About Canning: a Great Invention

Food spoils, its a fact of life, due mostly to bacteria and mold. There have been many ways of slowing spoilage, although no true way from totally stopping it. From the ancient processes of smoking or salting meat, to the modern day use of radiation to sterilize foods for spacemen. Sterilization is a key word here, as this serves as the main way of slowing the spoiling of food. It can be done many ways, such as salting, pickling, freezing, or heating. Cans depend on heating to sterilize the food inside. This simple mechanism is all it takes.

How is food canned? The process is much the same as Apperts original system. Heat kills off stuff like bacteria which would otherwise ruin the food. They are sealed to keep other bacterias from getting in the food. This is all it takes to preserve a lot of food, easily, to be transported to a war or to the grocer, never needing refrigeration or other special conditions.

Nowadays, in the advanced society that we are, canning hasn’t changed a bit. The modern canning factory still uses the same basic system to make cans of almost any imaginable type of food in the world. The only noticeable change is in speed, whereas the original cans took all day to finish, a factory can churn them out constantly in the thousands each day. So canning is a simple yet clever way creating cheap well preserved food to the modern family.
Canned food, is one of the most amazing and useful inventions of the latter part of the millenium, yet only recognized as a quick snack in just about all of the world. Canned food should and will always be considered one of the best inventions ever, well, next to TV!

Nicolas Appert, an unknown brewer and confectionist (a basic type cook really) proved to be the one to finally figure a way out. He designed the first can. Though it wasn’t really a can, in fact he used glass jars, but he used, or I should say created the basic way of doing this. It took him 14 years of experimenting, but he finally received the reward of 12,000 francs given to him by Napoleon himself. His process was found to be very useful and was successfully used first by the French Navy, and then the rest of the army. Many things were canned, but mostly fruits and vegetables as they proved easiest for his process.

The first person to actually use a can to preserve food, using the same process developed by Appert, was from England by the name of Peter Durand. In 1810 he got a patent for his work. Apperts earlier formula used glass jars, which during transit where very easy to break. Durand use tin coated steel canisters soldered shut. These was the first actual can. Yet he used the same basic process. His work was the birth of meat in a can. He began to can food commercially and this is when canned food became somewhat popular in England, and at least known of by the general public.So what was the, or I should say is the process by which food is canned? Well, originally Appert would put fresh foods into glass jars, corked them, and then heated them to certain temperatures, differing for different foods in different size jars. To heat the jars, he air-sealed them, then stuck them in boiling water. Unknowingly, the heat killed of stuff like bacteria which would otherwise ruin the food. The seal also kept other bacterias from getting at the food. My favorite can of food is sardines in olive oil, followed by anchovies and tuna.

Tags: Canning, Food, Inventions, Preserving