Human life is closely related to food. From the dawn of time, people wondered what to do to prevent it from spoiling. How to store hunted animals, harvested crops or fish so that they stay fresh for a long time? This problem was especially acute for people in the army. When going to the front, everyone had to have food supplies with them, as it was not known when he would return to the base.
The oldest way of preserving food was drying it with the help of sun and wind. This method is still used today. Completely dried meat, however, becomes tough over time. Therefore, as an alternative, cooking, smoking, salting and freezing began to be used. From the mid-18th century, fish began to be packed in cans in the Netherlands. However, they were not subjected to heat treatment, but only richly salted or smoked. A breakthrough in food preservation came at the end of the 18th century.
Who Invented Canned Food?
In 1795, Napoleon announced a competition to develop an effective method of preserving food for the army. Therefore, 15 years later, French confectioner and baker Nicolas F. Appert, after many attempts, came up with the idea of cooking meat and vegetables (he noticed that the best results were achieved by heating food to 100 degrees Celsius or more) in hermetically sealed glass vessels. In the course of this experiment, it was found that the products stay fresh as long as they remain closed. The choice of dishes was not accidental. The inventor's father was involved in the production of explosive wine, today known as champagne, for many years. The young Appert observed that bottles made of thick, dark green glass perfectly withstand high pressure and ambient temperature. He transformed the food storage bottles a bit by widening their opening so that they began to look more like jars. He used a mixture of cheese and lime to close them.
The method he invented came to be called, after his last name, an appraisal, and Appart himself received a £ 12,000 award.
Louis Pasteur and his research
At this stage, however, it was not realized that food spoilage was influenced by microbes. The dependence of the fermentation processes on microbes was discovered by the French biologist Louis Pasteur, who conducted numerous studies on lactic acid, butter, alcohol and acetic fermentation. He started using pasteurization, i.e. sterilization at temperatures lower than 100 degrees Celsius.
The first cans
The first tin cans for storing canned food were used in England. Already in 1810, the London merchant Peter Durand received a patent for them, which he sold to John Hall and Bryan Donkin, the English inventors. Two years later, the meat and canned soups found their way into the British Navy. From 1830, such products could already be found on the shelves of London stores. Initially, however, they were very expensive as the entire process of filling and closing the containers was done by hand. Only with time did man's work be replaced by machines.