Do the benefits of canning outweigh the drawbacks?
LAEL: Jenn, how are you doing today?
JENN: I am doing great, feeling good! And you?
LAEL: I am actually completely bushed. It’s fall, and that means every spare minute of my time is taken up putting our garden to bed, and figuring out what to do with the produce from our garden. It’s canning season. I grew up thinking of home canning in a sort-of romantic way, with the smell of grape juice floating through our home, or the beautiful orange apricots sitting on the counter top. But it turns out that when you become an adult and actually have to do the hard work it is something else. I have chapped hands, I have cuts and burns and…
JENN: …sweat across your brow pasting your hair…
LAEL: And pretty much a constantly sticky kitchen floor. Sometimes I wonder, is canning worth it? And I wanted to kind-of get your take on that. A lot of people immediately think, well of course, home canning is less expensive. You can get, you know, free food. What do you think about that? Do you can because it’s less expensive?
JENN: I don’t can at all. Well, I won’t say at all. I’m the supportive canner. I help my husband with canning. But I have actually wondered, have you done the math on this? Is it less still less expensive?
LAEL: I would argue that if you have to put any money in your canning then, financially, no. It doesn’t really turn out to be less expensive. You have to buy the jars and the lids and the rings, big pots for the water bath canning, a pressure canner which actually is quite expensive. You can get a lot of jars of spaghetti sauce for what it costs you to buy a pressure canner.
JENN: And we’re not even talking yet about the time. We’re just talking the supplies.
LAEL: Oh yeah, this is just economics here. I would argue that unless you really do it in huge massive quantities that home canning financially wouldn’t really be worth it. There’s a lot of prep involved in the process of canning your own food. Sourcing the ingredients, preparation, filling the jars, processing them. If you factor all that in I don’t know that you can really justify canning. A lot of people appreciate the flexibility of home canning. You can choose the ingredients that go into the jar, and that can be especially helpful for those who have really specific diet needs, like food allergies or diabetes.
JENN: That’s a great point.
LAEL: One thing that people often bring up when I talk about this topic is self-sufficiency. They say that’s a pro of canning, but it’s not really a paradigm that I have ever really bought into. But there is a philosophical argument that perhaps is more meaningful. And that is kind-of encapsulated in this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that says, "Every man is a consumer and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive and needs to be rich." And all that really says to me is that it’s better to be a producer rather than just a consumer. When we become a producer we can have a better relationship with the things around us. It’s a different kind of mind set, and one that food processing, I think, really taps into, if that makes sense.
JENN: It does. I definitely see the value in being the producer. I had an experience once when I went to visit family in Canada. They were putting down their wood floor and I said, “Why are you having that done? You can do that yourself,” and she said, “because I work and I pay someone else to be the expert at doing that.” But I do that that there are areas of our lives that all of us can enjoy being the producers, and if that’s in canning and you love that then that’s great. And then if it’s not in that then you can be a producer in something else. You also bring up an interesting thing: what about the social aspect? We talked about the time that it takes, but I do remember being in the kitchen with my mom and my dad and our family and taking the skins off of the peaches, and that was time that was well spent together. So I don’t want anybody to think that we are putting down the process of canning, but just looking at it through different lenses.
LAEL: Absolutely. And you know better than anyone how much I do enjoy talking about food.
JENN: Well I know better than anyone how much I enjoy getting some of your freshly canned salsa!
LAEL: Well that’s great. I guess those are things to consider and to give it a try. It doesn’t hurt to try.
JENN: No, it doesn’t.
LAEL: Well, thanks for your perspective Jenn. This is Lael Gilbert…
JENN:…and Jenn Ashton…
LAEL: For Bread and Butter.
