Have you seen that meme where the woman in Victorian dress flings herself over a chair in abject despair and says, “Why do they want dinner every single night?”

Feeding the Family

Most mothers here can relate. Now imagine a world where your family still expects dinner every single night, but you have no freezer, no refrigerator, no prepackaged snacks, no canned goods of any kind, no Uber Eats, no Door Dash, and no car with which to go pick anything up.

There’s just you, a minimalist kitchen, and whatever fresh, unprocessed ingredients you’ve collected.

(Fresh and unprocessed now sounds like the good, healthy choice, right? But we have the luxury of thinking that way because it is a choice. It’s a little more haunting when you need to serve dinner and what you have is a mound of whole wheat. Not even whole wheat flour, perhaps. Just whole wheat. Or maybe you’ve got something a little more interesting, but fresh and unprocessed means bits of dirt, blood, or feathers are still attached because it literally came out of the ground or off the chopping block just now.)

The problem of how to store food has been with us for millennia, and humanity’s invention on this subject is both varied and utterly delicious. Cheese extends the life of milk. Pickles are for any vegetable, not just cucumbers. Fruit can be dried or mixed with sugar for jams or jellies. Smoked and salted meats last longer than fresh ones. Almost every alcoholic drink is a way to preserve something, whether its grapes or barley.

Nearly every culture in the world has some delectable way of preserving food, but generally these methods are time consuming, they require skill, they attract pests, and they are eventually subject to spoilage anyway. Especially if you don’t do it exactly right. Then eating it could kill you. Or your kids.

Feeding the Army

You would think that in the Age of Enlightenment, a myriad of eager inventors looking for ways to get rich would see this plight of mothers and housewives providing dinner as a problem worthy of their attention. But they largely didn’t.

However, it turns out that an army needs all the same things kids do: food, clothes, sanitation, discipline, etc. Their moms aren’t on hand to provide it for them. In many wars, the combat deaths were almost trivial compared to the deaths caused by malnutrition, exposure, and unsanitary conditions. Any general who wanted to succeed had to pay attention to these issues.

Napoleon wanted to succeed. In 1795 he announced a cash prize to anyone who could invent a better way to feed his army when on the march in places where the locals were unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to hand over the vast quantities of food an army requires.

It was almost fifteen years before anyone managed to claim that prize, but in 1809, the lucky winner was Nicolas Appert. He developed the process we Americans now call canning. He proved that if you partially cook the food, ladle it into jars, boil the jars, and seal the lids, those jars can sit on the shelf for ages without going bad.

Appert could not explain why this worked, and nor could anyone else. It would be decades before another French man, Louis Pasteur, demonstrated that food spoils because of bacteria and you can kill the bacteria with heat and keep it out with an airtight seal.

Canned Goods for Everyone but the Housewife

Appert’s canning was a fantastic innovation, but it did your average housewife no good at all because the target audience was the military. By 1812, others had pioneered metal cans, which were less likely to break than glass. These goods were purchased by various militaries and also by explorers like William Parry, who was headed to the Arctic.

As of yet, no one had yet invented a can opener. The official instructions on William Parry’s roast veal said to open it with a chisel and hammer. Soldiers were known to open their food with bayonets or rifle fire (Woehler).

Parry and his team did not actually eat all of their roast veal, and one of his cans was kept as an artifact of the trip for over 100 years. In 1938, it was finally opened, and the roast veal inside appeared to be in perfectly fine condition. No human was brave enough to eat it, but it was given to a cat, who found it perfectly acceptable. You can think about that next time you have a can that is just past its expiration date.

Anyway, there’s no doubt that the system worked, but it was still weird and unfamiliar to your average housewife. Parry paid far more for his roast veal than most women could afford, nor did they have bayonets lying around to open the cans. Dinner at home had not changed.

In 1858, John Landis Mason patented a glass jar with a screw thread on the top to receive a metal ring lid. That’s why they’re called Mason jars to this day. I would have guessed that women would jump at the opportunity to preserve food themselves in this way, but they largely didn’t. The jars themselves were too expensive. Then there was the matter of know-how. Canning is a fiddly business and getting it wrong is disastrous.

People still didn’t know what caused food to spoil, but you do, so I’ll explain that if you don’t cook all the bacteria out of the food, or if you don’t boil all the bacteria off the cans and lids, or if you don’t fully seal the cans, or if you use a boiling water bath with low acid foods which require a pressure canner, then whatever bacteria still exist will multiply themselves and cause all kinds of havoc, which may or may not be visible to eye or detectable to the nose. You cannot be careless.

Canned goods took a major PR hit whenever anyone was careless. In 1852, the British Navy did an inspection of 306 commercial cans of meat intended for their sailors, and it’s a very good thing they did because 264 of the cans were absolutely foul. They were so putrid the room had to be chemically cleaned afterwards. An investigation found they had purchased the cans from a supplier who severely underbid all his competitors. Sometimes you get what you pay for (Geoghegan).

This publicized incident did not inspire confidence in food delivered in this very unfamiliar way. And remember, there was plenty of room for suspicion. There were no regulations for consumer protection. Even if you saw canned goods for sale at your local shop, a story like the British navy’s might convince you not to buy it. This was not the last time the canning industry was proved to be untrustworthy.

A Slow Conversion

Many Americans had never tasted any canned food until the Civil War. But during the war, the military suppliers fed canned goods to a very large percentage of American men (Zeide, 16). Those men who survived went home feeling fine about canned goods.

Demand grew and prices fell thanks to further inventions like the steam pressure cooker and better cans with better lids. Increasing urbanization drove the demand too. City dwelling factory laborers had little in the way of kitchens, root cellars, or gardens. Canned goods were the obvious solution. The invention of a rotary can opener meant you didn’t need a lethal weapon to open the thing.

Year by year, canned goods were slowly becoming normal.

For us in the modern world, it is hard to appreciate what a miracle this was. Nowadays, eating seasonal and local is an ideal that many people simply cannot afford, but for most of history it was not a choice, it was reality. Sure, they had fewer chemicals in their food, but they also had no greens in the winter. With a few exceptions, you never ate a fruit or vegetable that didn’t grow well in your own climate. Produce that did grow well was still only available for a few weeks out of the year. Tubers, apples, and cabbages were highly valued, in part because they store so much better than most produce. Even eggs were seasonal. That’s right, eggs. If you didn’t live by the sea, you didn’t eat seafood. Maybe you could get salted or smoked fish, but in many cases, seafood was simply out of your experience. Meats were dependent on what you or your neighborhood raised yourselves. Even then it was often a feast or famine kind of experience: either you butcher the whole animal or none. You can’t butcher just the part needed for dinner tonight.

Commercially canned food brought variety and badly needed nutrients to people whose lives had been lacking in both. By the end of the century, most Americans (and many outside America) could get these shipped directly to the front door. The 1897 Sears Roebuck catalog lists cans in more varieties than my local grocery store carries: four kinds of apricots, five kinds of peaches, four kinds of cherries, two kinds of plums, grapes, pears, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, gooseberries, pineapple, cranberries, rhubarb, figs, apples, many of these from multiple producers, and that’s just the fruit. The price lists go on to canned vegetables and then preserves and jellies, then meats and fish, like lamb’s tongue and fresh broiled mackerel in mustard sauce, most delicious, 3-lb can (Sears Roebuck, 10-15). Whether you actually want lamb’s tongue or a 3-lb can of mackerel in mustard sauce is one thing, but most of Sears’s customers were women who never dreamed they could have such a thing only a decade or two earlier.  

Commercial Canneries

Commercial canneries also brought job opportunities for women and children, and no doubt those jobs were better than starving, but possibly only barely. Many descriptions of child labor in factories focus on textile factories. This is true of my own description in episode 11.11. But canning factories were right behind textile factories in the number of employees and sometimes even worse in awfulness of conditions.

Commercial canneries had to respond to the harvest schedule, and when it was on, it was on. A photograph of a cannery from 1911, shows a crowded row of children and women around a long table.

The caption reads “Group of oyster shuckers working in a canning factory. All but the very smallest babies work. Began work at 3:30am expected to work until 5 P.M. The little girl in the center working, her mother said she is a real help to me. About 300 workers. Dunbar, La.” I’d guess that girl is about five years old. She’s clearly not in school, maybe not going to be in school, and those knives take the fingers off careless children.

To the extent that there were child labor laws, they weren’t very effective. Many such laws had explicit exemptions for any industry dealing with perishable goods where immediate labor is required (Radcliffe). When the laws did apply, they were pretty ignorable by owners who wanted cheap labor and poor families who were desperate for income.

Upton Sinclair’s 1906 publication of The Jungle was a major blow to the meatpacking industry. He meant it to bring attention to the poverty stricken and exploited poor people who worked in the canneries, but the general public was more horrified by his descriptions of the food in the cans: bits of beef, yes, but also dead rats and sawdust swept into the cans. Also the coughed-up spittle of workers too sick with tuberculosis to belong anywhere but bed, and all of it done right next to an open latrine.

Americans had been eating out of those cans. They were also exporting them around the world to an international public that could read Sinclair’s book just fine. Germany, France, and the UK all banned American meat products, while the US Congress hastily passed our first food safety and regulation laws, while ignoring the labor issues entirely. It’s a rare book that changes the world, but The Jungle did. You’d think the author would be pleased, but Sinclair was a little chagrined. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he wrote, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (Klein).

Canning at Home

One solution, of course, was to can your own food at home. Home canning wasn’t fool proof, but at least you knew whether it was done next to an open latrine or not. I was a little surprised by how much home canning lagged behind commercial canning. I had pictured your 19^th century housewife putting up jar after jar of her produce from her kitchen garden, but I was wrong. Home canning was largely a 20ᵗʰ century phenomenon. That’s how long it took for the Mason jars to become affordable, the canning lids to become reliable, sugar to be cheap, and the knowledge and trust in the process to become widespread, at least in the English-speaking world.

By World War I, home canning was a government campaign in both the UK and the US. It was what women did on the home front to support the war effort and increase the available food supply. Posters and pamphlets were created with catchy slogans like “We can can vegetables and the kaiser too!” and “Turn your reserves into preserves!” and “Back up the cannon with the canner” (North Dakota state historical society).

During and after the war, US government also hired agents to go out and teach women about canning. It was well meant, but not always very clear-sighted. In rural New Mexico, for example, the women already had a long and well-established tradition of drying food. Canning is water intensive, and not very accessible to women who live without running water in a land where water is precious. Government officials were not always sensitive to this reality.

Nevertheless, canning did make inroads even there. One New Mexican woman reminiscing about her childhood in the 1930s remembered drying apples, green chile, and beef jerky. But also canning peaches, pork, corn on the cob, and chile with tomatoes. That last one was so good they ate them right out of the jar (Garcia, 51).

Clearly, women were making the process their own. The major canning guides of that time period didn’t include recipes for canning chile. Because they weren’t written by people who ate chile.

Home canning really hit its high point during World War II. Food rationing was in effect so growing a garden and storing your own produce was an obvious flex. The government once again put out posters with slogans like “Of course I can! I’m patriotic as can be, and ration points won’t worry me!”

Another poster shows an impeccably dressed mother in a fluffy white apron affixing lids on a jar of bright green peas while her little girl smiles and says, “We’ll have lots to eat this winter, won’t we, Mother?” (North Dakota state historical society). Having canned myself, I doubt that any woman really looked so gorgeous at the end of the process, but it made good propaganda.

Australia had a Dig on for Victory campaign. The UK had a Dig for Victory campaign that promoted the same goals with more urgency because food rationing was stricter there. As a child I read the Chronicles of Narnia and wondered why Lucy was so excited about canned sardines at tea. Partly that’s cultural, but it was also because meat was in scarce supply. Even if Lucy’s mother managed to grow a garden in London and can the produce, it was produce, not protein. Canned fish and meats were highly prized.

I did look into the non-English speaking world, and I came up with very little. I have no idea how much home canning caught on elsewhere, possibly because it may be called something different there. Many of the British sites for example, call it bottling for the very logical reason that when you do it at home, you’re using bottles, not cans. I’m sorry American English makes no sense. I love it anyway.

Moving on, World War II may have been a high point for home canning, which does not mean that there were no scares, that everyone did it right, or understood the process. As late as 1944, a major US magazine published the answer to a reader’s question about whether canned goods would be safe to eat even if they were put up by a menstruating woman (Whitfield, 171). Sigh.

Other questions in that magazine were better. There really are important concerns about how long to boil and which foods are safe when canned by which method. Magazines like Good Housekeeping helped inform a wide readership.

Canning in the Post-War World

When the war ended, so did the government push, but commercial canning was alive and well. Farmers had narrowed down all the myriad varieties of each produce item to the one or two varieties that worked best for canning (Zeide, 55). That’s why we don’t get the same variety that Sears Roebuck customers could get in 1897.

The 19ᵗʰ century housewife’s doubts about food in this weird package were pretty much banished. Food safety regulations were well established, and a growing number of people were quite disconnected from their food source anyway. Most of it came in some sort of package. No dirt, no blood, very little mess. Comparatively speaking.

Women were also less likely to have the cooking skills to handle it from fresh anyway. More and more girls spent their girlhood in school, which I completely approve of. But that did mean that fewer and fewer spent their girlhood learning intricate cooking techniques from their mothers.

Every issue of the magazine Good Housekeeping contained a recipe that was pretty much an advertisement for commercially canned goods (Whitfield, 3). According to the magazines, canned goods were there to save you when your husband’s boss or your mother-in-law dropped by for dinner unannounced. You could do corned beef hash with a 12 ounce can of corned beef for 30 cents (Whitfield, 181). Spicy Meat Balls en Brochette was done with a can of ground luncheon meat and a can of pineapple chunks (Good Housekeeping Book of Company Meals and Buffets, 7).

Peach Pie au Gratin was made with canned peaches. Yes, the au gratin part means there’s also cheese (Good Housekeeping Book of Company Meals and Buffets, 14).

Veal Curry Hawaiian was made with canned cream of mushroom soup and canned pineapple.

Tuna Spaghetti was made with canned tuna, canned mushrooms, canned tomatoes, canned tomato sauce, and canned olives (at least I’m pretty sure those olives are canned).

I don’t mean to say that all of the recipes featured canned goods, but certainly the authors expected that their readers had access to commercially canned goods and a willingness to use them. It was much easier than dealing with these ingredients from scratch.

Plus, these canned goods were all safe, nutritious, and delicious. The Good Housekeeping editorial staff said so. Over the decades they had lots of articles about food safety and the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Apart from an occasional scare about this or that contaminated batch, the world was convinced. Millions of women served millions of canned goods at dinner on a regular basis.

The only reason cans weren’t even more ubiquitous was that in a post-war world, more and more people had access to refrigerators and freezers. You don’t need as many shelf-stable foods if you’ve got that.

But some shelf-stable foods are still good. I’ve got cans in my pantry. Occasionally, I’ve even home canned, though I have a vague impression that most other people my age have not. I could be wrong on that.

Anyway, canned goods do not seem to be going away, but one thing has changed, very slightly, and that is who benefits from the convenience of a canned food. Back in the day, most (but not all) cultural indicators suggest that cooking was the woman’s job. I’m not saying no men cooked at all, but the cultural expectation was that if there was a woman around, she did the cooking and therefore she was the one to benefit from goods that came in a can, already cooked and free of dirt, blood, and feathers.

According to a Gallup global analysis of home cooking, women are still the ones cooking on average, but not so exclusively. In 2022, there was one solitary country of the world where men cook more than women. Congratulations, Italy. But even in the rest of the world the gender gap in cooking is smaller than it used to be. Globally, women cook an average of 8.7 meals per week, while men cook 4.0 (Gallup, Inc.).

That same Gallup poll tracks one other interesting statistic, which is how do you feel about the cooking you do? Is it a chore? Or do you enjoy it? I am pleased to say that the largest tracked category was the one they called Joyful Chefs. If you do any cooking this week, I hope it’s joyful, whether you’re making Peach Pie au Gratin or Tuna Spaghetti.

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Selected Sources

Eschner, Kat. “Why the Can Opener Wasn’t Invented until Almost 50 Years after the Can.” Smithsonian Magazine, August 24, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-can-opener-wasnt-invented-until-almost-50-years-after-can-180964590/.

Gallup, Inc. “Gallup-Cookpad Cooking around the World.” Gallup.com, 2023. https://www.gallup.com/analytics/512897/global-cooking-research.aspx.

García, Nasario, ed. Comadres: Hispanic Women of the Rio Puerco Valley. Western Edge Press, 1997.

Geoghegan, Tom. “The Story of How the Tin Can Nearly Wasn’t.” BBC News, April 21, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21689069.

Good Housekeeping. “Good Housekeeping Cook Book.” Internet Archive, 1957. https://archive.org/details/goodhousekeepbook00good/page/n693/mode/2up.

———. “Good Housekeeping’s Book of Company Meals and Buffets.” Internet Archive, 1958. https://archive.org/details/goodhousekeepin00good/page/68/mode/2up.

Institute of Medicine (US) Food and Nutrition Board. Cattle Inspection: Committee on Evaluation of USDA Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle (SIS-C). Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1990. 2, INTRODUCTION AND HISTORICAL REVIEW OF MEAT INSPECTION. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235649/

Internet Archive. “1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue : Sears, Roebuck and Company : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive,” 2023. https://archive.org/details/1897searsroebuck0000sear.

Klein, Christopher. “How Upton Sinclair’s ‘the Jungle’ Led to US Food Safety Reforms | HISTORY.” HISTORY, May 10, 2023. https://www.history.com/articles/upton-sinclair-the-jungle-us-food-safety-reforms.

Meredith, Leda. “The Brief History of Canning Food.” The Spruce Eats, 2019. https://www.thespruceeats.com/brief-history-of-canning-food-1327429.

Radcliffe, Jane E.. “Perspectives on Children in Maine’s Canning Industry, 1907-1911.” Maine History 24, 4 (1985): 362-391. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mainehistoryjournal/vol24/iss4/2

USA Today. “Canned Foods: Tuna, Soup, Pasta, Beans and Vegetables among the 25 Top-Sellers in America.” USA Today, March 2, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/money/food/2020/03/02/handy-foods-top-selling-canned-goods-include-tuna-soup-pasta-beans/4901441002/.

Whitfield, Kristi Renee, “Canning foods and selling modernity: the canned food industry and consumer culture, 1898-1945” (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3499. https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3499

Wohleber, Kurt. “The Can Opener | Invention & Technology Magazine.” Inventionandtech.com, 2019. https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/can-opener-1.

http://www.history.nd.gov. “The World War I War Garden and Victory Garden – How Does Your Garden Grow Online Exhibit State Historical Society of North Dakota,” n.d. https://www.history.nd.gov/exhibits/gardening/militaryevents7.html.

Zeide, Anna. Canned : The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry. Oakland, California: University Of California Press, 2018.