The economics of canning [View all]

[Kaleva]

With the gardens producing and there being a nationwide shortage of canning lids (I can't find wide mouth lids anywhere) I'd like to talk about some thoughts I have about canning. Ideas that I've developed over the years and after doing quite a bit of back of the envelope calculations.

IMHO, there are some items that are not worth the time and effort to can such as green bean, tomatoes, spaghetti sauce and tomato sauce. Not when such can be had in the store for $.50 - $.75 a can. In the case of spaghetti sauce, it is far less time consuming to go to the store to buy the ingredients (tomato paste, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes) then to make them from scratch. Higher end items like dilly beans, pickled beets, chow chow, no-cook salsa and some others are probably worth it.

Some may say that eating canned foods that came from the garden is healthier so it'd be worth it to can the items I mentioned earlier. However, I'm unaware of any study that shows that person who eats homemade foods lives a healthier life then one who eats foods bought from a store. Some may say that there is a big difference in flavor between home canned and store bought but i really can't tell that much of a difference and certainly not that much of a difference to justify the cost. Another way to justify the cost would be if one considered the task to be a fun hobby. For them, the time put into it is well worth it because of the enjoyment it brings.

I enjoy the effort myself but being frugal, I want to get the most bang for my buck. The garden is going to produce a bountiful amount of tomatoes this year so I'm considering fermenting a bunch. Using 5 gallon food safe pails, I can preserve quite a bit for far less cost in materials and labor then if I were to can it. I don't have any paste variety of tomatoes in the garden this year but next year I will and I'll try dehydrating some.

In summary, I want to preserve as much as I can from the garden but I want to do it in a way that makes it price competitive with what I could buy in the store.