Cans Across America

by Kat Kinsman, Posted Jul 20th 2009 @ 5:00PM

Pickles. Photo: Kat Kinsman

There's a canning revolution going on and Kim O'Donnel -- former food writer for the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post -- has brought it to a boil.

Upon tremendous response to her re-Tweet of an Ethicurean post about a canning party in San Francisco and subsequent suggestion that Seattle and other cities follow suit, O'Donnel asked interested home canners to contact her. Thus Cans Across America was born. On the weekend of August 29-30, cities across the nation will host classes, can-a-thons, canning meet-ups and raise awareness of this retro-haute preservation method.

More about the nation's can-do attitude after the jump.

Pickled fiddlehead ferns. Photo: Kat Kinsman

So why the upswing in sales of seeds, canning equipment and how-to tomes like "Well-Preserved", "Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It" and "Putting Up"? In an article on the True/Slant Web site, O'Donnel asked several canning enthusiasts including Shannon and Jason Mullett-Bowlsby of the Lazy Locavores, former Slashfood editor and current Food In Jars editrix Marisa McClellan and me (I take a canning vacation every August) what draws us toward this antiquated preservation.

Said Shannon and Jason, "Food we grow ourselves or food we source from local producers we can meet and get to know is safer and better for us. The next natural step in that awareness is the desire to continue this type of food consumption all year long. For this reason, more and more folks are preserving the harvest through canning and other food storing methods."

Marisa reasoned, "I want the sense of continuity that making my own food, in the same way that women of generations past made theirs, lends to my life."

And me? I find canning endlessly meditative. I lose myself in the rigor of the process, from washing, chopping and processing fruit and spice and vegetables to sterilizing the jars, funneling in the brine and sliding on the lid at just the right moment. If I do it precisely, some hours later as the contents cool, I am rewarded with a telltale "ping" indicating a successful seal. I've stopped time and am left with formerly living, vibrant food in a state of suspended animation. I can open jarred summer into a dead-of-winter kitchen, when it is perhaps needed most.

Visit the Cans Across America blog, follow Canvolution on Twitter, upload images to the Flickr pool and read Kim O'Donnel's article on True/Slant.

Filed Under: Trends, On the Blogs, Retro cookery, Guilty Pleasures
Tags: canning, canning vacation, CanningVacation, cans across america, CansAcrossAmerica, guilty pleasures, kat kinsman, KatKinsman, kim odonnel, KimOdonnel, marisa mcclellan, MarisaMcclellan, retro food, true slant, TrueSlant, twitter