"I don't know when it started, but there is a date on every thing, saury will expire, meat sauce will expire, even the plastic wrap will expire." I began to wonder, is there anything in this world that doesn't expire?"
In 1994's "Chongqing Forest", He Zhiwu, who is out of love, looks for canned pineapples at a late-night convenience store. When he finds the 30th can and eats all the pineapples alone, it is his love that expires with the can.
▲"Chongqing Forest".
Although it is not possible to add 10,000 years of time as memory, as a "processed food" in the modern sense, the role of canned food is to preserve fresh food for a long time, and the shelf life is generally 2-3 years.
For a long time, the canned food has been neglected and has a bad reputation, and the per capita annual consumption of canned food in the mainland in 2019 was only 2 kg. In the post-epidemic era, it has entered the vision of the Chinese people more and joined the hoarding list with a bottom-up posture.
Canned, "little transparent" of the resident hoard list
If you had a choice during the hoarding period, what food would you stockpile?
For the "god in charge of the kitchen", rice noodles, grains, oil, meat, vegetables, eggs and milk are indispensable; and "those who are not compatible with the kitchen" can choose a variety of convenient fast foods, such as instant noodles, self-heating rice, self-heating hot pot, microwave fast food, snail powder, quick-frozen dumplings.
Cans are less conspicuous in the various hoarding lists, but they are always there. Lunch meat, canned yellow peaches, eight treasure porridge, these "basic" cans, you have more or less eaten.
In early April, 100,000 daily necessities aided by Fujian included Gulong brand canned goods; in early April, the China Canning Industry Association organized 18 key enterprises in the canning industry to provide more than 400 kinds of canned products to support the fight against the epidemic in Shanghai, Jilin and other places.
There are many reasons to stock canned food, including ready-to-eat, long shelf life, high calories, easier storage and transportation than fresh food, and, importantly, the versatile nature of canned food.
Tempeh mud carp is suitable for stir-frying oil wheat vegetables or bitter melon, braised beef canned stew potatoes let people eat two bowls of rice, lunch meat shabu-shabu, with instant noodles, wrapped in egg liquid under the pan frying can be.
▲ Image from: Stand Cool Helo
Relying on the mountains to eat the mountains and the sea, regionality and diversity are also a major feature of canning.
Tempeh mud carp from Guangdong, braised pork from Beidaihe, winter vegetables from Tianjin, drunken mud snails from Zhoushan, cloud legs from Yunnan, cowbars from Yulin, tomatoes and grapes from Xinjiang... Then the canned food spanned the distance of time and space, the inland areas could eat seafood, and the cold and long northeast of winter filled the childhood with canned yellow peaches.
The continent is a big producer of canned food, supplying a quarter of the world's cans, but we are not the ones who love cans the most.
Nielsen data shows that in 2020, the sales of canned meat, chickpeas and canned tuna in the United States increased by 31.8%, 25.6% and 24.9% year-on-year; the sales of canned vegetables in Germany rose by 80%, and the canned fruits also rose by 70%; and the domestic hoarded food was mainly flour, vegetables and meat, with an increase of 50% to 100%.
This is mainly due to differences in geographical environment, food industry and eating habits.
There are many semi-processed or fully processed foods in Europe and the United States, and Europeans and Americans visit supermarkets once a week to buy vegetables and grains; the domestic market can provide rich primary agricultural products, and the obsession with original ecology and freshness is engraved in our genes.
If you need to stock up, what kind of cans are editors willing to stock? AiFan er experienced 11 kinds of canned meat in ready-to-eat conditions.
Among them, the curry beef has received more praise, for no other reason than the low price. Less than 9 yuan a can, but with beef, potatoes, carrots and meat dishes, it is quite a dish, not just a canned meat.
My colleague Xiao Liang, a curry lover, thinks the taste of curry comes from curry powder, but she's not disappointed: "If you really want to isolate, it's already great to have this kind of thing." 」
The evaluation of braised pork is not bad either. Although its lean meat taste is not very pleasant, we agree that it is not bad to eat with rice.
The classic canned tempeh mud carp plays normally, it counts as the first pick of Cantonese people to hoard canned food, and it is also very acceptable for first-time eaters. In the heart of colleague Xiao Wu, it is on a par with Lao Ganma, and is "human food that can be passed down for hundreds of generations".
The Buddha jumped off the wall and was rejected by the people. 1 can of more than 60 yuan but fishy and salty, colleagues who have never eaten fresh Buddha jumping off the wall even threatened: "If this is the taste of Buddha jumping off the wall, I will never eat it."
It can be seen that when we evaluate cans, we always have the mentality of "after all, it is a can" or "isolation can eat well", as long as the taste is not too bad, the price is not too expensive, the evaluation will not be low.
At the end of the day, it's that we don't expect much from canning, but we just use it as a way to hoard goods, a meal that can deal with the rations of the past. The culture of "not getting bored" and the attachment to "freshness" are once again subtly fulfilled in us.
But in the past two months, we have realized the importance of hoarding goods, and in addition to the need for frequent procurement of fresh food, we are willing to sacrifice some pyrotechnics, make concessions on the sense of taste, and use enough energy to prepare for emergencies.
You eat or don't eat, the cans are there, at least it won't make you hungry, it's also a spiritual need.
Canned, better than we thought
Domestic consumers generally have a relatively cold attitude towards canned food, and another major reason is "untimely".
Canned food in the modern sense originated in the Napoleonic era, solving the problem that army food is not easy to transport over long distances.
The earliest domestic canned food in the mainland was the tempeh mud carp in 1893, and the real rapid development of the canned food industry was after 1949. Catalyzed by military needs, domestic canned production increased more than 15-fold in 1953.
▲ Image from: Figureworm
In the era of scarcity, canning was a luxury in the hearts of many people. Actor Chen Chong recalls his days in the film crew in 1979 and has forgotten how to spend his eighteenth birthday at that time, but remembers that he was very envious of the actors in the same group who often had canned lunch meat.
In the early 1990s, sales of canned food reached a small peak in the domestic market. People regard canned meat as a New Year's item, and canned fruit as a condolence to the sick.
▲ Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Around 2003, canned food was inexplicably labeled with preservatives, no nutrition, not fresh, etc.; at the other end, greenhouse planting technology brought a stable supply of fruit and grain, the vegetable market operated in an orderly manner, logistics cold chain, fresh e-commerce, convenient fast food, takeaway developed rapidly, and canned food further lost the soil for survival.
From a health perspective, canned food is the product of industrialization, and its mission is to preserve fresh food for a long time. The reason why it can be stored for a long time is mainly due to vacuum sealing and strict sterilization, and most of the canned food does not need to add preservatives.
At the nutritional level, after being canned by high temperature sterilization, fat-soluble vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, etc. are not easy to lose. However, vegetables and fruits are best eaten fresh, and their water-soluble vitamins are easily lost.
Therefore, in terms of preservatives and nutrition, the problem of canning is not big.
The main problems with canning are high salt, sugar or oil. Canned fruits with high sugar content and canned meat with high salt content should not be consumed in excess for a long time; try to choose canned food soaked in water or olive oil to avoid canned food soaked in sugar and refined seed oil.
▲ Image courtesy of Shutterstock
When epidemic prevention became the norm, canned food found its place in the "encirclement" of fresh food, takeaway, etc.
Not only that, in order to capture the "fresh supremacy, from time to time do not eat" of the Chinese people, canned food brands riding the east wind of new consumption, rushing to the direction of youth, trend, and health.
Among the 11 canned dishes evaluated by Aifaner, there is a low-fat chicken breast lunch meat, which is the lowest calorie of all cans, seasoned with black pepper, and not as salty as the general lunch meat, and can even be tasted empty, which we rated as the most "new consumption" canned food.
On this level, it triumphs over traditional lunch meat.
There are many examples of such "new consumption".
Merlin's Sixi Balls, Plum Vegetable Button Meat, and Eight Treasure Rice are canned Chinese dishes, which fit the fashionable concept of pre-made dishes, while Merlin launched the "One Food for One" canned series to conform to the rising single economy.
Li Ziqi's "Ginseng Black Bone Chicken Soup" and "Yam Barley Old Duck Soup" canned, 8 minutes of self-heating, suitable for staying up late overtime, traveling crowds and so on.
Lin Jia Shop launched a canned yellow peach known as "eating sugar freely" and "sugar control zero fat", which is convenient and fast to poke at healthy pain points. Although some of the white sugar is replaced by sugar substitutes, white sugar still ranks third in the ingredient list.
To this day, our demand for efficiency has not changed, and it has reached a more subtle point, and in the convenience of looking for some added value about health and nutrition, even if it is just an illusion.
Canning once symbolized the prosperity of the food industry. In the United States in the 1950s, the post-war economic recovery led people to work, and ovens, cans, microwave ovens, and vending machines eliminated cooking steps and reinvented people's dinners.
Similarly, the B-end business of canning is booming. Liu Youqian, chairman of the China Canned Food Industry Association, pointed out that canned food has played an active role in the catering industry in recent years:
Canned meat represented by lunch meat has increased year by year under the impetus of hot pot; porridge products have changed from being boiled by former catering enterprises to being centralized by canned enterprises for sale to restaurants; the popularity of Western food has led to the sales of canned mushrooms, asparagus, ketchup, tuna and other canned foods.
We have never turned away from the can, and the commercial civilization and consumerism that the can represents.
Hoarding canned food for a bottom-up life
One theory about canned food is that canned food has been industrialized to create a "food pantry" that can be eaten in all seasons, including vegetable gardens in June, orchards in August, the deliciousness of the sea, and the freshness of the land.
In disaster prevention scenarios, the act of hoarding cans is not only against the seasons and regions, but also against impermanence and scarcity.
In Japan, where natural disasters are frequent, people tend to plan the number of emergency foods according to the number of households, and even canned products with a shelf life of 25 years.
In 2018, U.S. retailer Costco launched the "Doomsday Canned Package," which ranges from more than $1,000 to more than $8,000 to prevent natural disasters and nuclear weapons attacks, and the pandemic has made this "can of doom" famous.
▲ Image courtesy of Costco
One of the most expensive packages can cater to a family of 4 for a year with a shelf life of up to 25-30 years.
Domestic canning merchants have also recently played the banners of "doomsday survival rations", "family material reserves", "emergency survival food sets", etc., and even divided into basic editions, deluxe editions, and high-end editions recommended to consumers.
"With grain in hand, do not panic in your heart", we often hear this sentence in the post-epidemic era, and gradually have a stronger sense of disaster prevention.
Canned food has never been a big hit in China, but it is still not outdated today.
▲ Image courtesy of Unsplash
As an industrial standard, canned food may be a consumption degradation compared to ready-made dishes, but it is about the most basic survival, the guarantee of daily life, and the preservation of more possibilities for the future, just for our needs today.
Veteran canned food consumer "Big Coconut" told Aifan that the standard for his hoarding of canned food is cheap bowls:
Taking canned curry as an example, the hoarding price is about 8 yuan, which is cheaper, more hygienic, sufficient and controllable quality than takeaway.
Big Coconut has a three-month ration all year round, and in addition to continuing to stock up on canned food, he also stockpiles more frozen foods and seasonings. This habit did not arise from the epidemic, but has been formed when studying abroad:
"At that time, I was busy with my studies, often too late to eat, took time to eat out, lived in a place with a cemetery, had to consider the zombie crisis (fog), and the family usually stocked more than 3 months of drinking water and instant/frozen food, as well as some survival tools such as multi-purpose sabers, water purification straws, grenade launchers, etc."
In Aifan's evaluation of 11 kinds of cans, the editors want to maintain a better quality of life through cans.
In addition to cheap, cost-effective cans, they are also willing to stock up on special cans with ingredients that are not easy to handle or have enough flavors, such as canned abalone for more than 50 yuan and lemon chicken with different evaluations.
In addition, "it looks like a freshly made dish" is also an important criterion. Seeing the fat, lean, fragrant pieces of meat instead of minced meat in the can is enough for the editors to shine and sigh.
Everyone is looking forward to returning to normal life, if not for the time being, then try to find a daily feeling from adequate preparation.
While hoarding goods, many people still use the form of planting vegetables on the balcony to write about the stubbornness of green leafy vegetables, so as to get close to the soil. Maybe when they turned their heads, they saw metal cans on display in the corner, carrying fruits and vegetables from some distant farm.