ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE YEARS AGO ?

I just opened up a jar of tomato sauce and it got me to thinking that people of my generation and the kids of today think they work too hard, but they don't work nearly so hard as their parents and grand parents did, raising their children, cleaning, cooking, washing clothes then putting them through the ringer and hanging them out on the clothes line to dry, and then there was the late summer chore of canning.
I remember doing some canning and consider the process more labor intensive than freezing. But back then they canned everything, simply to have the reaping from the garden all winter long. In autumn they scoured the garden for every last tomato, string bean, ear of corn, and cucumber. The kitchen was a boiler room with billows of steam from the canning process, hot water to skin the tomatoes! Boiling water to sterilize the glass jars!
Chopping, slicing and slaving away, sterilizing, steaming, aware that one little mistake could mean a jar full of botulism "Clostridium botulinum," which is Latin for "pushing up daisies." One jar of stewed tomatoes gone bad could wipe out your whole family.

Canning dozens of jars of tomatoes, beans, beets, corn and Indian relishes, in elegant Ball jars with the name "Ball" in cursive writing on the side, all lined up on deep shelves in the basement. Today, home canning has gone the way of the typewriter, the vacuum tube and the black and white TV variety show. The Ball company sold off its jar division and now makes satellite dishes or something, and grocery stores stock fresh tomatoes all winter, imported from Mexico or Chili, which cost a buck a piece and taste more like tennis balls than tomatoes.

I kind of miss the days of the canning and pressure cooking process. It some how brought the family together and kept us all realizing that we were all connected to each other. It took two people to fill the canning jars without getting any tomatoes all over the place in the process. I hope that today's kids appreciate the easy lives they have and are accustom to, but at the same time I fear and know they do not.


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