Can-Can

It’s the close of canning season, and I’ll spend the coming weekends combing my local Farmer’s Market for tomatoes and onions, sweet peppers and hot, all to cook up giant batches of tomato sauce and salsa to stash on my basement shelves for the coming year. This might seem an unusual pursuit—even a waste of time—when every grocery store offers jars of Prego for $2.00 on sale. It’s not half bad, either! However, I have a couple of reasons for investing my time in “putting up” summer’s bounty, the first of which is…

Sustainability

Spaghetti in December is a wonderful thing. With a loaf of crusty garlic bread, the saucy pasta dish is the ultimate in convenient comfort food. Every time I crack open a jar of Newman’s Own, though, I feel a pang of guilt for the perfectly usable glass jar I’ll be sending on its way to the local landfill after dinner. When I pour out a jar of home-canned sauce, on the other hand, I know that I’ll be loading it into the dishwasher to be used for next year’s produce. The only waste will be the tiny disc that seals it. How about chili? Here we have multiple cans made of strip-mined metals filled with diced tomatoes that I could have preserved myself fairly easily. Although recycling is a good option for those cans, reducing is a better one.

Another advantage is knowing that these yummy veggies came from local farmers . Besides all the advantages of small-scale farming, buying locally saves much in carbon emissions from cross-country shipping. If the item being shipped is not prepared sauce in jars but “fresh” tomatoes, I will be disappointed by their mealy texture and lack of flavor—secondary considerations to a business that naturally places emphasis on shipping endurance and shelf life, as Michael Pollan convincingly argues in his book In Defense of Food. And even though Smucker’s may be just as delicious, when I scoop out a dollop of homemade strawberry jam—made of strawberries from a local u-pick—I can’t help but smile as I think of my little nephew O’s face covered in red juice as he toddled among the rows of diminutive, abundant plants.

Which leads me to…

Connection

For all the persuasion of the practical considerations of canning, to me it just feels good. As I stir the steaming pot on the stove, I think of my Grandpa Earl in his overalls and white t-shirt, with his rectangular plot of tomatoes and peppers in the backyard and his rows upon rows of jars in the furnace room. I recall my Uncle Kenny’s enjoyment of my Damson plum jam the Saturday afternoon just weeks before he passed away, when he described to me the plum trees in Great-Grandma Kessner’s front yard in Concordia, and the jam she made from them, way back when. I even think of my dad teaching me to make my first dish, the inaptly-named egg-with-a-hole-in-the-middle (also known as eggs in baskets). In this way, I feel a sense of bittersweet continuity with my past as a daughter, niece and grand-daughter, as well as a human being with thousands of years of food preservation preceding me.

This summer, I taught Trevor to make peach jam. He is so proud of those golden-orange jars of peachy goodness.

Sweet.