social media encourages this all or nothing dichotomy where if some shitheads are saying backyard farming and canning will solve all our problems the reaction to them has to be NO! canning is unbelievably dangerous! and that's just not true.
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We in Poland make jars of pasteurised fruit/veggies in many forms. If (IF!) they go bad it's easily spotted. This is something that's an old common practice. Not to mention frozen and dried food. If you can't make safe preserves, find someone to teach you, there is a grandma/pa out there who can.
Ugh, thank you. A lot of my work is teaching safe canning recipes & techniques. Can you fck it up badly if you wing it? Yes! Is it also pretty simple to do safely if you follow good directions & use the right equipment? Also yes! (My granny had a 6th grade education & managed it... you can too!).
I studied this stuff in college (culinary degree with food science classes, including one chef who was also a microbiologist w/ a cancer-research patent) but you can just follow recipes from safe sources! Doesn't replace regs and inspections on commercial food sources... still a good skill to have.
That same granny also worked off the farm in a commercial cannery, but her job was more "make sure most of the grasshoppers in the greens don't end up in the cans" and not monitoring the processing. Which is both why we need outside oversight & why I like doing a lot of my own processing, lol.
Throwing out the link for USU's "Preserve the Harvest" website which is a nice resource for anyone who feels overwhelmed about the idea of canning et al.
Thank you for this! I’ve frozen my extra harvested fruits and veggies in the past, but I’m really looking to find more ways to preserve it all, and felt really overwhelmed.
These things are very doable but they take gear, time, space, and some level of skill. Not sustainable or scalable on an individual basis. For those who didn’t grow up sharing resources like this, it’s a good use case for assembling the apocalypse dream teams we made back in 2020.
I did water bath canning on my own in a tiny apartment for a decade. It is absolutely doable on an individual scale. There are small batch guides & styles that are better on a small scale like freezer canning. The gear isn't that expensive, either.
For sure. I am saying that it’s not scalable and sustainable, as in each of us doing our own canning and preserving only works for as long as we can access food without issue. Scaling requires community.
Yes but having an emergency food supply sufficient for your home and ideally to help your neighbors makes you much more capable of responding thoughtfully as part of the community to a broader disaster
Sorry, but this is not very true. I found these skills very basic and easy to learn, and I invested very minimal expense. They are extremely sustainable and very easy to do on an individual basis.
Like I said, it’s not *scalable* as in yes it works on an individual basis. I can do it. I can also save seeds and container garden from my window. But this could only be sustainable at the individual level if there aren’t a bunch of other needs. Sharing skills and resources is scalable.
It is scalable for a whole neighborhood to be full of individuals taking a huge chunk off of their grocery bill with some basic gardening. Basic gardening info is easy to understand and freely available.
A community is comprised of individuals taking action. You seem to be straying from the original point: Individuals gardening in the space they have reduces pressure on the food system and helps everyone.
Agreed! I don't see it as an either or. Gardening / canning can be supplements. They can be relaxing, interesting things for folks to do & to focus on. There's a reason Victory Gardens were so popular & everyone canned during the Depression. Because it truly did help.
It does and for people who want to get more self sufficient or just want to grow stuff you can't get at the grocery store, it's a fun way to feed yourself.
I do container gardening and currently have like 8 types of peppers, peas, green beans, lettuce, radishes, and carrots going.
This last fall I bought a half a bushel of apples. 21lbs. I made a historic recipe that involved 2 ingredients: Apples and sugar. It's called 'fruit'. Sugar macerates the apples, you cook and water bath can them.
Gave it away as gifts. It's proto-apple pie filling. I didn't grow the apples.
Well the people who didn't can properly aren't really here to tell you it's dangerous because they're dead. It's no different than saying Measles is fine because most kids who get it are fine. It's not hyperbole to say canning your own food is dangerous.
There might be nothing sadder than the vitriol that some people sling towards people doing cool and fun things. (Things a lot of people do with their grandma, like ffs, try something. Go for a drive, maybe, which kills more people than botulism in home-canned goods.)
It's dangerous in the way using a small ladder can be dangerous? Like there's a non zero chance that you will fuck it up so badly you die. But if you're careful and pay attention and know how to check your work, you'll most likely be fine
Lol. I'm old enough to have been taught how to identify canned goods for signs of botulism. Then I went to university and specialized in infectious agents. But yeah, your vibes trump my specialized education.
I have that same specialized education, actually I did my M.S. in Fermentation.
You're too alarmist on this, it's usually fine. Should it replace regulatory agencies? No. But we've done this as a species for a while and know what we're doing.
Oh yes. Nothing has made this world a better place to live like the anti-intellectuals. Can't wait til the safest and most reliable food system in history is replaced by us canning our own food.
Yes. When you go to university you're required to take smarmy classes. 4th year sarcasm was really challenging. The written exams were tricky because it can get hard to identify sarcasm is plain text.
There are roughly 0.02 cases of botulism per 100,000 people in the developed world. Like, yes, it's a huge threat when present, but it's very, very easy to avoid by following monitoring pH and temperature guides. You, of all people, should know this. How much botulism have you actually treated?
Years of canning, both pre and post education, and pre and post professional experience, I have never had a case of botulism. This person's education is scare articles from, I dunno, BuzzFeed. But they're usually more entertaining.
Could it be that botulism cases in the past 20 years are low because the number of people canning their own food is low? Nah. It must be because there's no risk.
I think it's something like a trauma response to living in D-K Country, everyone here knows too many people they'd tell "This is not for you, just like mushrooming or using the band saw", so the reaction to anything that is dangerous if done wrong is an immediate "oh god this is gonna kill people"
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https://extension.usu.edu/preserve-the-harvest/
(I do, in fact, know what I'm doing in this, and more importantly I know when I'm not sure.)
This all or nothing business has got to stop.
Subsistence farming is quite hard and a lot of work. Feeding yourself solely from the stuff you make and can is a job unto itself.
There is a grey here. Gardening/canning/whatever isn't a binary where death is one side and paradise is the other.
I do container gardening and currently have like 8 types of peppers, peas, green beans, lettuce, radishes, and carrots going.
Gave it away as gifts. It's proto-apple pie filling. I didn't grow the apples.
it's... really not complicated. or dangerous.
you're far more likely to get killed in a car accident driving to the store to buy canning supplies than you are to give yourself botulism.
You're too alarmist on this, it's usually fine. Should it replace regulatory agencies? No. But we've done this as a species for a while and know what we're doing.
How many of those cases have been from improperly made or stored home canned goods?
If this is your lane, you should know where to find this info. The CDC reports it.
It's about 10% of 200ish botulism cases, which are about 75% infant botulism and 20% wound related. This is normal year over year.
So for all of the food everyone eats in the US there are about 20 cases a year.
https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/php/national-botulism-surveillance/2019.html
i am not denying the existence of botulism, because that would be stupid.
almost as stupid as saying there are never circumstances were people are perfectly able to can their own food safely.