Can I eat?

Real chili?

Kristie soaked dried pinto beans and made a delicious pot of home made chili in the crock pot. Upon seeing dinner simmering away,our youngest daughter said, "Mom, I want the REAL chili, the kind in the can." We pointed out that the homemade chili was the REAL kind. She still wanted the chili that comes in the can. What has happened to us when our expectation is that food comes from a can? How did we get here?

Preserving the harvest has been a concern and a goal since there were harvests. How do you keep food available year 'round when most of it only grows for a short season starting in late spring and going until early fall? Drying food has been around since beyond memory. Beef jerky, dried peppers, dried beans...Hey wait a minute, that's starting to sound like the ingredients for our dinner!

Canning food, however, is relatively young. It dates back to the early 19th century when Napoleon's quest to feed his armies led him to offer a reward to anyone who could find a better way to preserve food. Frenchman Nicolas Appert took up the challenge. He found that food could be preserved against spoilage by first sealing it in an airtight glass jar, and then heating it. Appert set up his own factory to produce and distribute his preserved foods. The French government gave him an award of 12,000 Francs. Although Appert's method clearly worked, nobody knew exactly why at the time. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that it was found that bacteria were the cause of food spoilage, and that these were destroyed by heating.

Formerly the domain of the wealthy, food in cans is now enjoyed by all--except perhaps the wealthy. Food in cans has become cheap and easy. And since World War II, eating food out of metal cans has become ubiquitous. But by adding the layer of processing to our food, we have become that much more distant from the food itself. Our little girl thinks chili comes from a can. If you ask her what chili is made of, she'll tell you "chili," as if that is an ingredient.

     "Where does chili come from," we query.
     "The store."
     "Where to the ingredients in chili come from?"
     "I don't know. May I open another can of chili?"

Economics: Feeding our family of seven a pot of chili for dinner costs $13.65 ($1.95 per can times 7 cans). Starting with dried beans and adding spices and fresh ingredients to make our own chili runs less than $8.00 . Money wise, it's a no-brainer. In fact, this meal is a microcosm of our whole food/economy project. If we can reduce the bill for this one meal by 40 percent, and extend this throughout everything we do, we'll just about hit our goal.

The genuine article

The home made chili tastes great, and the fresh ingredients (and lack of preservatives) have got to be much better for us than chili that's been sitting in a can on a shelf for who knows how long. But the real cost of canned food may well be in the disconnect from food's origins to what we eat each day. As we work to get back to basics in our diet--removing the processing plant as middleman and using fresh whole foods to create our own meals--perhaps we will discover that real food and real economy are in fact the same thing.