speaker 1: had difficulty of production that like he talks about the
Speaker 1: first canned goods were made with these production methods that
Speaker 1: would allow each cannery worker to produce only about tin
Speaker 1: cans of food per day uh so. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: one thing that flowed from that is that there were
Speaker 1: high costs. Uh so, Like he says, the first canned
Speaker 1: foods that reached shops in England around eighteen thirty or
Speaker 1: so included products like tomatoes, sardines, and peas, and high
Speaker 1: price here was a significant barrier to adoption. Burke sites
Speaker 1: early prices in the eighteen thirties, when a can of
Speaker 1: soup sold for over seven and a halfpence. And I'll
Speaker 1: contextualize these prices in a second, a can of corned
Speaker 1: beef for eight and a halfpence, a can of salmon
Speaker 1: for eleven and a halfpence. And for comparison, Burke says
Speaker 1: that at the same time, an English family could rent
Speaker 1: a house for about twelve and a halfpence a week,
Speaker 1: so a can of corned beef is like two thirds
Speaker 1: of a week's rent. On the other hand, when we
Speaker 1: think about cans, you're probably picturing the modern standard, like
Speaker 1: fifteen ounce can, the kind that fits easily in one hand.
Speaker 1: I'm not positive, but I think these prices Burke is
Speaker 1: siting are referring to larger cans, which were very common
Speaker 1: early on, more like the size of a paint can. So,
Speaker 1: you know, paint can worth of corned beef, is that
Speaker 1: worth two thirds of a week's rent? I don't know.
Speaker 1: It still sounds pretty steep. Yeah, you can spice it
Speaker 1: up a little bit, you know, I don't have to
Speaker 1: just eat straight corned beef for every meal. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it also gets down to the fact that, like, this
Speaker 1: would have been more of it. This is more of
Speaker 1: a specialized product. Early on, it had to either be
Speaker 1: for like your your voyage to the edge of the
Speaker 1: threshold of human civilization, or it was something that you
Speaker 1: would eat because you were you know, it was a
Speaker 1: novelty and you could afford it. Right. One more funny
Speaker 1: fact is that Burke mentions early cans had to be
Speaker 1: open with tools like a hammer and chisel. But then
Speaker 1: also you had factors early on that still affect certain
Speaker 1: products today. I mean, some foods work way better canned
Speaker 1: than others. Right, most people are totally cool with canned beans,
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of people who don't love
Speaker 1: canned peas. Like, what's the difference there, Well, the sealed
Speaker 1: containers have to be boiled in order to be sterilized, right,
Speaker 1: And some foods just deal better with extreme exposure to
Speaker 1: prolonged heat and a sealed container than others do. And
Speaker 1: then I mean, it's also worth thinking about the fact
Speaker 1: that some canned foods were themselves already had already experienced
Speaker 1: preservation by another method. You know, if you're dealing with
Speaker 1: something that is pickled, for instance, sure, totally. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, today canning and you know there's there are
Speaker 1: a lot of steps in between. But today canning has
Speaker 1: done at massive scale by automated machinery rather than the
Speaker 1: early method of like hand soldering the can together. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's often I think I mentioned this earlier, superheated
Speaker 1: by the use of high pressure steam kettles to take
Speaker 1: the contents, actually has the normal pressure boiling point of
Speaker 1: water up to around two hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 1: or a hundred and sixty degrees celsius. So that's how
Speaker 1: you get a lot of these modern foods that are
Speaker 1: kind of canned to death. But then at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, like right, there's still it's still canned food.
Speaker 1: It is still food. That is, it is preserved, it
Speaker 1: is it is not corrupted, and you can eat it. It
Speaker 1: It might not be great, but maybe it's better than
Speaker 1: than than what Mangy assaulted pork from a barrel. Right now,
Speaker 1: and now to come back to home canning, this is interesting.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I grew up around canning, but I
Speaker 1: just had I just had this kind of mason jar
Speaker 1: world of canning in my head, and I kind of, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, just naively thought that this is what everybody did,
Speaker 1: like that everybody had the mason jar. The mason jar
Speaker 1: is the standard, and that's why we put flowers in
Speaker 1: them at at country weddings and why we we drink
Speaker 1: orange juice out of them in the morning. But uh,
Speaker 1: but no, you know, there were a number of inventions
Speaker 1: and innovations aimed at streamlining the home cannon game. Uh
Speaker 1: and uh and so yes, the mason jar was was,
Speaker 1: it was big, especially in the United States. But there
Speaker 1: were some other country specific innovations that were that are
Speaker 1: also worth mentioning, such as Germany's wet jar, which is
Speaker 1: created by the J Wet Company in eight and it's
Speaker 1: a molded glass jar with a simple lock sometimes described
Speaker 1: as like a fool proof lock, rubber gaskett and lid
Speaker 1: just to aid in the canning process. And it has
Speaker 1: a pretty slick looking kind of minimalist design to it.
Speaker 1: I think it's gorgeous. Yeah. She also mentioned, um, there's
Speaker 1: a Fowler's of a Cola, which was an Australian canning system.
Speaker 1: Perhaps some of our Australian listeners can chime in on
Speaker 1: that if they have memories of that U And then
Speaker 1: there's the Kilner jar, which was used in the in England,
Speaker 1: and I think this one had more of a screwing
Speaker 1: mechanism on top. So yeah, it basically comes down to
Speaker 1: the fact that, yes, there's the basic plan for out
Speaker 1: of can something, but especially and you know, if you're
Speaker 1: dealing with if you're either dealing with like a highly
Speaker 1: specific industrial process or you're dealing with a home process,
Speaker 1: you can have different approaches on how to best carry
Speaker 1: that off, how to how to form that seal, how
Speaker 1: to how to carry this all out safely because you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately you're dealing with boiling water and if you're in
Speaker 1: and if you're throwing a pressure cooker into the scenario,
Speaker 1: you know that also adds a certain element of danger
Speaker 1: to the scenario. And then, I mean, without getting to
Speaker 1: the fact that if you do it wrong, you're not
Speaker 1: going to properly preserve your food. You're going to potentially
Speaker 1: bottle um, you know, poison, which is not what you
Speaker 1: intended and not why you set off on this adventure
Speaker 1: of canning to begin with. At the very least, even
Speaker 1: if you don't poison yourself, you can end up wasting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and that is Yeah, that's the whole purpose of
Speaker 1: this endeavor is not to waste food, to to take
Speaker 1: what is food now and have it be food, uh
Speaker 1: three four months from now, a year from now, etcetera.
Speaker 1: You know, Robert, I think this has convinced me. I've
Speaker 1: never I do a lot of cooking at home, but
Speaker 1: I've never done canning at home. I think I'm gonna
Speaker 1: give it a try. Oh that's awesome. Yeah, I've never
Speaker 1: I've never attempted canning myself either, I don't think. Uh,
Speaker 1: most we've done in like fridge pickles, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: not cannings. Yeah. Yeah, but that's the closest I've come,
Speaker 1: because it's at least in a mason jar. Uh. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I would. I would also love to hear from anyone
Speaker 1: who currently engages in canning. What's your what's it like?
Speaker 1: How do you how do you relate to the canning process? Uh? Likewise,
Speaker 1: did you grow up you know, within any of these
Speaker 1: various canning traditions, uh, any of these various models of
Speaker 1: of of home canning, or do you have specific memories
Speaker 1: of good or bad about various canned foods? We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from you, and likewise, uh, you know, if
Speaker 1: we'd love to hear from you, if you would like
Speaker 1: to to hear the exploration here, continue in any in
Speaker 1: any direction that we've touched on in this episode, because
Speaker 1: certainly the history of food technology is is vast, and
Speaker 1: there's so many wonderful little avenues to to follow or
Speaker 1: to go in more depth upon. Next episode, Let's do Jello. No,
Speaker 1: we don't have um, you know, but it's a but No. Specifically,
Speaker 1: we could do a whole episode in Joel. We could
Speaker 1: do a whole episode on just can sardines themselves? You know,
Speaker 1: like any one of these these examples, you know, are
Speaker 1: are generally there's a lot more history and a lot
Speaker 1: more science to it than we tend to think. All right,
Speaker 1: So again, stick with us throughout November. We're gonna have
Speaker 1: some more food related episodes of Invention coming at you,
Speaker 1: and who I don't I can't even imagine what December
Speaker 1: is going to bring, but you can follow us and
Speaker 1: find out. Make sure you have wherever you get your podcasts,
Speaker 1: go to Invention. Make sure you have subscribed, and if
Speaker 1: you want to help the show out, a great thing
Speaker 1: you can do is leave a nice review, leave some stars,
Speaker 1: leave a nice comment. Uh. You know that that helps
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Speaker 1: remember our other show, Stuff to Blow your Mind. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can find that wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff
Speaker 1: toablew your Mind is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Invention is also at invention pod dot com. Huge thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on the episode or any other to suggest
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