^M00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^F00:00:03 ^M00:00:18 >> Nancy Groce: Hello. My name is Nancy Groce. I'm a folklorist at the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress, and I'd like to welcome you to the latest presentation on our ongoing Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture Series. The Botkin Series allows us to highlight the work of leading scholars in the discipline of folklore, ethnomusicology, oral history and cultural heritage while enhancing the collections here at the American Folklife Center. For the Center and the Library, the Botkin Lecture has formed an important facet of acquisition activities. Each lecture is videotaped and becomes part of a permanent collection. In addition, the lectures are later posted as webcasts on the Library's website where they are available for viewing to Internet patrons throughout the world. So, if you haven't already done so, now would be an excellent time to turn off any electronic devices you have with you. Very often the American Folklife Center partners with other divisions here at the Library of Congress to put on lectures and concerts, and today I am delighted to say that this event is being co-sponsored by the John W. Kluge Center, and I want to thank the Kluge Center for their help and support in this project. One of the great joys as working as a folklorist is the enormous scope of topics that folklorists are encouraged to study. Although folklorists might be better known for their research in music and legends, myths and customs and material culture, many folklorists are also involved in setting traditions and practices surrounding food, food preparation and preservation and the use of food in rituals and celebration. The American Folklife Center archive contains an enormous amount of materials about food and food-related traditions, and I welcome you all to come and do research in our holdings. Today I have the pleasure of introducing folklorist Danille Elise Christensen, who the last year or so as a Kluge Fellow has been here at the Library and using the resources of the American Folklife Center as well as a holdings of numerous other divisions to study [no audio] which will be addressed in today's talk. Dr. Christensen received her PhD in Folklore from Indiana University and is an assistant [no audio] Virginia Tech. Her work focuses on ways people shape everyday speech, actions and the objects they seek to influence and persuade others. She's especially interested in gendered domestic labor as a side of commentary and display. In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious John W. Kluge Fellowship by the Library of Congress and she's presently completing her book, "Freedom from Want: Home Canning in the American Imagination," which is based on her Kluge project. Today, she'll be speaking on home canning, cultural narratives, technological change and the status of traditional knowledge. I'd ask you to join me in welcoming her: Dr. Christensen. ^M00:03:36 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:42 >> Danille Christensen: Hello, it's good to see so many friends out there, and thank you for giving up your lunch hour, and I apologize in advance for talking about food during the lunch hour that you're giving up. [Laughter] My topic today is home canning. That is the preserving of heat sterilized fruit, vegetables and meat in sealed containers. I'm interested in the technologies involved, in the artifacts and processes that turn perishable matter into stuff that can be stored and exchanged according to human desires, but I want to also know how technology -- excuse me -- I want to know how technologies themselves in the societies in which they are apart are shaped by talk. So, in a moment, I'm going to share some of the narratives that circle around home canning. What kinds of values and agendas has canning been connected with and how? Who is telling these stories and why? What kinds of power relationships emerge? Are there good guys and bad guys? And how do changes in technology and other material context affect how these stories play out? I'll spend some time sharing an overview of cultural narratives that emerge in materials from the Library of Congress, and then I'll shift into two narratives about progress and authoritative knowledge that tend to erase women's roles. First though let me share my appreciation for everyone who has made my time here at the Library of Congress so amazing. I've been here since February and, unfortunately, I am headed back to Blacksburg in 2 weeks. I'm glad to be going back to Blacksburg but sad to be leaving the Library. So to my Kluge colleagues who are still in the United States and made the trek over from our offices in the Jefferson Building, thanks for the conversation, commiseration and willingness to act excited over small scholarly breakthroughs. The Kluge staff also have my gratitude for their support, problem solving, ability to procure European chocolate and general good will. [Laughter] Nancy Groce and others at the American Folklife Center did the leg work for this Botkin Lecture, which is one small part of the regular programming. My current work in progress, as Nancy mentioned, is a book called "Freedom From Want: Home Canning in the American Imagination," and it got its start here at the Library of Congress in 2012 when I was privileged to receive a Parsons Fellowship. During the two summers I spent doing concentrated work in the American Folklife Center reading room, I read field notes, examined photographs and transcribed interviews about food preservation in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia and West Virginia's Coal River Valley, on ranches in Nevada, and among immigrant families in the American West. My folklore colleagues here at the Library offered invaluable help and encouragement over those years and the collections themselves helped me understand how home bottling traditions fit into a matrix of preservation activities. The Blue Ridge and Coal River collections, for example, demonstrate a range of dehydration practices that continue because they make sense in terms of local tastes, social structures, built environments and values, such as reluctance to be completely dependent on electricity. So there's J.A. Easter and his technology. Here's Carrie Severt . Her, this image and her interviews and things in the collection demonstrate how some technologies are dependent on others such as her drying rack and wood stove combination. The drying rack is not too useful without the stove. And I don't have a photo of anyone using a car dashboard as a drying rack, but that's another strategy that's very efficient. Here's Maisy Beamer of Galax, Virginia, who noted that people dry food on glass in the sun if they don't have space inside. A roof she said will dry food in a hurry when it's a hot day. In fact, she had gotten tired of eating the fresh beans in her refrigerator and put some out to dry on her cellar roof the day folklorist Jerry Johnson stopped to talk with her. And I'll be showing lots of photographs today. I spent at last two months in prints and photographs and then two months in Folklife and so I wanted to showcase some of the really great resources that we have here. Here's one last photo from the AFC collections. This is from the Coal River Project. Here is an example of "leather britches beans" strung on thread and hung from porch beams or rafters. The pods take four or five days to dry outside unless it is rainy or damp. When the weather turns, you've got to bring them inside. The drying beans look pretty in rafters and porch railings. Like chili ristras in New Mexico strung leather britches act as a visual symbol of shared culture within Appalachian communities. I also spent a lot of time, as I said. in Prints and Photographs. The staff there took me hostage for two months always finding new things for me to look at, and I'm really grateful, thank you. I see you in the back row. You'll see plenty of examples throughout the presentation, and I did finally make it to Rare Books and Manuscripts, so thanks to Michael North, Maphon Ashman, Stephanie and others who helped me track down the books I needed including this book, Ann Mary Dutton's book from 1800. In 18th Century and 19th Century English language sources, they make clear distinctions between the words "to preserve," which means to use sugar, right? "To pickle," which means to use a salt brine or vinegar. And "to keep," which means to maintain for a relatively long time and relative means like until Christmas or all winter or the next year without the use of a taste-altering preservative. So that distinction and we often think about as being just part of contemporary canning where you don't add sugar and things, right? You can find it in these older books as well. This so called "cold water method" to keep barberries that's up here, that was still being advocated in 1919 to preserve rhubarb, cranberries, gooseberries and sour cherries although the 1919 author, Olive Hayes, noted in italics that, "this method is not always successful as the acid content varies with the ripeness and the locality in which the fruits are grown." I'll come back to her concern with context a little bit later. Also in Rare Books, I found this British bill-of-fare published in 1708 which called for February meals that included peas, asparagus, strawberries and cream, several apple pies, raspberry cream and gooseberry tarts. Some of the fruit had probably been over-wintered in cool cellars or forced early in greenhouses. The menus were created by Henry Howard, who was a well-regarded chef employed by several members of aristocracy. So he would have had access to hot houses, but the gooseberry tarts were possible because at least by the late 1680s people knew how to store firm, whole, firm, acidic fruits including gooseberries, currants, cherries, bases and damsons in sealed bottles and jars. And basses and damsons like plums belong to the genus prunus but are smaller, drier and tarter than their sweet, meaty cousins. ^M00:10:38 This book, which included the menus, was first published in 1703. By 1726 the book had gone into a fifth printing. A recipe Howard calls "to keep gooseberries" appeared unchanged in the second edition and fifth printing and exactly as it appears in the original 1703 book as well. As you'll see, the recipe relies on two, the two procedures fundamental to what we now call canning. First, existing detrimental yeast, mold and bacteria are killed or retarded through the application of heat. And second, further contamination is minimized by sealing the container, by stopping [inaudible]. Notice that he actually calls for clarified mutton fat to be used to seal the damsons. And what's interesting, so, in the preface to this book he talks about the different kind of manuscript sources that these come from. All right, so finally, I'm indebted to Allison Kelly and Connie Carter in the Library Science Technology and Business Division, who have loaned me their personal books, offered me snacks and sent me relevant materials over the past four years. And actually the other day Connie just gave me this replica Ball Jar, so I brought it to show you. In the stacks, I discovered more than I thought I needed to know about 19th Century technologies like this wax sealer. And I also learned how fluid food preservation processes in terms for the turn of the century. So, at the Third Annual Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics this is Mrs. Melvil Dewey. Annie Dewey who was the wife of Melvil Dewey of Dewey Decimal fame, right? And so she is setting out sort of a schema of how to organize preservation. She's actually part of a larger home economic section of the Dewey Decimal System. And I have found recipes for preserving food with borax. So that's not a mistake, but the organizational scheme is a little fuzzy to me here, you know, boiling and sterilization can overlap so there's sort of coming to clarify those terms, I guess, for themselves. I also accumulated a lot of food safety texts and food science and technology. And so I think this is as good a time as any to go over a few food safety principles that would be useful in understanding the rest of the conversation today, right? So, first you need to kill or disable existing microbes. You can do that through sterilization, high temps over sufficient enough time. You can also add sugar or salt or acid or you can dehydrate things for desiccation. Once you have sort of disabled the microbes, you need to keep the microbes out so you need to have some sort of a seal, right? So that's sort of the base of parameters we're working within. And you can see that in this 1876 set of instructions where you take cold fruit and put hot syrup and put into a jar and place the open jar in a boiler lined with a grate, pebbles and straw to sort of protect it from breakage. You fill it up with water to the neck, you cover the boiler and boil for a specific amount of time depending on what you're cooking. You remove it and let the jar stand for five minutes and then you add a rubber ring and a cap and screw it down with a wrench because this is a zinc cap that you have to really put a lot of effort in to getting it down there, but you can see this is a little problematic because it doesn't add the seal until after the sterilization has already processed, right? So you've got a chance for contamination to occur. So, again, you need to it in that order, right? First you sort of cover it, you sterilize it, and then you make sure that it's sealed. Air tight. Okay. So the last acknowledgement I want to give is to Benjamin Botkin for whom this lecture series is named. He is shown here in this Victory Garden during World War II. Botkin championed the notion that vernacular expressive culture is always relevant to contemporary, social and political life. The pattern of things people say, do and make in everyday life are not merely practical or decorative, but in fact, they shape structures of power. And home canning is a case in point. Shelf stable canned goods have been a part of everyday American life since the mid-19th Century. Where industrial canning utilized metal tins and mechanized processes, other forms of canning came to rely on glass bottles and the domestic labor of women. I should reiterate that in the United States home canning has come to refer almost exclusively to preserving fruit and vegetables in air tight jars. In the literature, it's not unusual to hear people talk about glass cans, right, when they're referring to jars. Of course the job has not fallen exclusively to women. So here you see this couple from New Mexico working on currants and apricots. That said, the story of canning is complicated, right? Even in the early 1900s the practice had multiple meanings. For some, home canning was old-fashioned, inefficient or embarrassing already by like the early 1900s. For others is a valuable skill to be displayed in public and mobilized in times of need. In today's context of economic instability, automated systems and cultural and environmental change, do- it-yourself canning is experiencing a revival. More people are canning their own food. The process can be a way to recall people and places; to confirm authentic or esoteric taste; and to enact abstract values such as stewardship or self-sufficiency. That is a vernacular process like canning becomes instrumental in articulating and further materializing ideographs: Those seemingly self-evident words and phrases that, "function as guides, warrants, reasons or excuses for behavior and belief". And that's Michael McGee. These one term sums of an orientation include things like tradition, heritage, authenticity, art, identity, but also a number of key words and code words that index broader cultural narratives and ideologies. I'll show you a few examples. So, one cultural narrative or sort of ideograph that indexes these larger cultural narratives is creativity. These images, one from 2011 and the other from the 1940s, demonstrate how canning can be an expressive creative practice; not merely a practical one. People often think of canning in the past as people just did it because they had to but we do it now because we choose to, but that's not an accurate depiction of what, from what I have found of people's motivations for canning. Beauty has always been something that people have been interested in and sought after. I'm going to show you a range of photos that sort of emphasize how home canning can be a sign of display. So here you have Mrs. Frank Jacobs, who is carefully placing pears in a jar and that has a practical effect of making sure that you got it closed in efficient pack, right? It seems to be floating up. But it's also aesthetically pleasing especially in terms of evenness and regularity, which is often valued by people who can. Here's another sort of sense of canning as display. You can't see the sign very well right here, but it's actually sort of a call for people to contribute exhibits, sort of a rotating exhibit. Each of these has the name of the woman who made it. Some of them I have been able to read with magnification, but this display is interesting in that it sort of brings together national security-- which I'll get to in a moment because it's part of a World War I era display--but it's also a chance in this public venue, right, the Library for women to display their handiwork. And here we have the Gonzales County Fair. I should say that display is not incidental among many canners. It may actually affect the procedures that they employ. One Illinois bacteriologist noted in 1935 that taste, texture, color and arrangement of jarred foods are one thing when it comes to earning social recognition at the county fair, but concern about public health risks should trump other performance agendas, he thought. He railed against housewives and their ill-informed teachers who use unsafe procedures in the name of display. Numerous books, he observed, caution that "temperatures higher than boiling tend to injure the delicate color and texture of most fruits". In an attempt to preserve flavor and yet address growing awareness of microscopic threats, in the early 1900s some canners experimented with sterilization process in which food was heated several times but at temperatures below boiling. And this is also a similar process was actually promoted by the USDA in the teens: the intermittent method as a way to sort of kill off... The idea was that spores might not germinate the first day but if you waited another day then they would germinate and then you could boil them again and kill that, right? In 1932, well, actually in 1913, three students at Stanford died because they ate food using this method. So it does have some risks. ^M00:20:29 Here's another sort of version of canning as a site for display. This is from the 1960s and it's part of a concerted effort to make canning appealing to younger women and what's really interesting in this is that it says, "Can't you just see yourself praised, admired, envied, appreciated?" and it goes through each of these different sort of potential audiences this young woman might have and shows how canning could help her win some social status. Another sort of ideograph or narrative that indexes this idea of abundance, right? So here we're back at this other image. Because it was produced by the Office of War Information during World War II, it's also concerned with abundance and it actually sort of steps out of display conventions that many home canners have when they're not-- this is posed by a photographer, right? So, often these will be arranged according to sort of color and type of food, right? And these are sort of mismatched, but they show the variety of different kinds of foods from potatoes to beets and peas, greens, right? That's available, that can be available to families during wartime. Sometimes I have been overwhelmed by the abundance that I have seen in the FSA and OWI files. This family is actually the Doc and Julia Miller Family near White Plains, Georgia. They have eight kids, four teenagers. There is a lot of variety in the kinds of foods that are in display, but I have to wonder how they got all that food out in the middle of the yard, right? I mean here's sort of another view and all the times when Farm Security Administration photographers were in some ways documenting the results of funds that had been given to families as part of various recovery programs, and I'm afraid that at times it was inconvenient for them to display, but it is an impressive show. Here we see a narrative of self-sufficiency. The idea that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but you might need a little help along the way. So, on this one side, it says "John was not getting the right kind of food, no garden, no cow, no canned stuff for winter. Thousands of farm families are sick because they do not grow their own food." The other side John two years later after his family started the Live at Home farming. "Plenty to eat, the right things to eat. The families have learned to grow their own good health" and script "through Farm Security's Program of Live at Home Farming." Okay and these exact same images were used for another panel that was called "They need our help to help themselves". Okay, so sort of posing a choice that's available to the individual and also to the society. Another thing that you'll see is economic security. Actually if you think about it, canning is a practice that enacts a nation's dominant economic system, right? It is a literal accumulation of capital stored up to enable future productive capacity. Another theme is National Security both in terms of food produced at home and abroad so that [inaudible] food will win the war and write the peace. But also here you see it as a metaphor for geo-political containment, all right, of the Kaiser. And the National Security images seemed to inspire lots of moments of levity, at least given canning's tremendous pun potential. So, here we have women from Summit, New Jersey, dressed in food conservation uniforms ready for a parade to promote Hoover's voluntary Food Conservation Plan, right? There wasn't mandatory rationing in World War I. So there's a parade and they made these signs that say Work or Waste, Can a Can for Uncle Sam. Canner Collapse. Preserve or Perish is another one that's not up here, right? So they've got their placards, they've got their uniforms, they're ready to go. I also found through various youth groups including 4-H and Red Cross groups and food conservation groups who got together and they would have these songs that they sing. So if anyone wants to sing this, it's to the tune of "O'Maryland" or "O Tannenbaum." I will give you this jar of raspberry jam that I made earlier this summer. [Laughter] Any takers? Basically...[inaudible]. So this last part is: [sings] "Our garden truck we here preserve / Our food supply we now conserve / And so democracy we serve / Right here in Thompson Center." ^M00:25:31 [ Applause ] ^M00:25:33 Thank you. And I believe Thompson Center is here close by in Maryland, right? Okay, we also have other puns here. We have Elise Borden and her calf, Beulah, and with help of Elmer the bull in bringing in tomatoes from the garden. Notice that they're using older called "lightning style jars" with the glass lid and wire bail perhaps because of war shortages of metal but also for nostalgic value. And so we see this idea of preserving the American way and encoded in that sort of notion of the American way that you see here, is a division of labor based in gender and there's a strikingly similar New Yorker cover by Helen Hokinson that also illustrates division of labor based in class and race as well. So, canning along with other domestic tasks and skills was also used as a tool of assimilation and/or became a mark of acculturation on American Indian Reservations and in boarding schools especially at the turn of the Century. So this idea of a particular kind of domesticity is also related to canning. And this is a group that's gathered to learn about pressure cookers in Oklahoma. The woman in the middle as far as I can identify her in her 60s is Lydia Humanstriker [phonetic] who was a school teacher and married to a local judge. The four boys in front were 4-H boys who had to gather wood for the fire, but this canning is also sort of a source of pride and connection, right? About how preserving strategies sync with indigenous fruit planting and harvesting traditions. So, this display of I can't tell exactly but I imagine at least some of those are peaches. It would make sense because of the orchards that Diné people had tended for hundreds of years and then we also here's another image by Virginia Stroud that is referring to gathering cactus fruit and berries as has been practiced in many parts of the United States. And then finally here is another form of sort of connection, right? We have a celebrity with common roots. This post on Loretta Lynne's official Facebook page was shared almost 3,000 times and liked by more than 30,000 people in less than 24 hours. And it elicited thousands of really fascinating comments. So that's just a quick rundown of some of the cultural narratives that canning plays a role in that gives a sense of the discursive and ideological context that we're talking about and the context in which canning has or does play a part. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit now because my thinking about context has been simulated in the last few months by the book called "The Mushroom at the End" of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The book's subject is the matsutake mushroom, a much sought after fungus that flourishes in the wake of dissuption. In Oregon, it loves living near the large pole pines that emerge after the ponderosas are gone. In Japan, matsutake thrive in forest soils scrapped clean by peasant foresting. This mushroom's life ways are complex, always a-tuned to and responding to other factors in its immediate environment. Matsutake's [inaudible] is out of step with modern capitalism, which is predicated on the ability to scale up, to expand smoothly in new spaces without having to rethink its framing assumptions. Scalability is achieved, she writes, by minimizing encounter. Monoculture plantations, for instance, become infinitely scalable by first wiping local context clean by clear cutting forests, concreting existing communities and then importing cologne [phonetic] sugar cane sort of a plant life that's oblivious to encounter and coerced labor that's been shorn of social relations that could make a difference, right? This plantation style alienation where parts are infinitely interchangeable and exchangeable in the market can also been seen in fast food franchises, which seem so similar and the workers so dispensable. Blank slate ferments in the food world are another example of an attempt to make production predictable by mitigating context. In this case, makers of cheese, beer or wine produce a consistent product by first removing existing organisms in the base liquid and then re-inoculating it with a pure culture of the bacteria they wish to do its work. ^M00:30:00 So I've been thinking about scalability in relation to the ways that home canning is often coupled narratively to fear and to compliance. If you Google botulism, you get pictures of Mason jars. Botulism is a specter that has haunted home bottling since the early decades of this century. Not long ago when I attended a high-end canning workshop, traveling lecture Marisa McClellan started her demonstration where she always starts by asking "who's afraid of killing your whole family?" [Laughter] She then explains why the food she makes-- jams, jellies and chutneys is no more dangerous than moldy bread. "You can't kill anyone with pickles," she told the crowd, but people are still afraid. And I should acknowledge here that there are real health risks involved in food processing and the deaths from botulism earlier and especially in the bottling of vegetables and meat. U- to-date canning guidelines are important and I encourage you to consult the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia for more specific information about current recommendations. These nationwide guidelines are intended to ensure safety for all, regardless of specific context. In the wake of botulism scares of the 1920s, for instance, government instructors were asked to recommend only pressure canning--just to be safe. So for everything. Instruction books like this Hazel Atlas Manual from 1924 started telling their readers to boil the contents of every bottle of vegetables and meat before consuming it, just to be safe. Context-free practices like these that arguably define modern life and notions of progress also do violence to localized knowledge, which is learned through lifetimes of observation and practice and developed within circumscribed intertwined ecosystems. In the case of home canning, I'm going to focus on two examples of metaphorical clear-cutting in the name of progress. First I'll explore how the idea of invention and discovery raised the complex networks that actually give rise to innovation and in this case erroneously reduce women to passive consumers of technology. The histories of canning that crop-up in everything from food magazines to microbiology textbooks invariably celebrate a single father of canning, Nicolas Appert. You can see he's a hero in France, as well, right? He has his own stamp and this is a park with a statue that's devoted to him. Further, Appert is depicted as a scientist motivated by military concerns and aligns progress with the blank state of a laboratory; a space positioned in contrast to grandma's methods. Second I'll consider clostridium botulinum. The bacteria whose spore produces the botulism toxin--an example of living complexity not unlike the matusake. When that emerges from and, indeed, is created by the ruins of the modern world. Preconceive the complexity of this microbe life makes me weary of blaming traditional knowledge when something breaks down. The efficacy of some local practices--canning corn and tomatoes, for instance, or sealing cooked sausage and lard they are rendered useless or even dangerous by external factors that include changes in population mobility-so people are moving to new places with different altitudes and climates; by changes of environmental conditions, food systems, food technologies ; and even changes in the chemistry of the food itself, but these practices and the people who do them experience another blow and they are then blamed for these failures by being characterized as backwards, sloppy, habit driven or simply ignorant when existing systems break down. And I'm not saying that local practice is inherently harmless. For instance, I would not try to can Vienna Sausages in the dishwasher, which I have heard of people trying to do. [Laughter] So, let me just take you through sort of this story of home canning that is often out there. And I chose this one because it's kind of fun. It's from the brochure that was handed out in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, in the 1950s. And I found it at the National Museum of American History. Here's the story, right? "Home canning was first started by a great soldier and emperor." They were losing men and I'll give 12,000 francs to any Frenchman who finds a simple way to preserve food. So, Appert, you know, drops everything. He starts doing experiments. He has some setbacks like any good inventor does. And then after 15 long years: "You see, if food is sealed from air it will keep for a long time, but different foods need different recooking times." "And made this time chart for all foods? Amazing!" "Finally in 1810..." he receives the prize. And "At the same time in England. 'You're seeing food in metal canisters, Mr. Burant?" (And that should be Durant.) "Yes..., you might say I'm canning food, might'en you?" Canning became widespread by 1850 but no one knew why it worked, but thankfully there was Louis Pasteur and he figures out that the bacteria is the cause, right? And heating kills them if they're in a sealed container. Then we jump to "The Mason jar...invented 96 years ago," right, and some different versions of canning jars and they claim today more food is canned at home in the combined output of all canning factories. I have not been able to verify that claim. In any case, this same history has been repeated in almost every history of canning that you find. In the magazine Lucky Peach, in a film that is distributed for science classes, for instance. And this USDA website that was recently launched does an excellent job bringing together primary resources and documents related to the history of home canning, and I encourage you to check it out. It also depicts very effectively what the dominant history of canning looks like in these stories. Okay, so you have this huge blank before a pear comes on the scene. Then you have this then nothing until John Mason invents the Mason jar in 1858 and then the Ball Corporation comes in. So, this sort of, a pear gets lionized and actually James Collins, who wrote sort of the history that everybody goes back to for the history of the commercial canning industry, he writes that "Nobody had ever preserved fresh vegetables or fruits before. For ages, the world had known only drying, salting and smoking to keep meats, fish and a few fruits from season to season," and he's actually publishing this in a canning trade periodical and asking for other commercial canners to give him feedback so that this will reflect well on the canning industry. So, this sort of story that he tells is very similar to other histories of food preservation generally, right? And it's a very gendered story. So this undated poster--perhaps intended to grace the walls of a mid-Century home ec classroom--tells a heroic narrative in which engineered cold replaces passive heat as a way to arrest for food decay. "Food Preservation from Cave Man to Kitchen" chronicles technological advances that begin with Egyptian slaves drying fish in the sun and ends with an aproned housewife unwrapping steaks pulled from the build-in chest freeze in her modern kitchen. In between our decades of exploration experimentation and conquest. And you can see here this is where, right here, is where the Napoleon a pear story comes in. In most of this pictorial history, women are bystanders to the various forms of physical and intellectual labor involved in making food last except for the final three frames of the chronology. Here they stand alone with refrigerators and freezers apparently enjoying freedom from extra work, but historian Susan Strasser and Ruth Schwartz Cohen have long since dispelled the notion that new household gadgets, fuels and processes actually or automatically make women's lives easier. New technologies have often simply created different work so the full burden of work on a single woman's shoulders or removed compensatory satisfaction such as soon as social interaction or opportunities to display skill and beauty. The images in this poster confirm these losses. These liberated women, for instance, are noticeably divorced from messy, sensory stimuli and human interaction. A more recent source also asserts that men and their inventions improve women's lives but does so a bit more suddenly. This 1975 canning guide explains "Traditionally, man has provided food and woman has preserved it, but traditions change and roles switch. In fact, the canning process for preserving food was discovered by a man..." The next paragraph describes Appert's experiments at the behest of Napoleon. Then it continues: "Appert's discovery made life easier for women who had come to preserve summer harvest for winter nourishment. And so home canning soon became a family tradition with one generation of women passing their special canning secrets along to the next." Like the food preservation poster the Bernardin Manual reduces the idea of liberation to extra leisure time. Appert made life easier for women, but in addition unlike the suffrage era Campbell's Soup ads that Catherine Parkin has analyzed, this 1975 manual coops feminist discourses. It raises the ideas of changing gender roles, increased freedoms and distinctive kinds of knowledge but it does so in order to reassert the authority of men. That is even in regard to women's work men did it first and they did it more rationally. So men discover and women have secrets, right? Even this purported special knowledge is undermined by the next section of the manual which reveals just what those canning secrets are. Continual improvements in canning technologies often rendered the experiential knowledge of women obsolete, and grandma's knowledge was presented as dangerous, even life threatening. So I just want to quickly show some of the predecessors that were out there. There was an Italian Abbot who in 1765 had done some experiments with meat extracts in closed flasks, but he didn't really apply that. So James Collins, who wrote the History of Canning, thought that was sort of a lame. If you can't apply it in the commercial world, right, it doesn't really count as a discovery, but there's also if you look at the manuscript sources you can see that these sort of food preservation processes that don't involve sugar, that involve heating and sealing are happening. ^M00:40:22 This particular one uses an oven. This is from the same cookbook of Mary Mott. This is another recipe for gooseberries. You can see that is quite close to the one that was published in 1703 that we saw earlier. I'm going to compare these on a graph because I don't have time to read all of these, but you can see they appear, and most of these sources are from Great Britain, but there are some that are from the United States especially in the 19th Century. This one the very first page of this book, right, you get a recipe for preserving currants and then there's also one, there's another version right below. Here's one from 1829 and this one has four different recipes for bottling fruit. ^F00:41:09 ^M00:41:18 Okay, and so let me just show you this graph of all of these different recipes based on place, ingredients. You'll notice that hardly any of them use liquid, right? And hardly any of them use sugar until you get into sort of later in the mid-19th Century. Almost all of them there are a couple of that sort of bake things in the oven, but the others are all scalded in water. They're all except for these two are sealed before and they're sealed after with some particular kind of, with resin or pitch or other kinds of things. There's precautions to take them from breakage, right? And also sometimes they're supposed to be for a particular duration. Well, that sort of big takeaway is that all of these, right, that are going on people are sharing with each other they're attributing them to other women, right? Before Thomas Additing in England and Nicolas Appert in France actually get patents on these sorts of processes, okay. So they are, this knowledge is circulating and, in fact, in 1814 there's a review that basically says, oh, you didn't discover this: In behalf of our country we must observe that unless they have forsaken the example and precepts of their ancestors, they must, already be more or less acquainted already with the methods of Mr. Appert," right? So there's this at least then there's a sort of acknowledged that this is a common process that people are building from, but it's been erased in our histories since then. Let me just go over briefly some of the technological shifts that were happening because they explain why the climate is so sort of confusing in terms of processing. Over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries home canning technologies, containers, closures, processing equipment and processing techniques and even raw foods themselves underwent a series of small but ultimately dramatic changes. Here's a small sampling of closure types that people tried at the end of the 19th Century when home bottling as opposed to long-standing salt, sugar, vinegar-based preservation methods became more common. These closures of [inaudible] and wax or liquid lead or air pressure or rubber rings or mechanical pressure from wires or clamps or a combination of all of these just for good measure. And then we have the open kettle method. People are using visual measures in order to sort of figure out what's happening and if they need to re-boil something or there's one example of one of these recipes I showed you said, okay, well, it's good if you can keep it on the shelf because then you can watch to see if it starts bubbling and when it starts bubbling, you should take it off and do something else, right? So people are really using sensory information to evaluate what's happening and the problem with botulism is that it is not detectable in the ways that people have been trained to detect and manage spoilage, right? So, it's odorless and it's tasteless and so that presents all sorts of difficulties. What I found interesting is that rather than being presented as sort of ignorant or unaware of what was going on, when you look at the transcripts of people who had been canning for lifetimes, they'll often express that they are very aware of the kinds of things that are recommended, right, and they talk about the ways that their own families have kind of mediated or managed those kinds of things. So she's giving here specific information about how long she's processing it and things like that. I wanted to just close today by talking about some of our own contexts that are changing, right? So botulism is interesting and that context always matters. It matters through what your altitude is, it matters how much fat is in your process. It matters what kinds of sort of temperature or humidity that you're working with. And so and all of these things can sort of combine or intertwine. Even now contexts are changing in these. So there is a FreshTECH Homemade Automatic home canning system that has been initiated, right? It capitalizes on the social value of sharing homemade food and pitches itself as a solution for busy household perhaps for working moms. In any case, they say it's as easy as 1, 2, 3. Literally you pick 1 out of 28 jam, jelly, pickle, tomato sauce or salsa recipes, prepare 6 half pint or 3 quart jars, load the jars, push the button that corresponds to your recipe and walk away. As the online description declares, this machine and it's 70-built in safety features take "the guess work" out of canning. And there's a whole sort of literature I could talk to you about, the ways that women's knowledge has been, sort of, it has literally been described as "guess work," right? This kind of experimentation, sensory investment in what's going on. Trial and error tends to be dismissed as guess work. And with this latest, this latest invention of Ball there are canners that are pushing back against the latest against the latest tool's remove of guess work, right? Comments on the website make it clear that most viewers dislike the confines of this automated system. Wanting the freedom to experiment with recipes to can all types of foods and to further develop their own skills. And some have pointed out that the canner works on the logic of fear suggesting that they will finally be able to can a safe product. By playing on the risk of danger and the allure of dependency that have characterized much discourse on domestic technology in the last century, Ball can sell a product that is essentially an electric water bath--but not everyone is buying. Contexts keep changing and so will canning just...Not that long ago Ball revealed that because it's changed the composition of the sealing compound boiling lids is no longer necessary and is, in fact, detrimental, which caused a big outcry because it's the one thing that's changed in the last 7 years in terms of canning, right? So people got concerned. And so what I hope that you'll be thinking about today is a story about how modernity, with spatial mobility and its rapid changes to work processes and technological systems, emphasis on receive knowledge, can undercut knowledge based in place, personal experience and sensory perception. The women and the materials I have encountered are not, by in large, sloppy, careless or unintelligent. Instead they are working with a complicated set of variables that feel the ripples of seemingly smaller unconnected actions. Like the matsutake ecosystem. It's also a story of how any invention is really a network of skills and gestures, but by consolidating things in the figure of a pear, a concrete person with a particular method, right? We can identify a point of before and after. Time moves forward then as [inaudible] says marked by progress. In reality, life is a messy overlap of technologies, materials and environmental context. Each of us work within these systems but because canning in systems is so enmeshed in the physical world, because in fact, death is on the line, these interconnections become a bit more visible. Perhaps it can help us think more clearly about the roles or everyday material worlds play an acquiring, articulating, validating, endorsing and affirming expert status. Thank you. ^M00:49:23 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:32 I'll be happy to take any questions that anyone has. >> Male audience member: Could you maybe summarize some of the mechanisms for the shift from, I think you call it grandma's knowledge to this more industrial or scientific language of canning? I know you touched on them, but what are some of the mechanisms or causal factors that drove that shift. It wasn't just that a pear showed up. >> Danille Christensen: Right, right. Well, part of it I mean it leads to, it links to the rise of... so when sort of the laboratory and science is valorized as the site of authentic knowledge-- and I could show you pictures of these men sitting around on the jam boards and they're like evaluating the jam. Then domestic science starts moving from spaces that seemed less. So a laboratory is a space in which you're able to isolate particular variable, right? It's the sort of blank slate in a sense and things start to make sense because you're only looking at one particular thing and you're bracketing everything else out, right? And so even in terms of, sort of, uniforms that people start wearing in domestic science classes, the ways that domestic labs are sort of set up as these sterile environments, right? In some ways it's a way to try to adopt the power of scientific discourse for themselves. It happens through schools, it happens through club work where kids are being taught, you know, the scientific method. I think there's a picture I have: So this is a jam board, right, of the USDA chemistry guys. These are women who are using sort of doing community canning with a large steam cooker, right, or boiling water bath alongside the creek. And here's another example of sort of a canning class, a demonstration that's taking place outside on the playground. Those are very different from the laboratory but you also have these more rationalized spaces, these community canning spaces and here is a good example of a canning club girl who is part of a tomato canning club in which the girls in the 19 teens would do these experiments, right? So she is doing, she is blocking out that one variable of what kind of fertilizer you're using and they would write reports, they earned their own money, they were proud of being involved in the scientific process. So this is another mechanism in which that kind of happens. Then on the flip side you've got popular magazines and things that are downplaying grandma's knowledge as there's a really great, let's see.... There's lots of displays of people with pressure cookers or pressure canners to show that they know the right and safe way to do it, right? Here's some instructions. But then you've got like these images of grandma in which anybody like these processes are so simple that anybody can operate it. There's actually, this is an interesting source that I found. I started out, I got to it from Prints and Photographs, but it basically says, you know, "It's amazing how people can't read. A cup of granulated sugar means a cup of anything sweet..." shows she's saying that long-time practices of substitution and flexibility, right, are no good. And "A good recipe is important, too. Those wonderful old recipes handed down from grandma work for your mother but only 'cause she'd... experimented with them many times." There "were probably frequent failures blamed on the bad weather or other insignificant factors. It's much better to reply on modern guides. Most of them have been tested more times than you'd care to count. " So the logic here is really screwy because it says like your grandma's recipes worked because they've been tried a lot of times, but you should really try these other recipes that have been tried a lot of times by different people, right? Like the scientists versus your grandma and the scientists win so. Any other questions? Yeah? ^M00:54:02 >>Male audience member: At some time you showed us a timeline, I think from a website at the University of [ Inaudible ] where you noted at the beginning there's not much happening, but I was wondering how does this relate to the history canning on an industrial scale? ^M00:54:17 >> Danille Christensen: I'm sorry. Can you repeat the last part? ^M00:54:18 >>Male audience member: How does that relate to the history of canning on an industrial scale? ^M00:54:22 >> Danille Christensen: An industrial scale. The commercial canners trace themselves back to Appert and to Peter Durand [phonetic] in England who basically-- one scholar argues that Durand took Appert's patent and just wrote it in English and also added other stuff just for good measure and sent it in and then it was actually bought by another company, who actually like who started canning in tin using that patent. >> Male audience member: Did it take off quickly after discovery? >> Danille Christensen: Commercial canning, yes. Uh-huh. Yep. So in the United States by... by at least 1825 there were commercial canneries operating in the United States. Often the early ones canned fish or other kinds of goods like that. >>Stephen Winick: So you showed some examples of canning recipes from the 17th Century. I wonder how far back we can trace the idea of heat sterilizing, heat canning, they didn't know they were sterilizing it, but I know there are medieval cookbooks, but I don't -- >> Danille Christensen: -- I would be interested to know. I haven't looked at any. These are the earliest manuscripts, manuscript books that I found in Rare Books, but I would love to know. I'm sure it goes back much farther, right? Yeah. >>Betsy Peterson: So when is your book coming out? >> Danille Christensen: The manuscript is due in March of this next year. So probably it'll be a year and a half or so-- I'm hoping. [Laughter] >> Female audience member: Thank you so much. I really wish I could sing because I really want that jar. [Laughter] >> Danille Christensen: It would have been better than my singing I'm sure. >> Female audience member: No, really I can't. It's really an extension of the slide you have up here-- this tension between male expertise and so at the perception of female incompetence. It reminds me of practices around childbirth when midwives were saying women should give birth on their fronts and men are saying, no, no, women should give birth on their backs. [inaudible]. So specifically what are the specific criticisms? Like is it women don't follow receipts, or...? What is the incompetence? >> Danille Christensen: I think really that flexibility and variation is a big one, especially when it comes to things like canning because one thing that Appert did do that was innovative is that-- and also a bit hubris in my own mind-- is that he decided that, I mean he figured out how to can every single thing that you could ever thing of doing, right? He figured out how much time you would need to and so for some vegetables and meats it was like 4 or 5 hours of boiling before you could, before you had pressure canners that you could raise the temperature to 240 or 250 degrees. And so Appert, he decides that he wants to can every single thing whereas in most people's practice, right, they have this multiplicity of techniques that meets their goals and their needs for like the performance of the product, right? So, frozen corn tastes better and lasts better than canned corn, right? Or dried apples are better for fried pies because they don't have as much moisture and they don't get soggy, right? So people like women in real life are sort of choosing all these things, but Appert has rationalized the process so much that it's like this idea of the plantation alienation in some ways, right? He just likes we're going to apply this to the, we're going to scale it up to every single thing regardless of how good it tastes or whatever, right? Could you remind me of the initial question because I think I've gotten off a little bit? >> Female audience member: No, no, it's a great job. Just where is the perception of the incompetence? >> Danille Christensen: Oh, right. So, multiplicity, flexibility also there's interesting, so part of that flexibility is flexibility in the kinds of technology that you're using. And so there's in 1935 the same sort of grumpy bacteriologist who is mad about other things that women are doing says, you know, some people can in wash tubs, which is I can't imagine how you get a sanitary product from a wash tub except that it's all like boiling, right? I mean and so this idea of whereas a lot of canning literature from earlier in the century is encouraging like you can do this, everybody can do this, this is accessible to you. All you need is some sort of pan, something to put in the bottom of it to keep your bottles off the metal, right? And you're ready to go. So I think just the open-endedness of it all, right? It doesn't fit within that paradigm of control. >>Male audience member: Explain to me the tension between like the rationalization process and the folk practices of women. I wonder if you could kind of help graph that out for me or explain the tension between domestic and whether they kind of followed along the same kind of graph. Because when I think of canning I think of the opposite of consumption, right, you know? Instead of consuming one is preserving, when one should be consuming. I think that's probably why it's so popular now. >> Danille Christensen: Because its production, yeah. >> Male audience member: Resistance to consumption. I wonder if you can kind of help me graph those things together or whether that -- >> Danille Christensen: -- so you mean how has commercial canning and home canning in dialogue with each other? >> Male audience member: Yeah or whether there is, whether that same kind of tension between, you know, rationalized processes versus domestic processes also at work in sort of commercial processes versus domestic processes? You know what I'm saying? Or maybe not? >> Danille Christensen: You mean where sort of domestic processes is less rationalized relatively speaking than? >>Male audience memebr Yes. >> Danille Christensen: Yeah, I mean it definitely happened on smaller scales. Although there are some people who are doing lots of quantity canning. The--one of the reasons that people thought Appert was so revolutionary actually is that he devised a plan for scaling up like this is, this is how I did it and this is how we can build a bigger apparatus and do it so that we can sell it, right? So that's one of the things that happened. I would say that domestic sciences and also sort of the threat of botulism has sort of taken a lot of the flexibility out of home canning procedures now, right? Because when people move to different areas of the country they're using maybe food stuff that are not as, you know, tomatoes aren't as acidic as they used to be or there are lots of sort of variables that happen now that require this sort of blanket everybody do the same thing so that everybody is covered and we're not going to have any leeway because there's so many variables now that have changed that people can't necessarily rely on traditional methods anymore. So I don't know if I answered your question but. >> Yeah. >> Nancy Groce: One more question. >> Danille Christensen: Yeah. Go ahead. >> Female audience member: Thank you so much. I didn't get to the beginning of your presentation. I'm wondering if you have covered the practices in Eastern Europe? >> Danille Christensen: I'm focusing on the United States in context, yeah, but I would be curious to know I know that Eastern Europe has traditionally had a lot of pickling. And I would be interested to know if there is a strong non-sugar, non-salt, non-vinegar based practice as well. ^M01:03:04 >>Female audience member: Yeah, and I have a couple of comments ... [ Inaudible ] You were talking about botulism and doing things in ...[ Inaudible ] to justify ...[ Inaudible ] started doing it less because of the fear of botulism. Have you [ Inaudible ] to the economic situation, to lack of social......[ Inaudible ] ^M01:03:50 >>Danille Christensen: Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people don't know that the things that people process at home most of the time nowadays-- jams, jellies, pickles, those, --botulism is not really an issue because you've got those added preservatives already built in, right? By definitely in that sort of 80s and 90s the canning, the canning industry people were really like aware of all of these sort of social factors that were also affecting those practice and yet I think it's easy for people to say," oh, I'm afraid of doing that because I don't want to do it wrong." It's an easy out for not having to sort of being involved in the practice especially if other people think you should be doing it, right? >> Nancy Groce: I want to thank you so much. I want to thank Danille Christensen for coming and you all for coming and for a great talk. Thank you. ^M01:04:40 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:42 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^M01:04:53