Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry by Anna Zeide (review)

Anna Zeide has written an ambitious and detailed history of the American canning industry. It is easy to see why this book won a James Beard Award in 2019—it cuts across the development of multiple food systems yet still touches upon contemporary issues like food safety and consumer trust. Its contents should be of tremendous interest to culinary historians of all kinds.

The work’s relevance to the history of the Great Plains is mostly indirect. Chapters focus on different kinds of canned food like olives and soup, but the closest it comes specifically to this region is a close examination of Wisconsin’s canned pea industry. There are, however, multiple issues related to canning that affected the history of crops. For example, Zeide explains that the presence of canning facilities in states helped spur the growth of agriculture in general during the early 20th century. She also closely examines the failure of grade labeling during the New Deal years, which would have applied to all canned foods had it stuck.

The book is arranged roughly chronologically, beginning with the earliest canning efforts around the turn of the 19th century. It focuses on products like condensed milk to get at the issues related to canning during the Civil War era and canned tuna to represent the 1960s and 1970s. Over time, as the canning process became cheaper and safer, the volume and importance of canned food grew accordingly. This allows Zeide to touch upon common historical themes in recent food history like industrialization, the significance of the end of seasonality to consumers, and the relevance of World War II to modern foods.

The best parts of the book deal with the intersection of government regulation, canning technology, and consumer trust. Just because you could can a particular food product does not necessarily mean that most people bought and ate it. Peas, for instance, varied in both quality and in the safety of the product. Olives carried a risk of botulism which both consumers and the media tended to magnify far beyond what was warranted. A combination of technical progress and rudimentary regulation assuaged such fears, but as Zeide’s final chapter on BPA in Campbell’s Soup suggests, there will always be questions about the safety of canned foods which processors will have to at least try to answer.

The lesson here for historians of agriculture and agricultural regions may be the importance of Zeide’s systematic approach to her subject. The many actors in her narrative include not only farmers, processors, and consumers but also governments and scientists. As a result, her useful analysis transcends both time and region, offering a model that many historians might choose to emulate.