Preserving old ideas

THERE’S a game I like to play when I’m presenting recipes with a crowd.

I call it “Good Food, Bad Food” and the idea is really pretty simple.

I show the audience an ingredient, whether it’s a fresh piece of produce, something preserved or even a processed item, and get them to start thinking about its relative merits.

The results are almost always surprising, and vary enormously depending on the demographics of those who are attending.

One rule of thumb that emerges time and time again is that the more free disposable income a group of people have, the less likely they are to regard convenience foods as healthy, regardless of whether they routinely use them or not.

For example, bottled tomato passata will be called out as less healthy than fresh tomatoes, frozen peas as inferior to those in the greengrocer, and dried foods are commonly viewed with derision as a poor choice for those with more means.

Yet the facts belie all these conclusions.

Since before the birth of agriculture, a key ambition of any group of humans has been the search for means by which their sources of foods might be maintained and preserved in order to even out the variances between periods of plenty and those of famine.

Over the centuries, salting, drying, pickling, fermenting, chilling and freezing were techniques used to achieve this end.

But no technique is more effective and nutritious than canning, that world-changing invention of the 19th century that continues to feed our ever-growing population.