Home Canning for Your Family's Health

With all of the incidents of tainted food in the news recently, I thought it was a good time to talk about canning your own. I'm sure many of us remember our Grandmothers pulling out a far of jam for your morning toast, or tomatoes for that night's dinner.

These were some of our best memories: knowing that she cared enough to make these things for us. Little did we know at the time, but we would never have jam that tasted quite that good, and spaghetti with meatballs was never quite the same as Grandma made.

My reasons for canning initially weren't for the health of it, but to deal with the overflowing crop of tomatoes and zucchini. We had so much a couple of years ago, that we just couldn't eat it all, to the point that much of it began to spoil. That, I think, was my turning point. I was tired of the waste. It wasn't until later that I realized how much better the tomato sauces made with my tomotoes out of the garden were, and that I knew exactly what went into them.

When I made strawberry jam for the first time, the best compliment came from my husband: it was as good as his Mom's! Truthfully, we will never buy another jar of jam or jelly at the store. Somehow, they all just taste like sugar to us now.

Soon after we started canning our fruits and vegetables, we started reading the labels on the packaged food we'd been eating. The cans of chicken soup have MSG in them, and packages of spices for things like taco seasoning are positively laced with the stuff! We never realized how much junk went into the canned chili we bought for chili dogs, so I made our own and canned it.

That first year we went crazy, making jam or jelly out of every fruit we could find, and very rapidly found ourselves with a stockpile of jam of every type! We also pickled vegetables. I bet you didn't know that zucchini makes the best bread and butter pickles!

Most of our family and friends got gift baskets for Christmas that year...want to take a guess what was in them?

Home canners can take pride in the fact that what they are doing for their families will improve their overall health by making many of the same things you can get in the stores, without the additives.

The best part about all this, is that we know that everything in those jars of food is safe to eat, unlike the melamine they've found in baby formula from China.