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I am so thrilled to see this discussion this morning! I too have gotten the bug to begin new adventures in preserving. I grew up on a centruy old farm in Banks, Oregon and as an adult, I have no greater desire than to return to the farm and share with my young boys all the wonder (and hard work) that comes with farming. One of the best memories I have as a little girl, was watching all the "ladies" of the town gather every harvest season around my mom's kitchen table. We preserved everything we could grow on the farm and my mom has a special (huge) room in her house just to store her preserved food.

I now have come to realize that preserving food is not just about storing food for the winter, but it is about the community gathering, the love, the joys, the gossip, the talk, the memories that are formed around a hot stove, an apple peeler and many generations of friends and family.

I've begun reflecting on this topic lately and I began a short essay...I'll paste it below. Enjoy the read!

I'll be sure to listen to the show on my commute in to Portland tomorrow. I'm a professor of biology at the University of Portland and I listen to Talk out Loud every morning on my way to campus.

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Cheaper Just to Buy by Jacquie Van Hoomissen

We?ve done the math a thousand times and the numbers always give us the same result. It doesn?t matter, though. Every year, just like the constantly changing seasons that never fail to return, at the end of every harvest, we sit down together, gather around the table in my mother?s kitchen, open the book, rework the math, and come to the exact same conclusion; it?s cheaper just to buy.

We sit there staring at the sparsely written text that we?ve laid down in our book, the special book that holds a sacred place on the second shelf in my mother?s kitchen, and we wonder why we keep doing this. For some reason, we can?t stop. My 85 year old grandmother has been carrying on the tradition for as long as she can recall, starting out in Idaho where her family did ?just fine? through the great depression, as she recalls, because of their varied skills on the farm and in the kitchen. So here we sit, another harvest season coming to an end and the data prove to us that we must be crazy, or backwards, or old fashioned, or whatever, because we are working for about $0.50 an hour, if that. But here we sit, tallying our day?s work and we can?t help but anticipate the day when we can write into the book the real value and meaning of our efforts. But, it is difficult to summarize these ideas using only math and numbers as the mechanism by which we record our labors. So, we just do as we normally do, and write down the numbers, glance them over, and conclude, yet again, that we really should stop doing this, because it is cheaper to buy preserved fruit at the store than it is to can our own fruit from our family?s century farm.

But, that?s the catch, we work tirelessly all day, we slump into our beds, exhausted after having spent ten hours straight peeling pears, and we awake the next day glowing in a sense of accomplishment, a sense of pride, and most importantly, a sense that we belong to a special and unique community of family and friends that would rather spend an entire Saturday canning fruit to feed their families throughout the winter season, than doing something more common on a weekend free from work.

So we do it again at the end of every harvest season. But the beauty of our endeavors is reflected in the saying that ?you get what you pay for.? And yes, at any local grocery store we would pay just $1.00 for a can of preserved pears, but when we opened the can, all we would find inside, is food, and that?s it. Nothing else. When I send my 6 year old son to the basement to ?bring up? a quart of our family?s preserved pears for dinner, we open the lid and listen for the slow hissing sound that confirms our success and then we find what we were really after, that special ?something else? that is preserved in every one of our family?s ever expanding collection of Kerr canning jars; a treasure trove of memories slithering and gliding around each and every surface of our food, which greet us as the first bit of juice drops into our mouths. At that moment, I?m hooked. I?ll never give up preserving our food and memories in the same canning jars we used when I was a little farm girl, even though the academic inside of the grown woman that I?ve become knows it really is cheaper just to buy.

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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