Anna Zeide. Canned

When I was a teenager, my sister worked for a brief time in a vegetable cannery. After hearing her less-than-appetizing stories of what went on behind the scenes, I eliminated canned food almost entirely from my diet, a habit that remains to this day. I was reminded of this when reading Anna Zeide’s Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, since Zeide’s inquiry is grounded in the inherent inability of consumers to know much about the contents of any can of food. When consumers cannot see, feel, or smell what is inside the can, or have any real knowledge about the origins of this food, why do they purchase it? Beginning with Nicolas Appert’s 1795 discovery of a safe technique for preserving food in sealed containers, and continuing up through the present era, Zeide provides an account of the technological, agricultural, and business developments that characterized the canning industry in the United States, along with the regulatory context that shaped the market for canned food. Each chapter (some more loosely than others) uses a particular canned food product as a case study to examine a time period and corresponding set of problems confronting the canning industry. Such issues included the basic question of how to prevent food from being contaminated by bacteria or by toxic substances in the cans themselves (the latter problem has never been fully resolved); how to create plant varieties suitable for canning, as well as how to convince farmers to grow them; and how to navigate relations with government regulatory agencies, research scientists, and consumer advocacy groups. Zeide argues that each of these issues is related to the more fundamental problem of how to create consumer confidence in the face of the “opacity” of both the can and the institutions producing processed packaged food.

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