Canning Food Parties

  • The jars are from a mildly more successful canning party than that described in our tale. If we can, you can, too. (Photo by Jennifer Szweda Jordan)

It’s harvest season – that time of year when farmers are selling cucumbers,
tomatoes and corn for cheap because there’s such bounty. So what do you do
with that kind of surplus? Jennifer Szweda Jordan followed one author’s
advice for preserving:

Transcript

It’s harvest season – that time of year when farmers are selling cucumbers,
tomatoes and corn for cheap because there’s such bounty. So what do you do
with that kind of surplus? Jennifer Szweda Jordan followed one author’s
advice for preserving:


Not long ago, I heard an interview with author Barbara Kingsolver about her
newest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.
Kingsolver and her family spent a year mostly eating foods they’d harvested
on their own or bought from local farms. The idea was to prove to herself
that her family could live well while cutting down the fuel used in food
transportation. In the interview, she mentioned that the family had canning
parties. Well, that was enough to inspire me.


I ordered a half-bushel of tomatoes from a local organic farmer and headed
to Ann Murray’s house. Ann’s a friend and co-worker whose family used to
can:


“I have to tell you what my father says of canning, he says: eat what you can, what
you can’t, can, and it’s so true.”


As a kid in rural West Virginia, Ann was the shucker of corn and the snipper
of beans. She never had a leading role at the pressure cooker – that tightly
sealed pot with the frightening capacity to explode if handled incorrectly.
Like me, the friends who joined us, Robin Hewlett and Matt Willard don’t
know much about canning either.


For canning instruction we turn to the 1964 edition of The Joy of Cooking.
Check out the language in this book: “Good organization and proper
equipment simplify canning and give you, with a minimum of effort, gay-
looking shelves of glistening, jewel-like jars… all labeled and dated and
ready to use.”


Matt recalls a similar book from his childhood:


“My mom had the Betty Crocker cookbook from like 1965 and they had like
explicit pictures of the process and I always found it really intriguing to read
through that ’cause I was like, I live in NYC, no one cans here. That was so
far from my mind. I’m thinking of some person in Wyoming on a farm like
actually still canning… But now it’s coming full circle, it’s great.”


Not many people think much about canning these days. But the process has
a rich history. Learning to preserve food this way actually helped Napoleon
win wars. Now canning has made its way into Ann Murray’s kitchen, where
we’re waiting for a pot of water to boil. We’ve scalded, and skinned our
tomatoes. Now we lay out our plan for organization that Joy of Cooking
promises will leave us with glistening jars:


(Sound of people talking while canning)


Anyway, what do we know? We try to get the right amount of tomatoes in
the jar – not too much so they’ll explode, but not so little that we’re mostly
packing water.


We submerge eight quarts into boiling water and wait what seems like a very
long 45 minutes. Ann throws us a bone to keep us going:


“They’re lookin’ beautiful, guys. Lookin like my mother’s cupboard.”


Since Ann’s the only one with actual canning memories, we’re all ears:


“I just remember it being really hot outside, incredibly hot, steamy in the kitchen. I felt like my mom was sacrificing a little so
we could have canned stuff. But it was always so great to open it up in the
middle of the winter.”


At the end of six hours, we only have 12 quarts of tomato jars to show for it.
I’m a little disappointed because I wish we could’ve been more efficient. I
mean, it’s a good thing we’re not in the French military, right, because we, like,
seriously couldn’t survive on this:


(Hewlett:) ” I feel like the sitting around and the canning is part of the social canning party
aspect.”


They eventually had me convinced that we were productive enough. Until I
did some searches on the internet about canning parties. In a 1918 book
called Use Your Government: What Your Government Does For
You
, there are tables listing teams of Kansas canners and their output.
If I read correctly, Mrs. P.W. Rieger, aided by 17-year-old Bernadette
Rieger, canned 622 and one half quarts of fruit, vegetables, soups and meats.


Wow, I wonder if I’m too old to join 4-H?


For The Environment Report, this is Jennifer Szweda Jordan.

Related Links

Elections Boost Environmental Agenda

  • The mid-term elections caused a major power shift in Washington. Democrats say they plan to rev up Congress’ power of oversight. (Photo courtesy of Architect of the Capitol)

The political landscape in the U.S. changed overnight last week. The Democratic takeover will mean a big shift in policy-making efforts in Washington. Mark Brush has more on how environmental issues played out in the election, and what this new Congress might do on the environmental front:

Transcript

The political landscape in the U.S. changed overnight last week. The Democratic takeover will mean a big shift in policy-making efforts in Washington. Mark Brush has more on how environmental issues played out in the election, and what this new Congress might do on the environmental front:

Environmentalists say some of their biggest enemies were defeated in the midterm election. And top on their list of the worst environmental offenders was California Congressman Richard Pombo.


(The “Pombo Mambo” plays: a catchy ad jingle whose lyrics expose Richard Pombo’s environmental record, produced and run by the League of Conservation Voters.)


Environmentalists spent millions of dollars on radio and television ads to defeat Pombo, and they say it was money well spent. They came to really despise Pombo because of his work to weaken the Endangered Species Act.


Tiernan Sittenfeld is the legislative director for the League of Conservation Voters. She says many Republican committee chairs, such as Richard Pombo, simply obstructed environmental legislation. She says now that will change.


“It’s not that even that Congress has even voted to pass particular pro-environment legislation; it’s that the house leadership and the committee chairs haven’t even allowed such legislation to come to the floor. They haven’t even wanted a debate on it. So I think having different leadership, having different committee chairs who care about protecting the environment, who care about clean air, clean water, and open space is going to be a whole world of difference.”


So now that the Republican leadership is out who is taking their place? One legislator who is expected to gain a lot of power is Democrat John Dingell of Michigan. He will chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee.


Dingell says he, and other Democratic committee chairs will first use their power to make sure that existing environmental laws are being enforced by the Bush Administration.


“This administration has been totally unsupervised by the Congress, and checks and balances which are so important to the Founding Fathers, and legislative oversight, have simply not taken place since the Bush Administration came in.”


Dingell will be joined by many other legislators who are likely to have strong environmental agendas. People like Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and Henry Waxman. They have several issues in mind that they feel have been mishandled by the Bush Administration. Top on their list is energy policy and global warming.


On energy, environmental lobbyists say high gas prices have made the issue one that resonates with voters.


Karen Wayland is the legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. She says the new Congress will revisit the tax breaks and other financial incentives given to oil companies in the last energy bill.


“I think what something the House will do at least will be to look at the royalty relief that Congress has given to the oil companies and sort of try to roll back some of the royalty relief; make the oil companies pay full price for extracting oil from our public lands and then use that money to invest in clean energy.”


Democrats are also expected to make a push for national renewable energy standards, and higher fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.


As for global warming, the Democrats say the Bush White House and the Republicans in Congress have completely ignored the issue. The Democrats are expected to introduce several global warming bills in the next session.


But while the Democrats gained a lot of power, they still will have to work around the threat of a presidential veto. And in the Senate, the republicans still hold more than enough seats to block legislation.


Darren Samuelsohn is a senior reporter with Greenwire, a Washington DC based news service covering energy and environmental policy. Samuelsohn says while the Republicans still hold a lot of power, it’s interesting to see how much of it was eroded overnight.


“As you start to talk about it and think about it, it’s across the board: it’s judges, it’s legislation, it’s oversight. And then the thing that really nobody outside of Washington ever really kind of knows what’s going on about, but the whole huge appropriation – the whole federal budget process. That will now be Democrat controlled and we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that get spent every year.”


Samuelsohn says the Democrats will now face the challenge of finding more money for their favorite environmental programs, while at the same time making good on campaign promises to cut the huge federal budget deficit.


For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Usda Catches Shady Organic Certifiers

The US Department of Agriculture says consumers will
see tougher policing of the organic food market. That’s after the
USDA recently revoked the accreditation of a company that certified organic products. The GLRC’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

The US Department of Agriculture says consumers will
see tougher policing of the organic food market. That’s after the
USDA recently revoked the accreditation of a company that certified
organic products. The GLRC’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:


The Ag Department kicked a Wisconsin certifier out of the
National Organic Program for apparent conflicts of interest. That marks the first time
the department has revoked an organic certifier, but the agency says
other investigations into rule-breaking have been done and some
certifiers have left voluntarily when they knew the government was
scrutinizing them.


Barbara Robinson oversees the USDA’s Organic
Program. She says the learning curve of the four-year old effort is
over and tougher enforcement is on the way:


“Ignorance is no longer a good excuse. Now, enough time has passed to
say, okay, we can get a little tougher.”


People who break the organic certification rules can be booted out for up to
five years and face fines.


For the GLRC, I’m Chuck Quirmbach

Related Links

Low-Flush Toilets Make a Splash

It’s one of the most private, intimate parts of our lives — in fact, most people talk more readily about sex than they do about what goes on in the bathroom. But now, toilet talk is heating up over a federal mandate requiring all new toilets to flush with no more than one-point-six gallons of water. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson has the story: