November 4, 2019 • 48 mins
In this episode of Invention, Robert and Joe kick off a month of food content with the history of canning! Yes, from Napoleonic bottles of soups to our modern bounty of canned sustenance, you’ll explore where it came from, who invented the process and how it changed the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And often on the Invention podcast we explore
inventions in the realm of getting food into your body.
That's right, And this is the perfect month to discuss
(00:23):
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,
(00:44):
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
(01:06):
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.
(01:26):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:31):
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
(02:52):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:36):
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.
(03:56):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:39):
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
(05:02):
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
(05:24):
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.
(05:45):
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
(06:05):
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,
(06:29):
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,
(06:49):
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
(07:12):
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
(07:35):
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
(07:55):
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
(08:17):
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
(08:39):
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.
(09:00):
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
(09:22):
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.
(09:44):
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
(10:06):
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.
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:13):
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,
(11:34):
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
(11:55):
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
(12:17):
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,
(12:39):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:22):
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,
(13:43):
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
(14:07):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:49):
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,
(15:12):
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,
(15:35):
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
(15:57):
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.
(16:19):
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,
(16:40):
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.
(17:03):
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
(17:25):
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
(17:49):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:57):
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
(19:18):
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,
(19:39):
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
(20:02):
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.
(20:26):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:10):
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.
(21:32):
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.
(21:53):
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
(22:15):
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
(22:37):
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
(22:58):
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
(23:21):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:02):
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
(24:24):
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
(24:46):
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
(25:06):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:51):
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
(26:13):
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
(26:35):
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.
(26:57):
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
(27:19):
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.
(27:39):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:23):
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
(28:46):
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,
(29:10):
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
(29:31):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:15):
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
(30:38):
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
(31:02):
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
(31:23):
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
(31:45):
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
(32:07):
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
(32:28):
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
(32:49):
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
(33:10):
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,
(33:32):
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
(33:55):
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
(34:17):
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
(34:39):
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
(35:00):
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
(35:22):
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.
(35:42):
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,
(36:04):
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
(36:25):
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
(36:45):
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,
(37:10):
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,
(37:31):
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
(37:53):
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,
(38:17):
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
(38:41):
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,
(39:04):
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,
(39:27):
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,
(39:51):
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
(40:13):
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
(40:36):
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,
(40:59):
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,
(41:22):
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
(41:45):
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
(42:08):
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
(42:29):
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.
(42:53):
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.
(43:14):
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
(43:35):
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
(43:56):
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
(44:19):
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
(44:40):
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
(45:02):
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
(45:23):
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
(45:45):
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,
(46:07):
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
(46:30):
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
(46:52):
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,
(47:14):
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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(47:36):
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Invention is also at invention pod dot com. Huge thanks
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(47:57):
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Invention is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
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(48:18):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And often on the Invention podcast we explore
inventions in the realm of getting food into your body.
That's right, And this is the perfect month to discuss
(00:23):
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,
(00:44):
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
(01:06):
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.
(01:26):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:31):
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
(02:52):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:36):
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.
(03:56):
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
(04:17):
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
(04:39):
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
(05:02):
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
(05:24):
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.
(05:45):
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
(06:05):
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,
(06:29):
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,
(06:49):
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
(07:12):
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
(07:35):
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
(07:55):
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
(08:17):
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
(08:39):
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.
(09:00):
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
(09:22):
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.
(09:44):
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
(10:06):
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.
(10:27):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:13):
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,
(11:34):
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
(11:55):
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
(12:17):
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,
(12:39):
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
(13:01):
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
(13:22):
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,
(13:43):
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
(14:07):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:49):
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,
(15:12):
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,
(15:35):
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
(15:57):
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.
(16:19):
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,
(16:40):
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.
(17:03):
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
(17:25):
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
(17:49):
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
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:57):
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
(19:18):
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,
(19:39):
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
(20:02):
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.
(20:26):
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
(20:46):
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
(21:10):
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.
(21:32):
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.
(21:53):
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
(22:15):
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
(22:37):
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
(22:58):
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
(23:21):
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
(23:41):
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
(24:02):
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
(24:24):
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
(24:46):
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
(25:06):
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
(25:27):
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
(25:51):
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
(26:13):
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
(26:35):
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.
(26:57):
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
(27:19):
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.
(27:39):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:23):
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
(28:46):
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,
(29:10):
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
(29:31):
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
(29:53):
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
(30:15):
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
(30:38):
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
(31:02):
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
(31:23):
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
(31:45):
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
(32:07):
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
(32:28):
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
(32:49):
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
(33:10):
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,
(33:32):
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
(33:55):
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
(34:17):
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
(34:39):
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
(35:00):
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
(35:22):
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.
(35:42):
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,
(36:04):
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
(36:25):
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
(36:45):
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,
(37:10):
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,
(37:31):
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
(37:53):
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,
(38:17):
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
(38:41):
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,
(39:04):
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,
(39:27):
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,
(39:51):
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
(40:13):
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
(40:36):
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,
(40:59):
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,
(41:22):
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
(41:45):
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
(42:08):
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
(42:29):
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.
(42:53):
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.
(43:14):
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
(43:35):
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
(43:56):
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
(44:19):
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
(44:40):
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
(45:02):
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
(45:23):
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
(45:45):
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,
(46:07):
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
(46:30):
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
(46:52):
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,
(47:14):
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
find out. Make sure you have wherever you get your podcasts,
go to Invention. Make sure you have subscribed, and if
you want to help the show out, a great thing
you can do is leave a nice review, leave some stars,
(47:36):
leave a nice comment. Uh. You know that that helps
feed the demons of the algorithm and so forth. Uh. Likewise,
remember our other show, Stuff to Blow your Mind. Uh,
you can find that wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff
toablew your Mind is Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Invention is also at invention pod dot com. Huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.
(47:57):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on the episode or any other to suggest
a topic for the future, just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
Invention is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
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(48:18):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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