The topic of food safety always touches people's hearts. Since April this year, food safety problems have been exposed in "Xiaolongkan" hotpot restaurant, "Mixue Ice City" milk tea restaurant, "Wallace" fast food restaurant, "Yang Guofu" Spicy Hot Pot restaurant, "Naixue tea" milk tea restaurant, and "RT Mart" supermarket, which have aroused widespread concern. On August 23rd, the State Administration for Market Regulation announced the investigation and handling of these six food safety issues.

The issue of food safety is not just present. 150 years ago, the emergence of canned food changed the dining table structure of people worldwide. When it first appeared on American dining tables, people were full of doubts about it: Is the food in an opaque jar safe? The botulinum toxin in canned olives brought the canning industry its first crisis, and after that, BPA (generally referring to bisphenol A, an organic compound) led Jinbao Soup Company to abandon "canned" products. As a processed food, the history of canned food is clearly related to the public's food safety history.

The following content has been authorized by the publishing house to be selected from the introduction section of Anna Zaid, Associate Professor and Director of Food Research Program at Virginia Tech in the United States, titled "Canned Food: A History of Food Safety for the American Public," with slight deletions and modifications compared to the original text. The subtitle was added by the editor and is not owned by the original text.

Most of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about canned food. The can quietly sits in the corner of the shelf in the storage room, and when we want to have a fast food or need a simple ingredient, we will reach out to grab it without thinking. We may think that canned food is the protagonist of the pantry, or that using it will add color to children's favorite dishes - such as Campbell tomato soup, green bean casserole, or a serving of spicy beans. We can imagine tin cans as one of the reserves prepared for the end of the world. No matter where the can is located, it is usually within our food choices.

Canned food is not a concern for the vast majority of historians either. Compared to the larger and more complex technologies that occupy the central stage of people's minds, such as cars or power grids, ordinary tin cans naturally "retreat behind the scenes". This phenomenon may be due to historians not considering how our country and world were formed. Even occasional historians try to understand every aspect of daily life and diet, but they rarely pay attention to canned food.

However, I believe that canned foods and those that sometimes appear sticky are worth investing more attention in. The canned food produced by the factory, as well as the metal cans, play an important role in shaping our daily lives. At the same time, many more highly respected technologies have also emerged due to it: not only those directly used for processing canned goods, but also the "unique skills" required when using it as a raw material to process other foods. The concealment of canned food is particularly prominent in our era - a variety of food products produced by factories are distributed around people. It wasn't until recent years that we began to think canned food was ordinary and unremarkable. However, over a century ago, canned food presented people with a vague and mysterious impression.

In that era, the dietary habits of most Americans would change with seasons and geographical locations. It is canned food that opens up a vast world for them to enjoy fresh food and new flavors. The food on the dinner table, for the first time, broke free from the constraints of natural decay due to canned food. In the words of early canners, "all summer gifts are hidden in cans.". Canned food has turned June's garden into a food storage room for January. As emphasized in the stories created by canners during their leisure time, canning makes it possible for the juice of summer peaches to flow onto the American chin in winter. The enjoyment period of peas is no longer limited to a brief spring. Salmon from the Pacific Northwest can be served on tables in inland Arkansas. Farmers and fishermen can seal their food at specific times of the year and take it out for consumption after a few months or years - by then, the food can not only be consumed but also be beneficial to health. We must admit that this idea is revolutionary.

The giant pea sorting machine that appeared in advertisements in 1914 was just one of the many new machines that reshaped the canned food industry in the late 19th century. Canned Food: A Food Safety History for the American Public.

However, when canned food begins to appear on the shelves of ordinary stores, customers still have mixed reverence and suspicion towards these "metal products". Planting and purchasing food is actually a sensory experience, during which we can pick up ingredients, lightly smell their scent, and feel their maturity. A shrewd farmer or consumer can always distinguish the quality of a tomato based on the smell of vines, the hardness of the flesh, and the color of the skin. Canned food has overturned the connection between humans and food, and instead only provides consumers with hard metal packaging decorated with colored paper.

Before the emergence of cans, food had leaves on it

As historian Ann Vileiss once said, "Before the emergence of cans, food was leafy, with green plants and soil attached to it. They were odorous animals with ears, eyes, and tongues... However, now whether it's salmon, dandelion, oysters, or canned tomatoes, they don't make a whoosh or splash." From growing tomatoes themselves, to an unknown pair of hands creating a sealed tomato can in a foreign land, this transformation took over a century and was indeed hard won. Even if unfamiliarity with craftsmanship is no longer the main obstacle, spoilage and overcooking often cause people to lose their appetite for canned food, and even instill fear in them. Consumers must establish trust with these industrial products - only in this way can they periodically purchase canned food.

Early canners utilized new technologies to transform fruits from fields into goods in factories. Manufacturers are committed to winning the trust of consumers. At first, manufacturers began to improve the canning process, cultivate crops that were more suitable for cans, and try to remove bacteria that cause spoilage. All these measures are taken under the guise of creating better products and winning consumer confidence. Later, as products became more reliable in terms of technology, canners shifted their focus to marketing, advertising, and political pandering. In this process, they built a huge network of relationships among farmers, scientists, doctors, universities, government agencies, media, and advertising companies - which also became the foundation of the development of the food industry in the 20th century. A study that constructs and analyzes the overall food system in the United States clearly shows that it is not only the personal preferences of consumers that drive people to choose processed foods, but also the "tricks" outside of consumer sight that play an important role in it.

This story provides an important perspective for us to better understand how and why Americans are fond of canned food. Many of us are now familiar with the argument that links processed foods with obesity, and we also see foodborne diseases frequently appearing in the news headlines. These external forces have also led to a period of ups and downs in public trust in canned food. However, from a historical perspective, what we need to consider more is the following question: Where did processed food come from? What were their predecessors? How did the public initially trust industrialized food? How do we accept these foods of unknown origin and time?

With the continuous experimentation of various processed foods, canned food finally emerged in the early 19th century. This is the first factory processed packaged food sold nationwide. Canned food processing, like meat processing and grain processing, is a primitive technology in food processing. However, the products produced from factories are vastly different in form from those you see in nature or on farms. There are two major differences between canned foods and traditional packaged meat and grain foods: firstly, canned foods are made of opaque metal; The second is that canned food processing has a production process that is not well-known to the public - it seems to have stopped the natural decomposition process. These two factors make it difficult to sell canned food. Especially from both literal and metaphorical perspectives, canned products and their production processes are opaque and undisclosed to ordinary consumers.

In the late 19th century, before the popularization of canned food, most Americans had just begun to change their dietary habits and no longer only ate their own grown or locally produced food. The opaque nature of canned food, coupled with the early difficulties encountered by the canned industry in promoting product safety and attractiveness, has led to a lack of confidence among consumers, resulting in slow growth in the early American canned market.

Nowadays, people are very familiar with commercial canned goods. But in any sense, canned food is still an "opaque" object. Its metal shell hides inside. The industrial starting point of canned food obscures this story. Canned fruits or vegetables are usually grown on large industrial farms in distant areas, and the packaging process is completed through buzzing machines or the labor of strangers. Afterwards, canned goods were transported to our local grocery store through giant warehouses, anonymous cardboard boxes, diesel trucks, as well as wholesalers and many anonymous workers. People who profit greatly from the canned food industry are widely distributed among multinational CEOs, bankers, and advertisers. However, those people's hands have never touched the canned food we are currently discussing.

The Metaphor of "Transparency" and "Opaque": The entire content of the industrial food chain is forgetting

If you want to accept ready-made industrial canned food, you need to have firm confidence in the industrial food system where everyone is involved, otherwise you should start researching the complex network involving hundreds or thousands of people mentioned earlier. For consumers in the 21st century, the former may be a natural choice. After all, in the era when most of us grew up, international food companies, processed foods, advertising, and complex food technologies have already become key factors determining how we eat. But when this complex network was still in its infancy, how did 19th century consumers react to it? Will they naturally form the same level of confidence as we do today? How can they understand that the origin of a can of tomatoes is actually a factory? What factors have led them to gradually develop trust in this commercial canned food and decide to serve it on their home dining table? What are the multiple impacts of these factors on consumers from different backgrounds?

This explores the issue of trust in processed food among the American public. It attempts to understand how the complex network that supports modern factory food production is formed. From many perspectives, this is a history of institutional and political use of power to shape American cuisine - it lays the foundation for a growing industrial food system: factories are responsible for production, packaging, national marketing, and the introduction of relevant scientific expertise. At the same time, manufacturers have also intervened in the regulatory process. Understanding these systemic forces is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the modern food movement.