Can Do

B y KATHARINE WHITEHORN

THE art of canning has its 150th birthday this year, and the celebrations that will attend the anniversary were given a cautious send-off in a room above .Charing Cross last week. Later in the year there will be exhibitions, con- ferences, a symposium and a banquet; attempts are being made to find descendants of the inventor, and if they are

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eventually tracked down they it ill 00 doubt be feted till their eyes bubble. In he Meantime, we had the Minister of Agricul-

tIre, and the usual gentlemanly jam of dark suits

d martinis. The Minister delivered a witty little eech of which we were given a copy afterwards; , ly heard him aright, he departed from his brief to confuse the man who discovered the Frenchman named Appert—:with the glish patenter of the can itself, one Peter it 'rand, of Shoreditch. 4 hil"'eVer, the evidence was all there for those ie ° wanted it. The-room was bounded by display iltilqraPhs, charts, pictures:' ones would turn ,lointt IRO to find oneself staring into the 1' 'IrriY whiskers of the inventor himself, or at a•:r'�ani Picture of canneries iff.action. There was a placard saying 'Carrots in Morocco! in Australia! Pilchards in Bechuanaland!' :Planation was offered as to-why one should t° go all the way. to. Bechuanaland and still Pilchards. Oddly enough, there was no men- ;)ititr The part the can played in the opening-up e Wild West. though except for the original erintliersmen the westerners were greatly depen- wri„c) arls. The pioneers had them, and the et t-t,'s of large cattle herds tried very hard to

th cowboys to eat their meat out of a can etter off the hoof. But there were several

eroir.es Of expeditions' which had taken tins with neand reverently resting in a glass case was DatWthich was taken to the Arctic in 1823 (and paled in 18281--the oldest living can. Near- Tiniev Review of Industry was describing e (1;thiraito, the opening of this tin a month I;o; her 4110. the Guardian was ,capping it with a ht lar story about the opening in 1948 Allve°11111 of a Renaissance Pope. h the Out Who remembered the abominable plot ver,o l'ildOg1, Drummond series to overthrow etwo llents With the aid of bombs contained m is r'lls Fruit Tins could have had their worst ililoirealised by .listening to .1$ man. from one 4r they Works describing how in the First World uolleY had packed a map and a forage cap in a8r a can of tongue and helped a prisoner ar tkt° escape; and how in the Second World otj 4'nis Was total war--they had -left out the otips!9gether and packed TNT for resistance al instead. • e e gures on canning are certainly impressive. °to 'r duce a million tons of tinned food a "s come off the production line at 300 a

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minute; ' cans are the largest single user of the world's steel; we spend £25 million a year on tinned pet food (I wonder how this compares with the amount sent to famine relief?); there were 100 million cans of beer sold last year, and we eat twice our weight in tins every two years.

The British tendency to live out of tins—so deplored by the French, so exceeded by the Americans—exists at all levels. It was Fortnum and Mason's. after all; who welcomed the young Mr. Heinz from America in 1886, and plenty of their tinned delicacies are OK eating even at Top tables--if only because the word Fortnum's overshadows the word tin. But snobbery about canned food is- a funny thing. Bottling involves exactly the same principle as factory canning, but a row of tins suggests a slattern, a row of bottles ti provident housewife. And then there is that cartoon which crops up so regularly: a wife being embarrassed by her husband showing, to an admiring visitor, the tin the dinner came from. But actually the idea is standing on its-head : it is not nearly such poor lifemanship to disguise tinned food as fresh, as to be the one who can't tell the' difference between them.

There are plenty of food writers who oppose cans absolutely, even for tying on to the tails of cats: and they will no doubt be saving so loud and often in the course of the World Can Year. The trouble is that this encourages in us such a, state of guilt about it all that we tend either to go in for real cooking or just open a tin. Which is a- pity: tinned food is most like its fresh equivalent when most involved in lengthy cooking, (like

tinned tomatoes in a casserole), at its. worst when

simply offered on its own (like tinned string beans). One of the posters at the show claimed that tins were proof against beetles. inice:-moth; rust

and what not—and also against bad' choking. Which ain't necessarily so; but it 'is

Lion of how the cooking is done irr-ilte"faCiory that the future of the can probably lies. Thre arc, after all, only four ways of stopping food

going bad: to can it, freeze it, dry it or eat it. Drying has had its day, packet soups notwith- standing; eating food direct from the farm be- comes harder and harder as the transaction gets slower and slower in the . hands of.- big

combines and marketing boards.-Canning is cele- brating its peak: but it may decline as -the -new Ice Age of the deep freeze overfakeS us. So far, the industry mostly concentrates on. More and

more complicated recipes for canning, though it has possibly gone about as far as it can go. (A

month or two ago 1 went to a press „show to launch some 'pre-cooked meals,' among them a mixed grill in a tin. This seemed an impossibility and nothing they gave us to eat prcived'orherwise -----in fact the whole proceedings were rather fbr lorn; the makers had been reduced to dIspitiyibg all their other- products as well incruding a

deodorant for budgerigars.) .

It would he interesting to see what, could be done in the opposite direction--simpler canned

foods, made with nothing .addeth-,,no,lialt, no sugar, no colouring, nothing. Nit .possibly the success of unsweetened •orange-juice.tilight courage the canning firms to give it 'it try: Canned food might then achieve the status of a raw material, and the word 'can' loseits.as.s.xiation