[.ca] Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of ... (ISBN 0743255534)

From Amazon.com:
We're apt to ignore the importance of food preservation, but its significance can't be overestimated. In Pickled, Potted, and Canned, Sue Shephard tells the fascinating and unexpectedly stirring story of the development of preserved, portable food--a history full of human ingenuity and mastery that limns our evolution from hunter-gathers, dependent upon food availability for sustenance, to "season cheaters" able to take nourishment when and where we wanted to and thus discover the world. Food preservation's history is the story of civilization itself, and in lively prose readers discover the way the world was shaped by such common yet extraordinary techniques as drying, salting, smoking, and, most recently, canning and freezing. In 1800, Shepard writes, archaeologists working in Egypt discovered the body of a baby perfectly preserved in millennia-old honey, a practice stretching back in time and employed by the embalmers of Alexander the Great, also buried in honey. Sugar preservation, we are reminded, is one of the major techniques of food keeping--mixed with fruit, sugar produces jams, preserves, candied fruit, and other time-defying food--and Shepard traces its history from ancient Greece to the present. Similarly, she explores other techniques including salting, responsible for keeping meat and fish like cod palatable and at the ready; fermenting, to which we owe soy sauce and other mainstays; and drying, which gave us pasta and "ever-fresh" breads such as hardtack and matzo. From ancient but ever-evolving preservation methods like these to modern dehydration, which helps produce food that sustains astronauts, the book details simultaneously world-changing skills and culture in the making. --Arthur Boehm

Poor writing - boring read:
"Pickled, Potted and Canned" is just not very interesting. It's basically just a compendium of ways that food is preserved, written in a fairly uninteresting way. It seems to just go on and on without any story or purpose. Let me make a comparison to "Cod" by Kurlansky. "Cod" tells the story of the New England fishing fleet and how preserved cod affected trade and the growth of US maritime strength. "Cod" has a unifying theme which holds the reader's interest. There's no story, theme, or technical depth to "Pickled, Potted and Canned". Within each section, it just repeats over and over the fact that certain foods were preserved with the subject of the section (drying, salt, sugar, etc.). It doesn't discuss how the preserving material works to preserve the food, or how preserving fits into the flow of world history. If you're interested in how preserving works, get "On Food and Cooking" by McGee. It's not focused on preserving but you'll get more than in "Pickled, Potted and Canned". If you're interested in how the development of food preservation affected world history, I don't know what to recommend to you. Maybe another reviewer can make a suggestion.

Life inside a jar.:
A refreshing (if such a word can be used for a book about food preservation) and fascinating look at history -- all history -- as seen from inside a jar. In this lively melange of history and food writing, Shephard argues that the ability to preserve food liberated humans from the anxieties of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. According to Shephard, the development of portable, preserved food enabled the great explorers to travel into the unknown and gradually map the planet, thereby facilitating the conquest of new territories and the creation of routes for the expansion of trade and the exchange of knowledge and culture that opened up our world. It also allowed us to expand our daily menu from the limited and repetitious range of our ancestors to the multicultural, international choices we enjoy today. Weaving together the stories of the inventors and key developments of food preservation in a richly detailed narrative that spans centuries and continents, this is a juicy blend of social history, popular science, and testament to man's ongoing curiosity and inventiveness.

Food preserving changed the course of civilization:
Food preserving changed the course of civilization by making it possible to travel, explore, and survive. Pickled, Potted and Canned reveals the history of food preserving techniques, exploring how early preservation techniques changed history, cultures, and modern ideas of food and eating. From milk products to sugar and pickling, this examines how preservation techniques were fostered.

Excellent illuminating history of food preservation.:
In this concise yet detailed history of man's attempts to provide food for times of need, Ms.Shephard describes all the usual, and some very unusual methods of preserving food. In chapters devoted to each particular method, she details how, by trial and error and by observation, people have discovered ways of extending the life of foodstuffs well past the natural sell-by date. This leads to the means by which explorers could subsist independently of the land or sea they were travelling in, thus expanding the boundaries of trade and colonisation. However, some of the preserving methods brought their attendant disadvantages, such as vitamin deficiencies, like scurvy or pellagra - the ways of combating these are also dealt with in the book. Ms.Shephard writes in a comfortable, informative style that is neither dumbing-down, nor patronising, but with clear, logical progression within the particular subject - with the occasional illuminating aside to spice things up. Drawing heavily on historical accounts, she has meticulously researched the subject and presented us with a fine addition to any amateur historian's library. A very worthwhile read *****