Armies must keep their soldiers fed.* When successfully engaged with the enemy, armies keep advancing and their supply lines stretch longer and longer. The French were fighting battles on four fronts back in 1875, each with its own supply line struggling to keep up. Government officials offered a cash prize to anyone who could find a way to make army-scale foodstuffs last longer so they could travel farther without spoiling. Nicolas Appert found a way.
Can It
Britannica says Appert was a French chef, confectioner, and distiller who preserved food in wine bottles by removing all the oxygen, recorking the bottle, sealing the cork with wax, and securing it with wire.
One identifying characteristic of a wine bottle is how its cylindrical shape tapers gracefully to a narrow neck with a lip. This simple, elegant design is excellent for pouring liquids, but lousy for getting food solids through the narrow neck when filling and emptying. A bit too much eye-of-the needle.
Nonetheless, Appert is known as the father of canned food
He should have been known as the father of preserving food by removing oxygen and sealing it in an airtight container. Appert called his original process that killed bacteria and hermetically sealed food “Appertizing,” but it didn’t catch on because he was an inventor, not a naming genius.
Appert improved his process by switching to wide-mouthed glass jars
No longer restricted to pushing and pulling food through the slender neck of a wine bottle, these wide-mouth jars were easier to fill and easier to empty, too. His glass jars were fragile, of course, and some would break during transport, creating a new problem for someone to solve.
Anna Zeide is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech
She’s also the author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry. Zeide notes there’s a lot of research suggesting that the method was not something Appert invented, because women in their homes had been doing something like it for a long time before he came along. The next step was to find a way to achieve the same results of keeping food from spoiling–but in more durable containers.
Tin was a good choice because it was cheap, non-corrosive, and easy to work with
Peter Durand patented a process of sealing the container with the food inside and putting it in cold water. When the water was boiling, the lid would be barely cracked open to allow the heated air to escape, then quickly resealed.
Zeide goes on to tell us how canned goods turned everything upside down
For eons, people held and touched their food, as many of us do today when sorting through bulk displays of fresh fruits and vegetables at the grocery, hefting the weight, feeling the texture, squeezing, and sniffing. Products would no longer be rejected for looking, feeling, and smelling bad because now they’re locked behind a tin wall.
Canned goods took the place of the wooden barrels in the old time stores that were filled with loose flour, crackers, and other foodstuffs because cans were easier to store and easier to handle. Even those who couldn’t decipher the writing on labels were able to use the picture on the can as a guide.
Canned processed meat
Introduced in 1936, this rectangular can with rounded shoulders said HORMEL SPICED HAM With All The Natural Juices. Along with those undefined natural juices, the only ingredients were chopped and ground ham hocks, salt, sugar, sodium nitrite, and pepper. The prominent picture of a spiced ham loaf and two slices already cut had what seemed to be many dozens of globules of pork fat.
Hormel sponsored a contest where whoever suggested the best name won a $100 cash prize
The Minnesota meat packing company’s strategy for 1937 was to develop a new product by adding pork shoulders (also called the butt) and potato starch (to soak up the fat) to the original Spiced Ham formula and giving it a new name. Reader’s Digest says the contest didn’t appear to be on the up-and-up when it was learned the winning name, SPAM,** was submitted by a relative of one of the high-ranking Hormel officers.
No matter the subject, I always used concrete examples to illustrate abstract concepts
We’d have classroom discussions about how taking things on faith is the assumption that everyone has the same values as you do and how taking things at face value is accepting things as true without evidence. I’d give students the example of how when it comes to canned goods, no one knows for certain what’s inside.
This is where some students would leap at the bait
You know, the System 1 Thinkers who are smarter than the professor. They’d hotly contend that everyone can clearly see what’s inside the can from the picture on the label. Teachers know immediately this person has no future in any field calling for reasoned System 2 Thinking.
No, we cannot see what’s inside the can
The food inside is invisible to us. The only things we can see are the can and the paper label with a picture on it pasted to the outside. We cannot know with 100% certainty what the contents are. What’s inside probably resembles the label on the outside, but it’s no sure thing.
Bonus
Daisy was a dignified woman somewhere north of 70, slight but not stooped, with iron-grey hair. Every week she rode the bus to come clean our house near the corner of Stonewall and Jackson Avenues. In the South, maids have long dressed in their Sunday best while riding a city bus to clean someone’s house in the morning and another bus going home in the afternoon. They carry their cleaning clothes with them and wear them only while working.
Daisy was deaf and dumb, so we kept a spiral notebook in the kitchen with her name on it
In it was a running diary of our “conversations,” notes being our only way of communicating. One day Daisy’s note said her church was collecting labels from canned goods and could she have some of ours. Sure. The following week, the labels had been removed from every single can in the cupboard. In their places were small torn pieces of blue paper in a crabbed and scrawly hand and held to the cans by twice-wrapped rubber bands. The first can we opened was mislabeled, so we removed all the rubber bands and all the little blue paper scraps so every can would contain a surprise. Once a week we’d open some of the cans and have a random canned goods meal.
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*One notable exception was when General William Tecumseh Sherman steamrollered the Confederate Army all the way to the sea. Knowing his supply line was already hundreds of miles long and vulnerable to attack and disruption, Sherman abandoned it and ordered his 60,000 soldiers to forage for themselves along their 250-mile-long and 60-mile-wide scorched-earth march from Clark Gable’s Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia.
** Some say it’s an acronym for SPiced hAM while others claim the letters stand for Shoulder of Pork And Ham. Tens of millions of American G.I.s will tell you it’s SPecial Army Ham. Soldiers ate so much canned processed meat that they liked to say that SPAM was ham that didn’t pass its physical and meatloaf without basic training. Hormel says only a small circle of company elders know the real story.
Just for fun
For a different kind of can, try this video of the Pointer Sisters’ Yes We Can Can.
