Canning

That's right, And this is the perfect month to discuss some food technology, right, because it's it's November, where in the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving, which is, of course, is a time when you were thankful for your food ideally, but also you engage in some gluttonous or semi gluttonous

behavior to celebrate said food. You're thankful for the elasticity of your stomach lining, right, and I should go deeper that, I mean, ultimately, it is a you see this in various cultures, right, it is the It is the the final big feast before winter truly sets in and threatens your survival. Yeah, the end of harvest feast day. Yeah, of course, Uh, but you know so. One of the overarching stories we often tell l about the correlation between technology and and the timeline of human history has to

do with nutrition. Of course, like to sustain a civilization in which most people don't spend the vast majority of their time on food procurement and production. You need a lot of specialized knowledge and a lot of technological leverage, which humans did acquire in stages over the past ten thousand years or so, largely in the form of agricultural innovations. How to farm, how to get bigger crop yields, how

to grow better food products, etcetera. But when you think about the problem of how to feed the humans of the world, there's a whole second part of the equation that has nothing to do with the initial production of the food products we eat, because there is this vast terrain of obstacles and challenges between the moment and egg is laid or the moment of potato is harvested, or the moment a cow is milked, and the moment that

that final food product is eaten by a human. In fact, you might be shocked to discover how much perfectly good food is produced on planet Earth, only to never be eaten by anyone. I'm embracing myself because this stuff always makes my skin crawlity here, yeah, it's it's it's shocking actually, so according to the u N Food and Agricultural Organization, it's estimated that roughly thirty percent, or about one third, of the food produced by humans on Earth every year

is wasted by major food category. That's about forty to fifty percent of root crops, fruits and vegetables, about twenty of oil seeds, meat and dairy products. About thirty five percent of fish are lost or wasted annually. And that's that's now. That's like with twenty one century technology for preservation,

cold storage, mechanized transport and all that. You know. This this lines up nicely with a recent discussion we had on our other podcast, Stuff to Blow your mind about rats and how rat thrive on disruption and how they have they have done amazingly well living in the shadow of human civilization. And this this is one of the reasons, oh exactly now that waste occurs at all kinds of stages throughout the chain of supplying food. In more developed countries,

a lot of times there is less waste. A lot of the waste takes place at the consumer side, including like the leftovers on your plate that you scrape off into the trash, waste produced during the food preparation process in the kitchen, like peeling off totally edible bits of food cutting off crusts, etcetera. Um, and then also just the idea like less than perfect produce that sits unbought

at the market because of aesthetic defects. Yeah, speaking of I remember correctly, there's like a box service you can get now where it's just the ugly vegetables. Yeahah, like someone said, hey, we're throwing all these ugly vegetables away. We should be selling these two hipsters for an inflated price. That's a great idea. Yeah, safe to eat, doesn't look could bring it on. I I prefer funny looking carrots myself. The more they look like like pants, the better I

like it too. Now, in the developing world, more food loss occurs actually earlier in the supply chain, mostly due to a lack of infrastructure for storing and transporting food products in a way that preserves their quality. So like a huge part of this food loss is due to spoilage, food going bad, and much of the spoilage occurs early in the supply chain because food rots and containers while it's waiting to be shipped to market, or spoils in the sun on the back of an unrefrigerated truck on

the way to a storage facility. UM. Food spoilage is of course a double problem because on on one end, you might say, the more minor end, of course, this is a huge problem worldwide. It wastes valuable food resources that could, if the distribution channels were working efficiently, get to the people who need them, especially to hungry people. But on the other end, of course, uh, if food spoiled by micro organism Z is eaten, it can potentially make you sick or kill you. And these are not

new problems. So today we're gonna be talking about an invention that played a major role in the history of this food supply chain and in preventing some of this food waste along the distribution chain from you know, food production to eating the food, and that invention is canning the process of preserving foods by heating them in a

hermetically sealed container. I have to say I always enjoy discussing hermetically sealed anything because it always brings to mind like this phantom of of of like a like alchemy and an actual hermit. I love it. Yeah, yeah, Because of course, her hermetically sealed in this context means air tight. Sealed air cannot penetrate. But of course it has the other connotation of like hermetic philosophy, hermetic religion. All right, well, before we get to the canning, though, we're gonna do

what we normally do. We're gonna talk about what came before, what came before this technology, this food technology of canning, and there was a lot that came before. If you if you wanted to preserve food in the ancient world, you had to turn to four different sources sort of four different powers. Uh. This according to Brian M. Fagan, author of the excellent The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World. He classifies them as snow, ice, smoke, and wind.

So let's start with the like the snow and the ice, because that's probably the one of the ones. We have some some some really robust evidence for Ice Age. Hunters in what is now Ukraine use perma frost storage some fourteen thousand years ago. We have evidence of this. They would dig deep pits in the frozen tundra and they would store mammoth flesh and other foods in there. Okay, so this would have been, you said, during the Ice Age.

So this is when like the like the polar regions that sort of extended down closer to the equator and you had ice sheets and perma fross lower at lower latitudes. Yeah, so you had a lot of basically, you had a lot of ice on hand, you had a lot of snow on hand, you had a lot of UH. You had a cold environment that was readily available in which to hide away your excess mammoth flesh for later. But that's not the only environment which we saw this strategy

excel in modern day Syria. For example, ice house technology goes back to at least BC, and it was also well established in China by the seventh century BC. Now, an ice house is a building design for storing ice and UH and then storing things that need to be cooled buy that ice. And we've touched on this a bit in past episodes, so specifically our episode on air conditioned. You know, how do you how do you store ice

and keep it cool? Yeah? And I think there were some allegations that say, for example, in ancient Persia, you could have sellers that were cooled by wind catchers and cannots that would would stay very cold and you could store you know, cold like foods or ice or whatever in them. Yeah, but in the other cases you just had access to say, mountain ice. Even we saw this in the the Aztec world. The Aztecs would bring ice

down from the mountains. It would be carried down by runners, and then it would be sold to, you know, members of the of the royal houses, uh there in the market. This allegedly happened in the ancient Roman world as well, right, Yeah,

and the Chinese utilized it as well. The the the different ice houses that the Chinese used, you know, they often had you know, ornate doors, they had a draining system for when the ice is melting, and it would be used as a place to store ice or even a royal body after the the individual had passed away. And by the way, all of this is one of the reasons why the history of ice cream goes back, you know, far further in time than I think a

lot of us might think. The Chinese, for instance, are thought to have produced the earliest example of a sweet ice milk concoction as early as the seventh century PC. E. When we're gonna do the full episode on ice cream, well, we thought we were gonna have maybe a sponsor for a little bit. We're like, bring us the ice cream sponsor. Yeah, k bar, you're out there, hit us up. Yeah, we'll do an ice cream episode tomorrow if you would like. So that's ice and snow, But let's get to that

smoke and that wind. Meat. The drawing of meat has also long been practiced, either drying meat in the sun or drying it with smoke and uh and and ultimately with with wind and smoke certainly goes back smoke smoke curing goes back at least to the late ice age. Salting would come in later, becoming an established technology by the time of the Romans, and we touched on that a little bit in our recent episode on Catchup. Sure, but these technologies all alone only get you so far.

What you need is some sort of magical container, right, something that preserves food within it without having to freeze it or dry it out, to reduce it, to alter it, you know, in some way shape or form, and and and and ideally do so in a way that like truly laugh because a lot of these food preservation techniques were discussing here, either they require ice to be continually added to the ice house or even you know, a salt cured meat is only going to last so long

that and I mean another concern is just the pleasure people take in eating. I mean, to thoroughly salt meat in order to preserve it. That will have some good preservative properties and not a dent, but you know, mostly works. But it changes that it changes the nature of the meat, and it makes it very salty and dried out. It's not like eating fresh meat. Yeah, I mean in the same way that we often discuss cooking itself as a partial digestion, like a pre digestion of the meat to

make it easier for our digestive systems. You might look at preservation of these various foods is additional digestion that in some cases can reduce some of the beneficial aspects either uh, you know, from a you know, vitamin and nutritional standpoint, or from just the experience of eating uh standpoint. Uh. It further digested the food and and at the end of that you might you know, grow tired of your

hardtack or whatever. I feel like one of the most standard bits of like a slice of military life you get when you look back over the centuries, like what the soldiers are talking about and stuff. It's complaining about

the food. That's like so often what's going on even as a technology advance is because certainly m you know, a lot of jokes are often made about spam, right, Spam is a canned meat that is ultimately, you know, one of the hallmarks of the the age of canning, which we'll we'll get to in a bit, but we you know, we've touched on some of the ideas you know, just about why one preserves food. Of the big one is we have all this food now, but we can only eat so much. Some of it's gonna spoil. How

do we say of that? Yeah, part of it is just sort of top level flexibility within the supply chain, Like if you can preserve the food, that gives you more time to figure out where you're gonna send it, who you're going to sell it to, and all that kind of stuff. If you know, you're talking about a lot of fresh foods, that question is always an emergency. You need to have the final destination figured out for

the food immediately. Yeah, But even on like a household level, right, it's like we have we just harvested, we have plenty of food. Now we can have a big feast, but it's about to be winter, and we need to continue to eat through the winter. So we need a food preservation system so that we can have that food to to feast upon, were not to feast upond but just to live upon heading into the new year. Right, So there's like supply chain flexibility, there's getting through the winter months.

Another big one is, like we already hinted at this, like armies and expeditions exactly if you're like on the move, Yeah, if you're sending your army to conquer an adjacent kingdom or sending ships to discover new lands. Um, you know, ultimately we can look at those two things and say they're basically the same. There's not really a lot of

difference in the way those two efforts shake out. But anyway, it pays to have improved food store ridge technologies on your side if you were engaging in any of those long distance of sometimes long distance travel scenarios. Now, just to provide a better idea of what was possible pre canning and what the sort of the pre canning world was, Like, Uh, I wanted to consider life aboard a seventeenth or eighteenth

century sailing ship. I was looking into some of this we know, we all have sort of the idea in our mind, right of sailors and going down, they're pulling up, you know, a bucket of provisions. They're definitely eating hard tack. Hopefully they have some limes or lemons to stave off scurvy.

But I was looking at an excellent website called Savoring the Past, and they they had they managed to pull up, uh, the list of provisions aboard a couple of different ships, and one of them is a British sloop UH called Alert from seventeen seventy seven, and it was a sloop of sixty men, and it contained the following beef four d and sixty two pieces and six barrels, pork seven hundred and seventy seven pieces and five barrels. Then twelve barrels of beer, uh fifty six hogsheads, and twenty five

casks of eighteen gallons each of water. And then you had, you know, like six thousand pounds of bread, You had four pounds of butter, twenty bushels of oatmeal, sixteen bushels of peas, thirteen hundred pounds of flour, eighty two pounds of suet, two hundred pounds of raisins, four half hogsheads of rum they don't have enough rub, I know, and

one hogshead of vinegars. Uh. So that meat that we discussed up top, the beef, the pork, that's definitely salted meat, which would not have had a tremendous shelf life either. I was reading a cool source on this. Uh there's Anatlas Obscure article titled the grim food served on the seventeenth century sea voyages Wasn't all bad, And it's about a Texas A and M University project that recreated some of these foods using the pre canning food preservation techniques.

You know, they would give you, say, a barrel of salted beef. Oh, this reminds me of when we talked about the life aboard the nuclear submarines that would spend a lot of time. So like, early on the food is really good, but things get weirder as time goes on. Yeah, and that's still you've got to eat. And so you're eating the weird salted meat. They pointed out quote after two months, the salted beef smelled gnarly and didn't look fresh, but it wasn't quite rotten either, So like that's kind of.

I think that's a good way of summing up where you are with even like the height of pre canning, uh, preserved foods is that it might not be killing you, it might not be actually rotten, but it's certainly not fresh. And it's also again it is not going to last for an extended period of time. And these were often extended voyages. Um hard tack they mentioned though, which is

that dried bread type substance, essentially like hardened bread rock. Uh. They said that that lasted pretty well though throughout the length of a voyage. So if nothing else, you could count on your attack as long as you had enough of it delicious. I guess you dip it in the

vinegar hardtack with suet and vinegar. Well, I mean part of this too is that, of course then to carry out these voyages, you know, and part of this is just you don't It comes down to like how much room you have to carry, uh, you know, additional provisions. You know you're gonna have to acquire new food as you go, right, and uh, that becomes one of the

difficulties of traveling. It committes one of the difficulties of traveling as a ship going from Port A to Port B. It also is one of the problems of a of an army, you know, transporting itself across the continent. Some of the one of the friendlier phrases is that armies forage, right, you know that they can't take all the food they

need with them. But a lot of times this spent, well, I mean, especially more in the past, it would mean like seizing local farms, taking their crops and their livestock and stuff, and saying, you know, we need to appropriate this. All right, we need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more on the invention of canning. All right, we're back. So I think maybe a good way to do this is to start with what we know now about canning and then go back to before

the invention. Uh so, why does canned food resist spoilage? Obviously there are multiple causes of spoilage. We know that, like you know, light, exposure to light can affect foods, exposure oxidization can affect foods. And these are different than what we're focusing on. We're focusing on the microbial variety of spoilage. Um, it's because spoilage is caused by micro organisms like bacteria, yeasts, and molds. Now, of course, we know that microorganisms like this are ubiquitous on planet Earth.

There everywhere. Even if you generally keep things clean in your kitchen, there are some small numbers of micro organisms in and on your food and all over the environment in which that food is handled, prepared, and stored. And over time those micro organisms that get on your food get to feed and multiply they're releasing potentially toxic waste products in the process. Uh, this is one thing that's

important to remember is that like cooking food. I think sometimes people think, oh, you know, even if food is a little bit old, I can cook it and that will kill all the microbes on it and then I'll be safe. But microbes also release waste products that can be harmful to you that are not destroyed by the cooking process. But anyway to keep your food from spoiling, you have to prevent the growth of microbes like fungal, molds and bacteria. But since again these microbes are nearly

everywhere in our environment, what can you do? I think canning is a very simple, elegant solution to that. And the solution is you seal the food in an airtight container so that nothing can get in or out, and then you kill any living thing that's already inside the container by heating the container to a temperature that nothing

relevant can survive. For example, the boiling point of water a hundred degreased C or two D and twelve degrees fahrenheit uh, and the modern canning process often gets things even hotter than that by the use of pressure kettles uh. And you hold it at that temperature for a specified length of time so you can be sure the temperature is permeated through the whole thing and it has killed anything that's in there. When done properly, canning can preserve

food for an extremely long time. In fact, though we are not recommending you eat old canned food, as long as the can is not breached in any way, properly canned goods should resist spoilage basically indefinitely, Like if if a can of corn was heated correctly and the air tight seal has never been broken, it should, in theory, still be safe to eat decades later, though the taste and the texture of the food inside can can and

almost certainly will deteriorate with time. Just one real world example of this I want to read from an article in the Sioux City Journal by Terry Turner from August. Turner is describing the nineteenth century wreck of a steamboat called the Bertry and the Bertrand sank in the Missouri River after hitting a submerged log on April first, eighteen

sixty five. Uh and the boat sank within ten to fifteen minutes of the impact, meaning there was no time to offload its cargo, which included many canned goods and Turner rights quote. Canned goods removed from the shipwreck were tested in nineteen seventy four by the National Food Processors Association. The cans contained such things as brandied peaches, oysters, plum, tomatoes, honey,

and mixed vegetables. The test determined that although the appearance, smell, and vitamin content of the food had deteriorated, it was all still safe to eat. Oh man, there's nothing like a hundred year old can of oysters. Yeah, I mean that does sound pretty nasty, even if it was ruled safe. Now again, we are not advising you to eat one hundred year old canned food because there could be risks of for example, the air tight seal and the can

being breached in ways that aren't vous to you. The most common warning signs that the can has been breached in some way are leaking, rust or especially bulging cans do not even go near that. Dents could also be a sign of worry, but then again, slightly dented cans are usually safe. Um. There's no there's no single rule that you can always look at a can and know

for sure. But generally, if most food hasn't been breached, the airtight seal hasn't been broken, and it was it was heated properly in the first place, it's good stuff. I was even reading another article about a team that was exploring somewhere in the Arctic and they came across like decades old cans that had been left there by a previous expedition and found that they were still safe

to eat. Um. So, when considered as an invention, canning, of course is more of a process than a material product. It's not all that much that's really particular about the design of the can, though those the word can design and vatitions that came along in the history of canning.

I think the main things to consider here that canning involves knowledge of what types of containers are appropriate, the fact that they must be sealed airtight and how to seal them, the fact that they must be heated, and knowledge of what temperature they must be heated too, and the time that they must be kept at that temperature.

I should also throw in that, you know, you hear talk about canning, and uh, you know, I've heard talk about canning my whole life, and I have to admit that for a long time, I just assume we call it canning because you put things in cans, right, But that's not where the word word canning comes from. It comes from the Greek canastron, which is in the Latin h canistra. It's a wicker basket used for holding bread, fruit and flowers. Beautiful. Try canning in a wicker basket, though,

and I think you'll encounter problems. Yeah, I just didn't. Didn't work all that well. Now, before we get to the most commonly cited inventor of canning, I think we should mention that there was some work preceding the invention of canning that sort of led up to it, especially in the early So the invention was generally considered to

be in the early eighteen hundreds. But one example of work leading up to Canning is the are the experiments of the Italian physiologist Lazaro Spalonzani fantastic multi syllabic name spalon Zanni. He lives seventeen twenty nine to seventeen nine. And spalon Zani was opposed to some of the spontaneous generation theories that were popular in his time. Spontaneous generation, of course, concerned various ideas about ways that life forms would sort of arise from vital atoms that were there

in the soil or in the water. Uh. It was it was against the idea that there were life forms all over the place that were microscopic and would multiply uh and of course uh. And spalon Zanni was supporting the theories of the early microscopist Anthony van Lewin Hook UH when these ideas where that the tiny cells seen floating around in pond water were in fact life forms

which gave rise to macroscopic effects through their multiplication. And in a group of experiments in the eighteenth century, spalen Zani showed you could fill up a glass vial with gravy and if it was sealed air tight and then boiled for some reason afterwards, it did not show any

signs of spoilage. Thus, he concluded from the great gravy experiments that under normal non sealed conditions, microbial life forms must somehow enter the gravy through the air and cause the spoilage that we recognize in most food that sits around for a while. So he basically had like a miasma theory of how the gravy shooter was going to

be corrupted. Well, no, I mean I think he. I don't know to what degree it overlapped with me asthma, because miasma theory was absolutely still in vogue at the time, Like we wouldn't get to the work of say John snow and and uh and Louis pass Stewar until later in the eighteen hundreds, you know, cementing the idea that like, there are these micro organisms out there, they are the cause of infectious diseases. Uh. But spalon Zanni I think

was sort of on the right track. Uh. And I do think he attributed it to life forms, tiny microscopic life forms, and not necessarily say the fumes coming off of rotting vegetation, as many miasma theorists. But he realized that the the these organisms were going to reach the gravy shooter via the air right if you couldn't, if you didn't seal it off and sterilize it with heat, then they would eventually get in there and spoil it. But he did not invent anything cooking wise or food

storage wise from this insight. But that brings us to one Nicolas a Pair, that's right, Nicholas a Pair who lived seventeen forty nine through eighteen forty one. He was accounts apparently differ whether he was the son of a woolcomber or a hotel keeper, and as possible that you know his his father was both. But he started work early on in life as an apprentice cook, so he he was a chef, he was a distiller, he was

a confectioner. But through all this time he experimented with the preservation of food and UH and he especially got interested in it after the French Directory offered a prize in anyone who could develop and an improved method of food preservation, and so he set to work on the problem for something like fourteen years. And the French Directory

issue I think was mainly military focused. Right. It's the idea of how can we get well preserved foods that still taste good and don't go bad and make people sick for the navy, right though also, I mean this was the period of the revolution and the Revolutionary wars. There was there were food shortages as well, so there was you know, the focus was also domestic, you know, just you know, whatever we can do to preserve food better to to survive these uh you know, these crunches. Yeah.

And then also we we mentioned the similarity but between military needs and like, uh, the expeditions that are going on at the time. Like many early stories about the successes of canned food mentioned it being used on, for example, polar explorations. In the early eighteen hundreds, Sir John Ross, the Arctic explorer, took canned food with him on his expedition to the Arctic. Otto van Kutzebue also did the

same while searching for the Northwest Passage. So what a pair did is he developed a method using glass containers, wire and wire reinforced corks sealing wax in a bath of boiling water. And he tested this over the years on a number of different types of foods, including soups and what was, you know, essentially a hermetically sealed bottle. He was then able to claim an eighteen ten prize of twelve thousand francs with this method. And this was all published in the Art of Preserving All Kinds of

Animal and Vegetable Substances for several years nice for several years. Now. This is interesting because so this guy who is credited with inventing canning here was not putting things the metal cans we think of today. He was more like, uh, ceiling and sterilizing soup in wine bottles, like glass bottles, right like some of the ones you see pictured in

the history books. They essentially look like dark, old timy milk glasses, you know, with the with the wide brim, and U fill that with soup, seal it up, use this method and then it would be good to go. Uh. These were the four steps that he outlined in the Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for several years. Uh, and it's basically what we've been talking about. Step one to place in the bottles or

glass jars the substances to be preserved. Step two to cork these different vessels with the greatest care, because success chiefly depends on the closing. Okay, step three to submit these substances thus enclosed to the action of boiling water in a water bath for a more or less time according to their nature, and in the manner that I shall indicate for each kind of food. And then step four to remove the bottles from the water at at the time prescribed. So he got that, he got this

prize money and he put it to you. So he established the first commercial cannery with this money in eighteen twelve, and the house of a pair operated until nineteen thirty three. And he can't all manner of food, so including at one point a whole sheep for purely promotional purposes. I know, I was looking for, like at least an illustration of this,

but I couldn't find anything. He also applied himself to other inventions, including he a perfection of the autoclave, which is a device that uses you know, boiling conditions to sterilize instruments, the boulong tablet booleyon tablet for making soups. Yeah yeah, okay, so like uh oh, I always wonder how they made the earliest ones of those what do you just boil down broth until you've got a solid Yeah? Basically, I mean we have to remember the like broth is

essentially what you have like a turkey carcass. After you've gotten the meat off of it, you put the carcass, what's left of it in the pot. You just boil it until you have the stock and then the stock can to utilize. But then if you reduce the stock down to it's like there, uh, you know, you know, completely dried essentials. You have that tablet uh. And that's

what he came up with. Um. And then he he also worked on a non acid gelatin extraction method, which is you know, maybe less exciting now, I know what you're thinking, especially if you've listened to past episodes. Okay, sure the French celebrate a pair, but what what what he did? Wasn't that revolutionary? Right? Surely other individuals and and other nations make claims on canning technology. Yeah, this

is very often the case. Even when there's usually an identified inventor of a technology, they weren't like it didn't come out of the blue. Usually Yeah, and you know, even though it wasn't the you know, the sort of hyper connected world we have today, you still had people communicating with each other throughout a country and then cross country. So I was reading a piece on this from J. C. Graham.

This was published in nine in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, titled The French Connection in the Early History of can Um. I like that he put the movie reference in there, but he writes that yes, uh, you know, based on what we know is su does that the theory was widely known before the time of a pair. However, he points out that a Pair went above and beyond by testing different foods to figure out

how long he needed to heat them. Even though he didn't understand the reason for air tight containers, he'd figured out through trial and error and experimentation that it was essential. So even if you know, there were other people who were onto something, they realized, oh, there's there's something to

this boiling ceiling and boiling of the container. A pair really did the leg work, you know, spent again allegedly fourteen years uh figuring it out and devising his own recipes for how long things needed to be uh, you know, exposed to the heat and then and then you know, how exactly to go about it like he took more or less a scientific approach to it. But what but it was very different than like what we saw with

Small and Zanni. Right, Small and Zanni got some correct approximation of the underlying reasoning, right, But but a pair did not. A pair just figured out what worked right. And again he didn't really understand why it worked. You know, the theory of spontaneous generation still still held sway at that time, and Pasteur's revelations about the role of microbes and decomposition would come some fifty years later. But Graham considered that his method was keeping decay at bay, and

and that was enough. And he had It's like, he had the recipe for it, he had the instructions, and time after time he was able to prove that it worked. So a pair didn't necessarily have the insight about microbial life, but he knew that, like you can't let air get in right after you've heated it up. Yeah, he kind of, I mean essentially had kind of like the workhorse like kitchen knowledge of how this was gonna work. Like he didn't have to explain that, he didn't need to know

how the microbes worked. He knew that if you if you follow these steps, then yes you could. You could store away a soup and a bottle and it would remain uncorrupted for a lengthy period of time. Now, I'm sure once we had a more fully realized and accurate theory of microbial decomposition and food spoilage, we could pair that with our like industrial and technical knowledge to to

get better results overall. Oh. Absolutely, yeah. I mean it's the it's canning and fruit food preservation in general, and progresses. It greatly benefits from that new information. Right. A big point there, of course, being Louis pasteur as you mentioned, the pasteurization of of milk. All Right, I think we need to do a quick break and when we come back we can talk a little bit about the early

years of canning and some of the legacy. Alright, we're back, So a number of you might be wondering, all right, we're talking about canning, and we're talking about bottles full of soup and whole sheep and so forth, but we're not talking about tin cans. Oh I'm sorry. I'm trying to formulate some kind of like Scottish accent joke about a ship in a bottle shape and a bottle. Never mind, I think it needs some work, but we can get there.

We can get there with that joke. Okay. So basically, yeah, a Pair's book comes out and it's it's a big hit. It's such a big hit that Englishman Peter Durand buys a copy of it, uh and brings it to England in eighteen ten, and then seeks and obtains a patent on on an exact copy of a Pair's method. He obtains the like the English patent for the method h and he mentions in the application that he obtained the

idea from a friend traveling abroad. So he's not he's not too cagy about the fact that he basically just took the idea and he's just going to patent it for use in England. But as J. C. Graham points out, he covered his grounds in the patent to include quote bottles or other vessels of glass, pottery, tin, or other metals or fit materials. So basically, you know, he he had an eye on the financial possibilities here, like he

was kind of a patent troll. I guess he would say, you know, he was like, oh, this was this was working great in France. I'm gonna get it in England, and I'm also going to add in some additional language to ensure that we have, you know, all the various UH material iterations of this covered. But those material changes would actually come through in in the big early successful models of kens, which were the tin coated iron can, which replaced a pair of sealed glass jars for industrial

production exactly now. So so I guess you could say that Durant saw the future like he at least knew like these are some of the materials that could be the future of canning. I'm going to include them in the patent. But then he was himself not an inventor. He was a merchant. So after receiving the patent, he promptly sold it off for thousand pounds and the buyers were Brian Donkin and John Hall, and they set up a commercial cannery in eighteen thirteen and it took off.

And meanwhile Durand said about obtaining his patent in America so you could continue this this process. In his book Connections, James Burke at this point talks about UH an influential moment in the early days of canning, when some canned meats were served to the royal family and then I think it a maybe at a feast at the Duke of York was hosting or something, and apparently the royals greatly enjoyed the canned meats that were served to them, and this was like a big thumbs up for the

new technology. Well, you have to you have to think about it. I mean, we've been eating out of cans our whole life, so there's not really much novelty to it for the most part. But imagine encountering a can of food for the first time. Here's this sealed object and uh, when it is opened up, there is a rich soup inside. Uh, there's a there's a prepared meal inside this object. I mean, it's It's one of those

things that makes me wonder. Generally, was food just really bad and the past I don't know, But maybe maybe these early canned foods were just really good. There is such a thing as good canned food. I think we often associate can food with being bad, but it doesn't have to be whereight, I mean, because the thing is like canned food. Processed food does not begin with canning, but but canning does bring about a revolution in processed food.

And you and and becomes like a hallmark of processed food. Uh. You know. But that being said, there are varying degrees of of quality to be had there and there there is such thing as a good can soup. I would presume that if they were serving it to the royal family, they would have they would have picked a good one, they would have marked. I was like, this is the one, Uh, this is the can that needs to be put in front of the queen. It was in fact Campbell's split

pe and Ham. But yeah, one thing you mentioned is that Duran was looking to obtain a patent in America, and of course America. In America, shortly after this, canning became huge business. And generally everywhere, like anywhere you were producing food, there's a high probability that you're also gonna have a cannary because you need to to to actually

you know, ship the the product out. But you look back at particularly with America, you look back at a cookbooks from say around nineteen and you have books like how to Make Good Things to Eat, uh and and it's mostly recipes for how to utilize canned goods. But then, on the other hand, canning wasn't just a way of obtaining commercial foods. It wasn't just a way of of obtaining foods that came from over there. No, it was

also a breakthrough in in household food preservation. Uh, you know, a way to preserve your own food, but then also to engage in like minor food trading and selling in your own community. Consider canned fruit preserves and jellies Household Methods of Preparation from nineteen o four by Maria PARLOA. Uh, there was just another cookbook that I ran across, and it's all about ways to can, ways to preserve food in your house. Uh. And I don't know about you,

but I mean I I grew up around canning. Like canning was always occurring, either with my grandparents or my aunts or my my mom would can stuff, and uh, it was just it was part of the tradition of life. I wish i'd been around it more. I mean, I love those kind of traditions. No, we we didn't do

it a lot in my household. But I want to come back to home canning because I think, uh, that's an interesting development in this process because what you see early on is like canning begins as this very centralized activity, which is for like the needs of the state, right, you know, you've got the state prize paying out for But of course, gradually over time it becomes like industrial products for the consumer and then finally democratized to something

you can do in your own kitchen, which is only fair because the need for the reservation of food and the various some methods to preserve it like that was a pre state um initiative in human civilization. Oh, of course, But I want to talk a little bit about I mentioned James Burke writing about canning and connections. There's a section where he talks about several problems encountered by the

earliest consumer canned goods. Uh So, First of all, you had difficulty of production that like he talks about the first canned goods were made with these production methods that would allow each cannery worker to produce only about tin cans of food per day uh so. So yeah, and one thing that flowed from that is that there were

high costs. Uh so, Like he says, the first canned foods that reached shops in England around eighteen thirty or so included products like tomatoes, sardines, and peas, and high price here was a significant barrier to adoption. Burke sites early prices in the eighteen thirties, when a can of soup sold for over seven and a halfpence. And I'll contextualize these prices in a second, a can of corned beef for eight and a halfpence, a can of salmon

for eleven and a halfpence. And for comparison, Burke says that at the same time, an English family could rent a house for about twelve and a halfpence a week, so a can of corned beef is like two thirds of a week's rent. On the other hand, when we think about cans, you're probably picturing the modern standard, like fifteen ounce can, the kind that fits easily in one hand. I'm not positive, but I think these prices Burke is siting are referring to larger cans, which were very common

early on, more like the size of a paint can. So, you know, paint can worth of corned beef, is that worth two thirds of a week's rent? I don't know. It still sounds pretty steep. Yeah, you can spice it up a little bit, you know, I don't have to just eat straight corned beef for every meal. But yeah, it also gets down to the fact that, like, this would have been more of it. This is more of

a specialized product. Early on, it had to either be for like your your voyage to the edge of the threshold of human civilization, or it was something that you would eat because you were you know, it was a novelty and you could afford it. Right. One more funny fact is that Burke mentions early cans had to be open with tools like a hammer and chisel. But then also you had factors early on that still affect certain products today. I mean, some foods work way better canned

than others. Right, most people are totally cool with canned beans, but there are a lot of people who don't love canned peas. Like, what's the difference there, Well, the sealed containers have to be boiled in order to be sterilized, right, And some foods just deal better with extreme exposure to prolonged heat and a sealed container than others do. And then I mean, it's also worth thinking about the fact that some canned foods were themselves already had already experienced

preservation by another method. You know, if you're dealing with something that is pickled, for instance, sure, totally. Uh. Now, of course, today canning and you know there's there are a lot of steps in between. But today canning has done at massive scale by automated machinery rather than the

early method of like hand soldering the can together. Uh. And it's often I think I mentioned this earlier, superheated by the use of high pressure steam kettles to take the contents, actually has the normal pressure boiling point of water up to around two hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit or a hundred and sixty degrees celsius. So that's how you get a lot of these modern foods that are kind of canned to death. But then at the end of the day, like right, there's still it's still canned food.

It is still food. That is, it is preserved, it is it is not corrupted, and you can eat it. It It might not be great, but maybe it's better than than than what Mangy assaulted pork from a barrel. Right now, and now to come back to home canning, this is interesting. Like I said, I grew up around canning, but I just had I just had this kind of mason jar world of canning in my head, and I kind of, uh, you know, just naively thought that this is what everybody did,

like that everybody had the mason jar. The mason jar is the standard, and that's why we put flowers in them at at country weddings and why we we drink orange juice out of them in the morning. But uh, but no, you know, there were a number of inventions and innovations aimed at streamlining the home cannon game. Uh and uh and so yes, the mason jar was was,

it was big, especially in the United States. But there were some other country specific innovations that were that are also worth mentioning, such as Germany's wet jar, which is created by the J Wet Company in eight and it's a molded glass jar with a simple lock sometimes described as like a fool proof lock, rubber gaskett and lid just to aid in the canning process. And it has a pretty slick looking kind of minimalist design to it.

I think it's gorgeous. Yeah. She also mentioned, um, there's a Fowler's of a Cola, which was an Australian canning system. Perhaps some of our Australian listeners can chime in on that if they have memories of that U And then there's the Kilner jar, which was used in the in England, and I think this one had more of a screwing

mechanism on top. So yeah, it basically comes down to the fact that, yes, there's the basic plan for out of can something, but especially and you know, if you're dealing with if you're either dealing with like a highly specific industrial process or you're dealing with a home process, you can have different approaches on how to best carry that off, how to how to form that seal, how to how to carry this all out safely because you know, ultimately you're dealing with boiling water and if you're in

and if you're throwing a pressure cooker into the scenario, you know that also adds a certain element of danger to the scenario. And then, I mean, without getting to the fact that if you do it wrong, you're not going to properly preserve your food. You're going to potentially bottle um, you know, poison, which is not what you intended and not why you set off on this adventure of canning to begin with. At the very least, even

if you don't poison yourself, you can end up wasting. Yeah, and and that is Yeah, that's the whole purpose of this endeavor is not to waste food, to to take what is food now and have it be food, uh three four months from now, a year from now, etcetera. You know, Robert, I think this has convinced me. I've never I do a lot of cooking at home, but I've never done canning at home. I think I'm gonna give it a try. Oh that's awesome. Yeah, I've never

I've never attempted canning myself either, I don't think. Uh, most we've done in like fridge pickles, which is, you know, not cannings. Yeah. Yeah, but that's the closest I've come, because it's at least in a mason jar. Uh. So yeah, I would. I would also love to hear from anyone who currently engages in canning. What's your what's it like?

How do you how do you relate to the canning process? Uh? Likewise, did you grow up you know, within any of these various canning traditions, uh, any of these various models of of of home canning, or do you have specific memories

of good or bad about various canned foods? We'd love to hear from you, and likewise, uh, you know, if we'd love to hear from you, if you would like to to hear the exploration here, continue in any in any direction that we've touched on in this episode, because certainly the history of food technology is is vast, and there's so many wonderful little avenues to to follow or to go in more depth upon. Next episode, Let's do Jello. No, we don't have um, you know, but it's a but No. Specifically,

we could do a whole episode in Joel. We could do a whole episode on just can sardines themselves? You know, like any one of these these examples, you know, are are generally there's a lot more history and a lot more science to it than we tend to think. All right, So again, stick with us throughout November. We're gonna have some more food related episodes of Invention coming at you, and who I don't I can't even imagine what December is going to bring, but you can follow us and

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