What changed with canning?

Ziptie, I did a quick search on home canning botulism deaths - and, admittedly, I'm not the best at searching the net - but couldn't find anything newer than 1977 until 2007. A thirty year period of nada on home canning botulism poisoning. The illnesses and 2 deaths from botulism that happened in 2007 were from a commercial cannery. Can that be right?

What I did find on my quick search was allllllllllllll kinds of stuff from the CDC about being careful and other folks chiming in about botulism this and that.

I was raised on home canned stuff. Both pressure and water bath canned (don't remember any oven canning going on) and paraffin seals on jams and jellies. I do a lot of canning and do take all the normal precautions so I'm not worried about poisoning my family.

Also, why is it that many people hear the words "home canning" and assume it's unsafe? I've heard lots of comments like: "You canned that? Aren't you afraid of poisoning your family? I could never use a canner - it's too complicated. Aren't you afraid the pressure canner will blow up?" etc. Maybe they've read the CDC stuff on the net!

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maybe the things that cause the food to spoil have mutated over the years so that they are harder to kill now???

I guess that is also a part of what I was wondering kentuckyhippie. It is known that tomato's have changed. What else has changed? Is the meat so bad these days oven canning is dangerous or all the stuff they add to the meat changes things?

The National Center for Home Food Preservation has worked very hard to scare us to death about the dangers of home canning myself included.

Here is another example lemon curd..we're told that we can never ever ever can anything that contains eggs and dairy...well it contains both.

Pie filling..no longer can contain flour or cornstarch..but there is this new product that works. I guess I would like to see some of the data myself.

As I stated before I am a good little minion and follow most all the rule and regs when it comes to canning.

Something many folks, especially those interested in returning to simpler lifestyle thinking often overlook are evolutionary factors.

In Louis Pasteur's time many known deadly organisms were found susceptible to heating to boiling or near boiling temperatures. hence the evolution of the process of pasteurization.

During the same time that pasteurization proved an effective action, nature continued to evolve various organisms that became immune to the processes.

In answer scientists who followed in Pasteur's footsteps developed new techniques medications, insecticides, herbicides, etc. to combat naturally evolved resistances of the various evolved organisms.

Unfortunately during the same evolutionary resistance developments, over use or underuse (in the case of antibiotics) by the majority of humanity assisted the organisms science was combating to become more resilient and mutate to stronger health risks.

Safe food processing, science improved health maintenance, science improved chemical treatment of crops, human tendencies to overuse / underuse evolved technique and natures ability to evolve all combine to fix or cause troubles in an equation that is not only as a double edged sword, but as a barrage of hundreds of double edged swords with two points and no hilt (okay maybe a barrage of ninja stars would be a better comparison ) continually being thrown at Mankind.

Despite our knowledge and intelligence, Nature still treats us as any other infection it views as a risk to its existence.

In Pasteur's day boiling was adequate to combat most infections. In a few centuries who knows what sort of evolved organisms will exist, what will be needed to combat them or even if our descendants will exist or resemble what we are now.

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I heat my jars to 250 degrees in the oven to sterilize 'em...Have for years. I also bleach 'em before I wash 'em after they've been in storage. I water bathed green beans and corn, you can still come across the old timetables in old bulletins.
Some folks around here used to get their stuff ready and put the jars in the baccer barn...especially tomatoes.
i finally bought a pressure canner for meat and other stuff....even my green beans....mainly because of 30 minutes at 10 lbs instead of 1 and a half hours of boiling......saves on time, power too!

Nothing has changed.

Poor canning practices like people doing oven-canning like their grandparents did are the reason I do just like my grandmother did when someone brought her home-canned goods: Thank them profusely for the gift, then promptly put the contents of the jar straight into the compost heap the instant they leave.

Botulism was a rare but serious problem back then, too.

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Nothing really has changed. There have always been well-meaning people who have tried other things than the Ball Blue Book. Like using mayo jars, like reusing can lids, etc.. I have never heard of oven canning, but I have heard of dishwasher canning....

When we finally got an electric range, Mom bought a pressure canner AND a Ball Blue Book(it was free, then). she followed it like she followed the Bible. Grandma had taught her water bath canning on the three burner kerosene stove on the back porch, but even then, Grandma got an electric stove and a pressure canner---and a Ball Blue Book. http://www.freshpreservingstore.com/...D=FPPTPD1PRDTL

Now, the USDA offers this: http://www.cdc.gov/features/homecanning/

Check out the link, The complete USDA Guide to Home Canning, down at the bottom...

Personally, I wouldn't want to eat food canned in any other way.

geo

PART ANSWER: Pressure cookers have become more common. They can operate at a lower pressure, and hence lower temperature, than pressure canners. They are also generally smaller than canners, and hence will cool down quicker. If a pressure cooker is used for canning , food may not heat enough, or may cool down too quickly, to attain and maintain the necessary temperature for sterilisation.

PART ANSWER: It's been a long time since home pressure canning was started.
There's a lot more people doing a lot more canning of a lot more things and types of things grown in a lot more places, than when it started. Wider variety of raw materials, more of them less acid, less acceptance of acid taste (i.e. vinegar) in the sauce/canning liquid, wider use of thick sauces which distribute heat less rapidly and evenly rather than thin liquids or dry pack, less acceptance of mushy texture from overcooking and desire for discrete pieces (lower cooking time, less penetration of high heat to piece centre), lot more of a wider variety grown at high altitudes (where water boils at lower temps, so MUCH longer time is needed to sterilise things).

PART ANSWER: People are in more of a hurry. They are more likely to use a quick-release method of letting the pressure and temperature off and cooling stuff down, so the contents aren't sterilised as long or as much. Earlier canners often didn't even have a "quick-release".
There's even the fact that they believe pressure cooking is safe. Before, people would believe they had (and in fact did have) a potential bomb sitting on their stove. They were QUITE willing to leave it sit there to do its own thing in its own time, MORE than willing to leave it in peace because they could imagine it in pieces if they joggled its metaphorical elbow to let off pressure early.

PART ANSWER: Today, lots of people try to keep things longer. It used to be a major triumph to can enough of a small variety of things in late autumn to still have them in late spring. We were happy if we had jam or jelly for a sweet three days a week, and a raisin or plum pudding, a peach cobbler or applie pie on holy days. Quite often the things in the clamps, cairns and caches, the root cellar or the kraut crocks, the bags of grain and meal and dried fruit and vegetables, jars of pickled eggs and bucket of eggs in water glass or sawdust or lime, the brine barrels or the smoke house, the pumpkins and squash in the hay mow, the large stock in the fields and the wood lots, the small stock in the barns and the poultry house, the wildlife out in the hedgerows and on the traplines, would last longer than the stuff in the pantry. At the same time, we've got pickier about some tastes, so we're discarding some things and some methods altogether. No more turnips and swedes, potatoes and parsnips, kohl rabi, rutabagas and beets, rye and oats groats, home-brewed beer and country wines and vinegar. No more cheeks and tongues, liver and kidneys, hearts and tripe, head-cheese, scrapple and brawn, salami and sausage. Now we're trying or expecting to get years out of canning rather than seasons; we're trying to make one-size fit all food presentation and preservation needs, and we want it bland bland BLAND, when before we had multiple means that we just aren't using today.

PART ANSWER: We are less used to bad things. Before, our systems would be frequently exposed to and challenged by more-or-less sub-clinical infections, and our immune system was tuned-up and raring to go. Nowadays, not so much. We probably do better overall, but that's because we don't suffer at all most of the time. When we do get hit, it hits us HARD, and we get disabled. We certainly used to suffer from the Kansas quickstep or Montzuma's revenge, but we dealt with it. Change the small-clothes often, have a wad of Sear's catalog in your pocket and another between your cheeks, when you get taken short drop drawers and squat in a hurry. Nowadays we don't seem to be able to cope as well.

PART ANSWER: Like Shrek said above. We've challenged the bacteria and their spores, and they've adapted to meet the challenge. We've been doing it for a LONG time. Commercial canning of salmon gave rise to the term salmonella, and it was started 150 years ago. Heck, servant's remuneration was negotiated with how many meals a week weren't canned salmon, because it was so plentiful, cheap and easy. Bacteria can tear through around 500-1,000 generations in a day. If 1 in a thousand can survive 240°F, and we expose each generation to that, then in a day or so you've got about 999.99999999999999999 in a 1,000 surviving. It's not that bad, because resistance has a cost, the more the more, so there's evolutionary pressure away from super-high resistance as well. However, like Christmas, it's coming - and how many of you can resist Santa? It may only be a recessive gene, with a cost so high you only see it when it''s needed, but we've ensured it's so common that it will get doubly expressed through most of a population in just a few generations when it's needed.

PART ANSWER: People are economising, with an emphasis on the miser. Sometimes it's false economy. They re-use containers and lids that were never meant for home pressure canning, they use cheap or old, damaged containers; they buy lids that have thin and irregular seals. You should buy quality goods and check them well.

No!!!

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Here's the 2012 data on botulism from the CDC, it's hard to find as it's under categorized under survellience. You can see all the prior years there.

http://www.cdc.gov/nationalsurveilla..._CSTE_2012.pdf

No, not many cases of botulism from food, but still not worth risking. If you don't die you can be horribly disabled from it.

As for the boiling for 10 minutes, the latest USDA canning guidelines say you don't need to if you properly canned the product. That to me is worthwhile as who wants to boil their green beans for another 10 minutes and make them super mushy? Or boil the chicken they are going to make in to chicken salad.

This is a lot of it, someone from the Government telling everyone it is good to go. Can't do that without there being very little risk, even though they still say there is a possibility.

We still juice fruit in the steamer, run it directly into the hot jar, seal and done. We pressure can the tomato juice. We reuse non "canning" jars, they are older now because we buy very little, what we do does not come in glass anymore and we can in pints mostly now. I wouldn't tell anyone else to but it works for us....James

What I told dgs who looked at me, tinged with horror, when I first opened a jar of home canned fruit, you can eat food prepared by hands that love you or you can eat food that was prepared in a factory. A factory where many of the workers hate their jobs and may not wash their hands. He loves my canned fruit.
If I go to the trouble of canning, I want it healthy. Don't want to boil it for ten minutes to make it ingestable, not edible by then, bleah! Some of the guidelines I question, like having a bit of milk in soup, etc I will research and decide. As for mayo jars, that's about all I had when I started, now mayo comes in yucky plastic. I can't say as I belive everything for guidelines as they change and w/o some proof, hmmm maybe there's doubt.
Searching for the studies on squash might be tough..I have an older canning book with directions for canning summer squash. Not sure why it would be worse than canning meat which is very dense.
I hold my maple syrup jars, empty and full, in an oven. Helps to keep the temp at 185.

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