The Tin Can

Tonight you come home from a long day at work or school or whatever it is that you do, maybe you’re a well off retiree with no nearby relatives and you spend your days walking circuits around the neighborhood, or maybe you’re 5 years out of college working 2 jobs and also driving Uber just to make ends meet, or maybe you do any number of things in between, but the point is that you come home after a long day and you are tired. You don’t have the energy to cook, but you still have to eat something to satiate the grumbling in your stomach and to keep your parents/children/sibling/partner from worrying.

If it were the fifteenth century, you would be forced to either muscle through your exhaustion or endure your hunger and go to sleep on an empty stomach.

It is not the fifteenth century. This is the modern day, and in the modern day we have cans.

The canning process was invented in the early 1800s and marketed as a replacement for salted beef as the primary staple of British Royal Navy cuisine. The true inventor of the process was a frenchman named Phillipe de Gerard, who used Englishman Peter Durand as a proxy by which to secure the patent and market the product to the British military

Unlike brining, the previous champion of food preservation, canning could preserve a food without radically changing its taste or texture. This was incredibly attractive to seamen, who were sick of eating salted meats day in and day out as they slogged across an unchanging blue horizon. Getting the British Military to sign off on replacing salted meat with canned meat was an easy sell.

Now you are an Englishman living in Southern India in 1825. Perhaps you are a pencil-pusher in the employ of the East India Company, tallying up shipments of opium and silver and tea to be shunted back and forth from China to the motherland while silently melting in the heat, or maybe you are a stowaway, a dirty kid who scrambled aboard a ship bound from London to the far flung ports of the Empire, and now you find yourself on foreign soil, imbedded in the bloody imperial cogs that keep the city you were born in afloat. Either way, you have not taken a liking to the local food. It is too spicy for you, the tastes too complex, the bases not nearly as comfortable and filling as the numerous bread and beef combinations that composed your diet back home.

Thankfully, these are not the barbaric days of the eighteenth century. It is 1825, Great Britain is riding the wave of progress, and in this instance progress comes in the form of a shiny tin cylinder packed to the brim with sterile water and boiled meat. Perhaps it does not have the same bloody freshness of the beef you remember from home, and perhaps the earthy, home cooked feel that made you fall in love with it in the first place is just simply not there, but when the alternative is choking back more salted beef and curried rice you are more than happy to dig in to the canned vittles. In time, you might even forget that there was any difference between them and the food you enjoyed at home.

The history of canning is one fraught with manufacturing mistakes, cut corners, and scandal. In 1842, 32 years after the process was patented, the British Crown contracted Stephan Goldner to take care of all their canning needs. Goldner had a knack for business, keeping prices low and profits high with a dash of entrepreneurial magic and an extra large dose of cheap Romanian labor.

7 years later, Goldner’s cost cutting caught up to him, and a fresh shipment of cans was found to be improperly sealed. This resulted in the meat within being completely putrid and inedible, and the majority of the shipment was thrown into the ocean. Public opinion of cans plummeted, and wouldn’t recover for years.

Can-related food scandals continue to this day, with lead-poisoning scares cropping up every few decades and worry about foreign sealing chemicals turning your benign can of soup into a sinister abscess of carcinogens.

Now you are an immigrant living in the United States in the 1990s or maybe the 2000s. Maybe you were born in Guatemala and recently made the perilous trek north in search of a better life for your family, settling down in the Los Angeles area and finding a job as a construction worker. Or maybe you hail from Ireland, and recently moved to Nashville to follow your burgeoning career as a musician, or perhaps you are fleeing political unrest in the middle east and find yourself in New York City, surrounded by unfamiliar faces and facing a fresh type of hatred.

America, as they say, is a melting pot. Hundreds of cultures and peoples go in and mix together and, if all goes well, come out a few generations later as a single unified people, with its own cuisine and belief system and values.

What actually comes out is greasy food and classism. The latter is unavoidable, but the former can be dodged, if you know where the right grocery stores are.

You feed yourself and your family on the food of your homeland, or at least the closest approximation to that that you can scrounge up. The vegetables and meats and strange pastes that are hard to come by in America can be bought for cheap in tin cans, more soggy and soulless perhaps than the products you remember from your childhood, but a sight better than the fatty Anglican American food that you would be eating instead.

You hear from the American newspaper that the lead soldering on the cans is poisoning you, making you irritable and stunting your children’s development. The country is strong-arming you into assimilation.

The soul of the tin can is the preservation of culture. That you can go anywhere, do anything, and still be able to enjoy the food you were raised on. The trade-off is that the canned food can never quite measure up to its real life counterpart. It feels lifeless, immobile, the shape and texture and flavor of home but not the home itself, not by a long shot. The tin can is the preservation of culture, but it is also the death of it.

You are a woman in your late 70s. You were married, but your husband died a few years ago. You live in New Hampshire, where you spend your winters reading and your summers gardening.

You still cook for yourself, and sometimes you use canned ingredients when you can’t find fresh ones.

You do not throw out all the cans. Some you use as flower pots, during the spring and fall. Others catch candle wax when the power goes out or when your children come home for dinner, and still more have been cut up into a wind chime hanging on your porch. What is old is new again. Death does not last forever.