Canned Food Once Stood for a Booming Food Industry. Why Has It Drifted Out of Your Life?

The rise of canned food is the best footnote to the consumerism born of America's postwar recovery. People poured themselves into work and had no time to cook, so big companies took over the job, supplying decent food to the people who were creating the wealth.

Canned food is getting harder and harder to sell.

Five years ago Shanghai Maling Aquarius, the maker of canned luncheon meat, could still grow its annual revenue by double digits. By 2014 growth had slowed to 2.35%, and last year it turned negative. Meat products, its core business and 59% of revenue, aren't selling, so the company has had to find ways to make pork a little cheaper. It drew up a "proposal to form a joint venture with Shanghai Farm, under which the new company will buy hog-farming assets."

Six months ago, at the 20th-anniversary meeting of the China Canned Food Industry Association in Beijing, Wahaha Group chairman Zong Qinghou declared: "Stimulating domestic demand is the most urgent task for the canned food industry and its companies." Whatever else he meant, the remark makes one thing clear: people want fewer cans. And not only in China. The US canned food market is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 1.69% over the next five years, slower than the 2.23% expected for fresh food.

In the 1990s people happily carried canned meat home as Chinese New Year gifts. Today the canned food aisle has lost that prestige, even though a whole row of imports sits beside the Maling cans: Thai Rooster-brand sardines in chili sauce, Spanish sweet-and-spicy stuffed olives. They are mostly for show. "A big supermarket has to carry imported food, but what sells is still domestic. It's cheap, and ordinary people can afford it," a shelf stocker at a Shanghai Century Lianhua supermarket told QDaily.

Trendier convenience stores barely stock cans at all. Walk into a Lawson and you might find, at most, a can or two of luncheon meat and sardines tucked in a corner. A clerk told us a single can sells once every few months; the last buyer was a staff member who paid for one himself to go with his lunch. As everyone knows, what sells fastest in a convenience store is the fresh boxed meal delivered that same day.

Chinese consumers are unusually fixated on freshness. OGS, a maker of laminated steel (one of the materials used for can bodies), once surveyed the market and found that 74.5% of Chinese respondents check a can's shelf life (even when only a small part of it has passed), more than any other factor asked about, and more than half consider canned food unhealthy. After years of media scare stories about preservatives and additives, people distrust food that keeps for a long time; they assume cans must contain preservatives and have no nutritional value. Besides, canned food doesn't really fit into Chinese cooking.

Things aren't much better in the United States, where cans are far more common. Campbell, the largest maker of canned soup, has been criticized for the salt in its products. Its sales peaked at US$16.2 billion in 2012 and have slid ever since. To win over younger palates, Campbell has started reformulating its soups, and this February it set up a US$125 million fund to invest in and acquire food start-ups.

Yet canned food truly is a symbol of modern civilization. The Industrial Revolution turned a 19th-century method of preserving food into a mass-market product. The video series Japanese Science and Technology shows industrial canning in detail: freshly caught sardines are beheaded en masse and pass down a tightly run production line, through weighing, draining, cooking and many other steps, until they are sealed in cans. Watching this slightly brutal process, you find yourself oddly trusting the food industry.

Americans remain the world's biggest fans of canned food. By one count, annual per-capita consumption is about 90 kilograms in the US, about 50 kilograms in Western Europe, 23 kilograms in Japan, and just 1 kilogram in China. According to figures released by China's General Administration of Customs in January 2016, China exported 3,474 tonnes of canned pork and 21,505 tonnes of canned mushrooms. Cans made up 33.94% of all the food China exports, and the cans you may not care to eat end up on American dinner tables.

You may wonder why Americans like this stuff. The canned food market was built with help from war, from changes in how Americans cooked, and from the triumph of consumerism. Andy Warhol, who ate Campbell's soup for breakfast for twenty years, one day used 32 cans of it to define Pop Art.

Before warfare came down to pushing buttons, an army's food supply was a key measure of a country's military and technological strength. On the eve of World War II, Americans could go from slaughtering a cow to sealing a can of beef in under 30 minutes. In fact, the can was invented in the first place to feed Napoleon's armies in the field in the early 19th century.

Military needs and advances in food storage go hand in hand. Most of the processed food on supermarket shelves today, including energy bars, deli meats, canned goods and other ready-to-eat products, as well as many packaging technologies, came out of military laboratories. Anyone curious can read Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat, published last August.

Here is more evidence that cans were not designed for the general public: the can was invented in 1810, but the can opener did not appear until 1858.

By 1935, per-capita consumption of canned food in the US had doubled over the previous 17 years, to 101.1 pounds a year. Fred C. Heinz, then head of Heinz, said: "This industry (canning) has made enormous progress. The market has reached US$2.5 billion." In 1944, a year before the war ended, the US War Food Administration announced in The New York Times that it would cut civilian supplies of canned fruit by 43% and canned vegetables by 19% to meet military needs.

It was in those turbulent years that canned food caught on. As the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto wrote in Near a Thousand Tables (Food: A History), war can break through cultural barriers and make food international. An army on foreign soil is a powerful carrier of cultural influence: "once soldiers have seen Paris, it is hard to make them content with the plain fare of home." The British kept eating canned SPAM after World War II, even though it had arrived as American wartime aid.

When the war ended, the companies behind the products that had shone in wartime, including frozen food, dehydrated potatoes, instant coffee and, of course, canned food, made their pitch: we fed the army, so naturally we can feed the people.

The journalist and food historian Laura Shapiro has said that the oven reshaped the American dinner of the 1950s. It wasn't only the oven, but also canned food, the microwave and the vending machine. The whole food industry seemed to have agreed to persuade Americans to hand all their cooking over to it. Western acceptance of these gadgets rested on more than a century of market-building. S&W was founded in 1896 (it now belongs to Del Monte Foods, one of the world's four largest canned food companies). As for our worries about preservatives and additives, its old salmon ads had already answered them: "The only thing we add is salt." S&W's canned beans still use the same pitch today, stressing that beans in a tin are not only better and carefully selected, but also spare you several steps of cooking.

Jonathan Thorn, corporate archivist at Campbell (America's leading maker of canned soup), has confirmed that the handwritten-style logo on Campbell's cans was designed that way on purpose: "It looks like a recipe jotted down by hand, which gives housewives a sense of 'homemade.'"

Instant coffee followed the same path as canned food. When Nestlé launched its instant coffee in the 1940s, shoppers resisted it. After extensive research, the company found that "making a good cup of coffee" was a mark of a virtuous, hardworking housewife. To ease wives' guilt, Nestlé dropped its "quick and easy" advertising and stressed flavor and the benefits of the time saved. The early advocates of convenience, feminists and socialists, wanted to free women from the kitchen. And cooking itself was getting harder: between 1967 and 2009, the average American's working hours rose by 167 hours a year, and as more and more women entered the workforce, looking after several children became an almost impossible task.

Harry Balzer, a senior food-marketing researcher at the NPD Group, summed up the food industry's conquest of the American kitchen this way: "Heating a can of soup, microwaving a frozen pizza: Americans now call that 'cooking.' If their grandmothers knew, they'd be furious."

In the end, canning became a way of cooking, not merely the way of preserving food it was first designed to be. During the Civil War, the American Gail Borden began making canned milk to supply the Union army. To make it keep, he added sugar, which is why it tastes distinctively sweet. Canned sardines have a different texture from fresh ones, and they are juicier. The great 19th-century chef Jules Gouffé, devoted as he was to inventive dishes, praised canned green peas as soft and delicious and canned jellied salmon as having a lingering finish.

The rise of canned food is itself the best footnote to the consumerism born of America's postwar recovery. People poured themselves into work and had no time to cook, so big companies took over the job, supplying decent food to the people who were creating the wealth. This is also the idea behind Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans: a new spirit of the age that embraced commercial civilization.

The can's ability to keep things fresh has also given it new meanings. In 1919 Duchamp drained the liquid from a glass ampoule, named it "Paris Air" and gave it to two American collectors. Over time, "canned air" came to stand for a place's pleasant surroundings, or else to serve as a warning about pollution. And in every film or TV show about the end of the world, humanity's last outpost is always stacked with cans.

By the 1970s, more than 1,400 kinds of food were being canned each year. Tomatoes, peaches, baby food, chicken noodle soup, seafood and meat went into cans and onto the market, accounting for ten percent of Americans' food spending. Canning also turned tuna, which Americans had barely heard of in the early 20th century, into an everyday food. Andrew Smith, author of American Tuna: The Rise and Fall of an Improbable Food, once said: "Before 1970, I'd estimate that 99% of the tuna we ate came in cans."

Now the craze for canned food is fading. At bottom, this reflects the gradual disappearance of the insecurity that food shortages once caused. Before that insecurity vanished entirely, there was a period of transition. During the Great Depression, cheap canned food became the star of the American dinner table. In postwar Shanghai, people could often buy surplus US military supplies: not only SPAM luncheon meat, but also orange powder, coffee, salt pork, butter, cigarettes and bread.

In China's breakneck development, canned luncheon meat was a flash in the pan. Our industrialization was compressed into an exceptionally short span, and most people quickly took to "foraging" by way of food delivery and logistics networks. The old anxiety, "will there be enough to eat?", has given way to a new one: "is the food fresh?" One kind of person says food should be as local and as seasonal as possible; they certainly have no use for cans. Another kind likes Australian Angus steak, New Zealand strawberry ice cream and fresh Hokkaido cod. Cold-chain technology has not only stretched the distance our food can travel, it has also delivered the freshness that cans never could.

There is one exception. Someone who wants to break the routine might well make hunting for a delicious can one of life's small, unusual pleasures. And making cans more refined may give many companies a fresh angle for their marketing. But neither will ever become mainstream again.