Can-Didly Speaking

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear can, happy birthday to you! August 25^th! 200 years old, my can is, she is! The Washington Post (August 23^rd) notes the humble beginnings: “1810. A Frenchman named Nicolas Appert discovers a way to preserve soups, produce and dairy products in glass bottles using boiling water to force out air, and sealing the contents with cork, wire and wax. Other inventors soon adapt the process to tin cans, which are lighter, cheaper and more durable… Kick the can. Shoot it off a fence post with a BB gun. Put it under the grill to collect dripping grease. Construct a string telephone with it. Get 60 percent of your daily value of sodium from it. Get five cents for it (in NY, CA, ME, CT and VT). Puncture a hole in it and shotgun the beer. Make a purse out of pop tops. Stock your bunker full of canned goods. Eat as cheaply and with the greatest variety possible.”

From mundane pragmatics to Andy Warhol’s high art, the tin-to-aluminum container is ensconced in global history far more than the Internet – a “technology-come-lately” if you will – that is still paying its dues and may be outmoded long before cans outlive their usefulness. Take our cans away, and civilization can damned well get cantankerous, indeed a jarring experience!

In the U.S. alone, 130 billion cans are produced annually, and while many are recycled for the “next round,” many other lie corroding (can’t saying “rusting” anymore) in inappropriate landfills or casually-strew garbage leavings all over the globe. The Post lets us in on the details of our can-tinlevered obsession: “Forget botulism (not the can's fault!). Forget ozone depletion by aerosol can (fixed!). Forget the Colombian drug smugglers who can cocaine for incognito transport (canny!), or scientists who've canned feces so it would stay fresh for later study (ew). Forget the fact that plastic has duly rocked the world (in the mid-1950s a third of a supermarket was canned goods; today it's only a tenth)… You eat the contents of 85 cans of food a year and you don't even know it…

“What if gold prospectors relied solely on foraging on their treks out West? What if tinsmiths didn't handcraft 35,000 cans a day for meats and condensed milk during the Civil War? What if Chef Boyardee and Hormel Spam didn't nourish Patton's armies, whose soldiers wore can openers around their necks in communion with their jangling dog tags? What if canned food had never freed the American homemaker from time-consuming dinner duties?”

When armies traveled over the past two centuries, cans were there. When natural disasters slammed food supplies, cans came to the rescue. When Monty Python needed new material, canned Spam found its place in comedic history. Indeed, humanity appears to have become can-ivorous for the last two centuries. Can the modern world really live without cans? Can’t! Can too! Can’t! Can too! Oy!

I’m Peter Dekom, hoping that I too can be well-preserved without getting canned!