Home canning is making a comeback

What do you get when you mix rising food prices with a little apocalyptic dread? Pickled veggies, apparently.

Per Vox, canned food — like its starchy sister sourdough — rose in popularity in 2020 when covid lockdowns kept people at home and bored out of their minds:

• Google searches for “canning” soared
• Sales of the All-American Pressure Cooker, a canning tool, were off the charts
• Newell Brands, the company behind Ball jars, saw sales triple between April and June 2020
• Sales of the cookbook So Easy to Preserve rose 175%

But canning isn’t new

The practice of preserving food dates back to ancient times, but modern-day canning took off in 1897 with the debut of Campbell’s tomato soup (a cultural icon itself).

Home canning caught on in the early 20th century after the invention of screw-on lids allowed amateur cooks to preserve their own food in glass jars.

Canning had a rebirth in the 1970s with the DIY movement, and again in 2008 amid the Great Recession.

What is new is social media’s adoption of the hobby:

• Canning content creators @gracewalkfarm and @fiveacrefarm have hundreds of thousands of followers across Instagram and TikTok
• The hashtag #canning has 640m+ views on TikTok
• Black Girls Can and Black Folks Love “Canning” Too offer Facebook communities to Black home cooks and preservers

So, it might be time to inflation-proof your pantry and preserve some food. You can do it.