A Community Canning Renaissance

By Kimberley Fehr • photos by Tiffany Brown Cooper

Two months after Amy Steeves, 31, moved into her new house near Commercial Drive, she had a beautiful dream. “Our driveway was filled with kids playing, live music, this amazing community,” she recalls. “There were jars everywhere and mountains of tomatoes and long tables in the driveway with colourful tablecloths. Around them were clusters of people stirring pots, canning the tomatoes.”

 

The dream became her inspiration to form the Jamboree Canning Co-op, which will meet four times this summer for canning festivities. First they’ll do berries and pickles, then tomato sauce and stewed tomatoes, roasted vegetables and applesauce, and if the timing works out, fruit from members’ trees.

A $300 grant from Vancouver Foundation’s Neighbourhood Small Grants Program helped with the costs. Half went to buy a pressure-canner; the rest for supplies like pots, burners, propane, jar lifters, and fruits and vegetables. The funding also helps keep membership fees down, so low-income families can participate. “I was baffled that there are organizations out there who give funding to make community projects like this possible,” says Steeves. “A really important feature of a society is how much of its population knows about food, and how connected we are to the people who grow it.”

The Co-op started with a few people Steeves knew, their friends, and friends of friends, and when she had 20 members, she sadly had to turn people away.

The amount of interest she received is a sign of canning’s new-found popularity. The economy, the local food movement, and the desire to have more control are spurring a canning renaissance in Vancouver.

“Canning is a lost art,” says Krisztina Kun, 33, who is organizing canning workshops for this August and September. “And I’m the lost generation.” Her grandparents canned and gardened, but her parents rebelled. Only this year has Kun started gardening in earnest in her Mount Pleasant backyard. She is hoping her neighbours, particularly the ones with amazing gardens, will share their canning (and gardening) expertise at her workshops.

“We take classes in things, but we don’t actually talk to the people who are closest to us,” she says. “In any given radius of a couple of blocks we have so many skills that we could share with each other.” Kun envisions blackberry jam, tomato salsa, and sharing the surplus from neighbours’ gardens (she went overboard on her zucchini).

All this is part of her shift towards a more simplified lifestyle, partly because Kun is recovering from an injury and can only work part-time. “I’ve exited the hamster wheel of go-go-going, and I have more time to make the choices that are harder to do when you work full-time.” Things like cycling instead of driving, buying locally, gardening—and now canning. “All of the small choices we make every day are really important, like spending more for food that is made ethically by people in your community, or growing your own,” she says.

Canning is a philosophical choice, says South Vancouver resident Susan Faehndrich-Findlay, 45. “It’s a way of supporting local farmers. I was really struck by The 100-Mile Diet, how there used to be a lot of wheat grown in the Vancouver area but as it became easier and cheaper to import from big farms on the prairies, they stopped growing it here. If we don’t buy produce from our local farmers, we’ll lose it.”

Faehndrich-Findlay’s kids will never know the taste of rock-hard California peaches. “They only know peaches in season. It’s a really special treat, because they’re only available a few weeks a year,” she says. But this winter they had BC peaches all winter long: home-canned peaches. “They were melt-in-your-mouth, soft, and sweet and juicy.”

The peaches were the bounty of workshops that Faehndrich-Findlay organized last summer. Twenty women of varying ethnicities and ages gathered in a church kitchen to learn the art of canning from local seniors who have canned for most of their lives. Before the workshops, Faehndrich-Findlay was intimidated by the books that warn of the hazards of canning. Also, her previous attempts hadn’t gone so well: there were pickles that “just had a very strange, funny flavour,” and another time a recipe with a chili that made the pickles too spicy. “It’s nice to do it for the first time with people who have canned before,” she says.

Steeves has been canning seriously for two years. “We try to grow a lot of our own food and the last few years we’ve been trying to preserve as much as possible. You can can anything. Even cake. You put the batter in the jar and boil it and there you have it: cake in a can.”

Her yummiest canning moment was a very simple tomato sauce: slow-roasted tomatoes in a red wine sauce with garlic. “The smell was just amazing,” she sighs. She aspires to make the Co-op a resource for other groups who want to learn how to can. “There’s this down-home feeling about canning that really brings you back to where your food is coming from. It really has a way of bringing people together,” she says.

All of the above canning projects received funding through Vancouver Foundation’s Neighbourhood Small Grants Program, which is administered by neighbourhood houses in East Vancouver, South Vancouver, and South Burnaby, and by community centres in the Downtown Eastside. For more information, visit www.vancouverfoundation.ca/specialprojects