Is home canning primarily an American thing?

[quiet1]

Canning seems as innocous as an activity can get. There's no strong smell or noise involved, and I am not aware of any major belief system forbidding it. What am I missing?

I think it's like any other hobby - people can get really annoying about it. Particularly if it's combined with the whole green/organic/home gardening/farmer's market holier-than-thou thing. (I.e. "Of course I only use my own home canned tomatoes that I grew myself using compost that we made at home.")

It's generally time consuming and messy and physically demanding since you often don't can unless you have a quantity of something, so it just doesn't fit into everyone's lifestyle, but some people seem to think you should MAKE it fit. (Plus, even if you have the time and the space and the energy to do it, there's the food safety aspect - some people may just not want to deal with making sure they do everything properly so the canned stuff is safe. It's not like most of us are in a situation now where we NEED to can in order to have stuff available during the winter, thanks to supermarkets and commercially available products.)

I mean, I quite enjoyed it and I'd do it again, but there are plenty of items that I COULD can where I don't see the point when you can buy something just as good or better, or where canning isn't the preservation method I like. (I don't like canning vegetables in general, for example. I think they're better frozen for preservation, if you have the freezer space. I don't like the canned vegetable texture.)

Wait, you mean canning doesn't suck the organic right out of food?

I understand not "getting" an interest or even thinking it's kinda stupid and probably symptomatic of moral depravity or something -that's how I feel about RAH RAH HOMETOWN SPORTS TEAM- but, really, canning? If you hate thise annoying granola canning people, you'd presumably avoid them because they're annoying, not because they're into canning. I think.

Apparently not? Maybe if you've canned it yourself you know for sure there aren't any Evil Strange Chemicals? I have no idea.

Personally, I do not care about such people. If they want to talk about canning, I can talk about canning also, and discuss the best preservation methods and all of that kind of thing. But that's my guess for why some other people dislike it.

I personally find 'food safety? Why should I care about food safety? It'll be FINE!' types to be exponentially more annoying and bothersome. I don't mean people who make an educated decision that the food safety guidelines are too conservative in this way or that, I mean people who do not know/understand the risks and have decided wholesale that they can just do whatever they'd like. These types are not restricted to canning, of course, but the subject seems to come up more in the context of canning than in the context of cooking generally. (Also not restricted to granola types.)

[SylviaLovegren]

"one of the reasons she had to move away was that she couldn't get used to everyone canning things all the time"

Makes perfect sense. Canning really gets on my nerves too.

I wish I could find the book. She was being slightly tongue in cheek, but she did say she felt like there was a big culture/world view of food that involved canning and she wasn't into it and felt left out and slightly frowned upon by the "earth mothers."

I finally remembered -- it was Annie Dillard in one of her autobiographical essays. For those of you who've been wondering!

[janeer]

The whole world does preserving (hate the word canning, an artifact from the 19th/early 20th century). Asians, Europeans, Africans, Middle Easterners, even people from New Jersey. It is, after all, the Garden State.

[Snadra]

The Australians on ForumThermomix do a lot of canning and both Ball and Kerr Mason jars are available, if not at local stores, they are easy to find online.

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Traditionally non-jam preserving in Australia is done with Fowlers Vacola, which I believe starts in cold water. Mason jars, as well as European jars are becoming more available, but are quite expensive compared to their cost in The US/Canada. When I first arrived here the only jars I saw were Quattro stagionni (one piece lid) and Fowlers. The US style of preserving fruits and vegetables is pretty niche here, although as someone mentioned above tomato sauce preserving is big amongst Italian migrants. Most people I know who bother stick to jams and a few pickles/relishes and seal them in recycled jars, sometimes with cellophane.

In 'black kettle and full moon', Geoffrey Blainey says families used to cut down old bottles to turn into preserve jars, and if I recall correctly he says jam was a popular method of fruit preserving because sugar was relatively cheap. My father-in-law grew up in the thirties and all his contemporaries have strong memories of lemon and melon jam, because it could be made with cheap sugar and scrounged ingredients.

http://www.abc.net.au/tasmania/stories/s1463201.htm

http://fowlersvacola.com.au

http://www.cwaofvic.asn.au/content.asp?pid=140780

[Martin Fisher]

Home preservation of tomato sauce in glass water bottles in Italy.

http://awaitingtable.com/2011/10/eating-the-calendar-our-tomato-sauce-this-year-and-the-next/

[nickrey]

I bought myself a pressure canner from Amazon and had it delivered to me in Australia.

My source for Mason jars and canning accessories on-line here in Australia is redback trading.

I also agree that it should be called preserving as I put my produce into jars, not cans.