Why do I do it ?

Well if you would ask DH it would be that I do this for a hobby. But for me it is so much more than a hobby. Last night we decided to have Spanish rice for supper, so I went down to the canning closet and grabbed a jar of salsa to make supper. I do it for the convience of having stuff ready to use and also because so many of the things I make taste better than what I can find in the store. I have had a baby every other year for the past 4 years so every other year I haven't had the chance to do much for canning on those years so the years that I am not pregnant or have a tiny baby ( all babies born in June or July) I really go all out and go overboard in the canning department. This year I am due July 23rd so don't know how much is going to get done as for canning. I do know that I need to do salsa and dill pickles.

Stacie

Because I enjoy it.
I like knowing where my food comes from and what's in it.
Therapy!
Creativity.
Gift giving.
Convenience of having it on hand.

Yep, that's pretty much it.
Deanna

Its saves me money as well as gives me more peace of mind, when I know what goes ito making the things I can. Without a vegetable garden, I would become a couch potato. Its bad enough in winter, when I tend to gain weight, but once growing season starts, I am outdoors weeding, planting, spraying and picking, which is about all the activity I usually get, except for the canning and prepping for the freezer.

As for me I think it may be a little of --All of the above.--
I enjoy canning
I love the way it looks on the shelves
It tastes a lot better then store bought
There are times when I am glad I had the extra canned
I love to share what I can with my family
And with times the way they are now I am sure I a glad
I have learned food preservation

I don't can/perserve much anymore, Daisy. But, when my kids were little the canned foods in the grocery were so full of salt and/or sugar, and whatever was sprayed on the fruit before picking, that I planted and cared for a HUGE garden that was totally organic, and canned or froze almost every vegetable we ate. And, I bought fresh-picked fruit from known, local organic growers. That was work.

Now I mostly make preserves of fruit from our trees -- if the critters let us get any. But I mostly do it because I get a sense of satisfaction from making my own; PLUS I can decide how much sugar and salt to put in the fruit. Now that I've been introduced to Pemona Pectin by this group, I'm happier than ever to try new things just for fun.

Yes, that Pomona is a God send. Its really great for those who can't have sugar. With Splenda or other sweetener, you can really get a good flavor of fruits coming through too. I just finished up the last of a 7 year old jar of grape jelly. Even though it wasn't purple color anymore, it still had a lot more grape flavor compared to any store bought. I made it with both fresh pressed grape juice as well as some frozen grape juice concentrate, without adding any additional water. In a few years, I hope to start making quince jelly again. My tiny quince seedling tree was just planted recently, nearby a few new Asian pear trees. These will not have any fruits for several years. My two big apple trees are now 4 years old and both are loaded with apples, that ripen quite early, like the middle of August.

I do it because I am amazed at the wonderful creation of fruits and vegetables, from putting a seed in the ground to nurturing, watching it reach and stretch and stand tall in the sun while sinking it's roots in deep and holding on tight in wind and rain, then blooming and blessing us with a form of nourishment. Then I get to pick from this plant that has come from a little seed, make a delicious, often beautiful meal or canned food that will continue to nourish us.

This absolutley amazes me and leaves me in awe, especially of the One who created it all and gave me talent to garden and preserve the bounty.

It is all very spiritual for me and my husband. And...it is also incredibly fun!! And...a great way to meet new friends! :)

Susan in NC

Ditto what izzysmom said.

Fun and taste, in a nutshell!

Started out growing a few tomatoes for fun, and was astonished at how much better they tasted than store-bought.

So then I grew more tomatoes, and was looking for a way to preserve the extras. Got some books on canning, stumbled on this site, and found there were so many wonderful things I could preserve that tasted WAY better than the store-bought counterparts, and that the work of making them was fun. (If I didn't enjoy it I wouldn't bother; my life wasn't terrible before I started home canning or anything! And these days one COULD buy a lot of quality, small-batch products if one had the money and inclination.)

But I do often say that if we had to live on what I preserve and/or grow, we'd be pretty poorly nourished indeed, so for me it's clearly more of a hobby (albeit a very tasty one) than a real stride toward self-sufficiency. I don't do such large quantities that I can avoid buying commercial stuff all together, and I don't do much in the way of protein (no pressure canning so far).

That said, it IS satisfying to learn about how to do these things, and I feel good knowing I COULD can whole meals, enough food to get us through a disaster, etc. if I wanted to.

There really IS something to be said for the enjoyment of looking at all those jars lined up in the pantry, isn't there/????

Zabby

These last few years it's just a satisfing hobby-- and a basis for my Christmas baskets-- somehow giving something I've actually made seems more in the spirit of Christmas.

And it's keeping a family tradition going.
And because I still am capable of doing.

Diane

Because I like growing things and I like to know what's in my food.

I grew up canning on the farm and I enjoy it, but like Westelle, I really started canning "for a reason" when I had children.

I disliked feeding them the herbicides, pesticides, insecticides that commercial foods are sprayed with. I also know about the "particulate matter" allowed in commercially canned products, the rodent hair, nail clippings, etc. I started growing my own organic produce and canning it so I knew what went into my kids' mouths.

Now I can for my grandchildren, and I still like to do it. Plus, we are all "spoiled", none of us like the taste of commercial products like jam. Someone here once said that Smucker's strawberry jam tastes "red". They were right, it just doesn't taste like strawberries.

My "fun" has been to try to develop all fruit jams and spreads for Dad without artificial sweeteners or any pectin at all, including Pomona's. It's been a challenge but some of it has turned out spectacularly, like Melly's fig preserves.

Annie

Hobby, and because I like the flavor better. I hate high fructose corn syrup, and it seems to be everywhere in everything. Not in my homemade jams/jellies/fruits/veggies, etc

I've looked at this thread several times, and been thinking o'er the issue. I'd have to divide it up.

Dill cucumber and dill bean pickles. I can put enough dill in there to peel paint. Pickle as breath freshener.

Chutney's. There is so much fun in making these with ingredients largely from my own garden.

Jams and jellies: way less sugar, so much better flavor, and cool combo's like mint-apple-jalapeño.

Then the big effort, the tomato / onion / sweet pepper / garlic combo, all grown 50 feet from the kitchen, turned into what we call "The Base" which gets turned into anything pasta wise, Chili, Pizza, stews, soups, and so on. Minimum 100 quarts a season.

This is so good. I honestly have never tasted anything like it anywhere else, and enough recipients of gifts have also remarked.

So, perhaps to sum it up, "because I can make really good food"

It completes the circle. I plant the seed or cutting, nurture it, harvest and consume. I know what is in my foods and I take pride in making something tasty and healthy. It is hearing form a freind that my red cabbage is the best he has had since his grandmother passed 50+ years ago.

Peppi

Peppi,

That must've been a GREAT feeling.

I had wonderful moment a while back when some friends came to visit, very urban types who had a toddler that always got nothing but the best. In the morning, they asked if we had some fruit for his breakfast, and unfortunately we didn't because we had just returned ourselves from out of town. I was about to pop out and buy some, when I remembered I had some home-canned applesauce in the pantry. Would applesauce do? Sure, the mom said, he'll eat applesauce.

I handed her a jar and went off to shower. When I got back into the kitchen, she was staring at her child in disbelief and asked, "WHERE did you get that applesauce??? He's never eaten that much of ANYthing in the morning!" The toddler was licking his apple-y lips, and I was pleased to be able to say, "Oh, I made it."

So I suppose a secondary motive I might now have to admit to would be "to show off," JUST a bit.... ;-)

Zabby

Because it's how I can afford to eat organically. Genetic engineering bothers me, this tainted food we're getting from China bothers me, we shouldn't need to bring in food from all over the world. Fresh is healthy and the next best is stuff you preserved. It's also very gratifying, a link to the past.

I've wanted to learn how to do this for years. This year I decided that I was going to.

I want to control what goes into my family's mouth. I am so sick of trying to be health conscious when everything you pick up at the store has ingredients you can't pronounce. It's disheartening. I actually found tomato paste where they ADDED RED DYE! WHY??? I think that was the final straw.

Hubby and I have a dream of someday living completely off the land (or local farms -- where we KNOW where our food came from and how it was taken care of before it reached us). We're stuck where we are for now due to older, sick parents, but someday.... In the meantime we are blessed to have a decent sized plot of land and a local farmers market nearby. We'll learn through trial and error, and eventually know what we're talking about. :-)

I also find the whole growing / gardening aspect very relaxing. Spending daily time with my plants, talking to them, checking them out before or after work, watching my hard work turn into something to feed my family. (Oh, and learning! Learning is fun too!)

I can't think of a better feeling!

I have a long list of food intolerances, which prompted me to start paying extra close attention to what's in my food. The more I learn about the food processing industry, the less comfortable I am. I cook from scratch because I like to know exactly what's in my food, and I can for the same reason. I'm learning to replace more and more of the processed foods I've always depended on.

Last year, DH and I did the math and found that it was actually cheaper to buy fruit in season and make our own jam and jelly, rather than buying it off the shelf year round. That was including the cost of ingredients and lids, but not the reusable jars and rings, although you'd recover that cost after a few uses. It's nice to pare down our grocery budget and help our local farmers at the same time.

Another bonus is being able to share what I've made when I'm not feeling sweaty and wilted from a day in the kitchen. I cook Thanksgiving dinner most years, and by the time the meal rolls around, I'm exhausted and starving and I never really notice whether anyone else is tasting their food. But when friends are enjoying my salsa (well, Annie's salsa) at a relaxed gathering, I actually feel like I did somebody some good.

Julie

I grew up helping my mother can fruit, jam, and tomato sauce, so canning is in my history. Hubby's family also did canning. So when we grew our first big garden in 1992, we canned tomato sauce and pickles. Cheap way of getting organic food to be sure. That traditional continues. We have a large orchard, so plenty of organic pears, apples, and raspberries, currants, gooseberries, and rhubarb to work with as well.

We also both prefer very low sugar jams, no medical reason, just find the taste to be so much better and fruitier. Another hurrah for Pomona pectin! Also, we purposely live a low cash lifestyle, using time instead of money to have a good life, so canning helps with that. Canned goods make great gifts, and we sell some extra jams to well-to-do friends and associates. I sell enough to keep me in jars, lids, sugar, and pectin, 37 jars last year and a little less than that the two prior years.

We are growing 40+ tomato plants this year, so definitely a lot of organic tomato sauce coming this year. Knowing that canning is a lot of work, we eat or dispense everything we can. We have used pretty much everything from 2005 and are working on the 2006 items.

Besides our own gardening, the other big reason we can so much (200+ jars a year) is we get a lot of free produce from a local farmer's market, and there is only so much we can eat or put in the freezers. That stuff isn't organic, but it still winds up with less sugar and other additives and the price is right!

Marcia

I have several reasons:

I like the taste of some of the recipes that are not available in a commercial product, for example:mango chutney, salsa - at least I haven't found a commercial product of these two things that I like better yet.

I like to have the knowledge of food preservation. It calms the paranoid tendencies I get regarding tainted food, pandemics, gmo's, preservatives and additives. This applies to growing fruits and veggies and hunting too but I digress...

I hate to waste things when there is an overabundence or ok when I buy too much of what's on super-sale.

I like to impress my friends and family at Christmas time.

I want my kids to learn that food doesn't magically appear processed in tin cans at the grocery store.

I want to know what I'm eating. And I also don't want to eat high fructose corn syrup.

Wow - I guess there really is a whole bunch of reasons, but that's the top 7. Oh, I almost forgot the big one - because its fun!!

Cindy

Cindy,
My children are pretty fascinated with the whole process. I agree about learning where the food comes from. My oldest lovingly tends to the tomato plants. Along those lines, when they occasionally go to the grocery store with they will inevitably ask for something like the pre-made tollhouse cookie dough. That request inevitably gets turned down on the principle that I can a lot more cookies that will taste even better if I make the dough myself. Just my 2-c's as Bejay would say.
Melly

Wow...I ditto most all of the above. And for me, its all summed up on the day "my" salsa runs out, and my DH's salsa habit changes from a pint a day to a pint a month! Or when my best friend opens up a jar the moment I give it to her and takes a "drink" straight from the jar!

Because I can!

Bad puns aside, I agree with those who have already commented: my mother and grandmother put up lots of things, it's fun, the final product makes great gifts, and it goes perfectly with gardening. And who can deny that particular joy that comes from opening a jar of bread-and-butter pickles or homemade salsa in February and tasting summer again?

Oh! Don't forget the shocked look from some people when you tell them you canned it yourself. You know, like you are from Mars or something!

I love that! I just grin and know that I will eat, no matter what!

Deanna

My great grandmother did it. I can still remember as little as I was, the wonderful smell of her cellar and all the mysterious jars lining those dark shelves.

My grandma did it. And I still have her canning book and some of her jars and kettles, and by then I was old enough to help.

My mother did it. She and my sisters spent many a hot summer day furiously canning whatever bumper crop the garden had blessed us with, and with a family of eight we needed it!

And I do it. Because they did. And because there is nothing more satisfying than for me to know where it came from and that I'm the one who put it there.

I will be echoing many previous reasons but here goes:

I can't say that I do it because I enjoy canning but I enjoy having canned :-)

I learned from my grandmother and we and my other grandma canned together for many years. Big batches of applesauce, vegetable soup, pinto beans, sauerkraut, etc.

I guess I mostly can because we like the taste better, we can can things we can't buy, we like knowing what is in our food and how it's grown, and we like having a cellar and a freezer full of "convenience" food.

VG

For me canning includes the satisfaction that I receive when I put all the jars in the pantry but there is a bigger reason.

The government has directed that we should have a 3 month supply of food on hand in case of an emergency. If we were to loose our electricity, all of the meat in my freezer would go bad, but I would have my chicken in the pantry. I believe in preparedness.

I also enjoy knowing that my jams made with Pomona's has very little sugar.

Part II: My best friend is married into a status conscious family where money and appearance is all important. I had one of those moments last week when I said that I made the salsa myself, and they looked at me like I am an alien. One of the women said she would just go to the store to buy it. I said there is nothing like our salsa at the store. The family business is grocery stores, so they get their food 'free', but best friend's hubby asks me to bring our salsa over. They also really appreciated the organic applesauce for their baby last year. (Did you know they make 4 oz. canning jars?)

Another friend's hubby reported that my organic black raspberry jam was the best jam he ever ate in his life, and I would echo that sentiment. Also, where else would I get mango sauce, banana jam, apricot sauce, etc.?

Marcia