Are frozen foods the key to combating food waste and getting the most out of the fruits and veggies we purchase? A noted food professor says its a no-brainer. And more folks need to be mindful of her recent findings…
Napoleon commissioned creation of the first mass-produced
canned foods to provision his armies in the field.
Stacey Snelling (left) is a professor in the Department of Health Studies at American University. And she says there’s a simple solution to at least one dimension of the over-whelming food waste problem that plagues the Western World’s already stressed food chains…
A stigma…
One issue with getting more frozen food into the West-ern diet limelight is that, in the eyes of many, there’s a serious stigma attached.
Nothing like that which sticks to canned foods. But the concept of ‘frozen food’ remains plagued by abiding misinformation and myths that have stalked our deep-freezers since this mode of food storage became popular for home deployment in the 1960s.
Not fair at all
Comparing frozen food and canned food is not a fair proposition at all, Snelling notes.
Canned food – which has been around since Napoleon Bonaparte first commissioned its creation 200 years ago – was king for a long time after it was perfected.
But the problem of opening the cans safely was one sticking point. The issue of lead leaching into the food from soldered metal joints was another. And there was no really efficient way to conduct the process until the industrial revolution, in the mid 19th century.
In addition, even after the process of pasteurization came into common use, killing germs inside the sealed cans, there were issues with the wholesomeness and shelf life of canned goods.
Not perfect, but…
One such point was that, because the foods to be canned were heated to high temperatures for ex-tended periods of time to sterilize them, they lost significant amounts of their nutritional value, flavour and colour. And over time, it became common to add what we now consider excess salt to canned foods to ensure their safety and preserve at least some of their palateability.
Nevertheless, canned foods remained the go-to for folks who couldn’t grow their own fresh food, and home-preserve them for use use in the off season, until after the Second World War.
My take
The foregoing has really been the first half of a two-part saga that spans a huge swathe of Modern History: The rise of Canned Food. Tomorrow, Part II: The segue from Canned Food to Deep-Frozen. Which might be characterized as the perfection of long-term fresh-food storage.
The prevailing ‘cooler heads’ appear to agree, it’s the way we should all be considering going, to help optimize (such as we can) the sustainability of world food production. And minimize the impact of climate change through controlling food waste.
~ Maggie J.