You’ve been counting down the days and it’s finally here! As you undoubtedly know, February is National Canned Food Month! Actually, there’s a very good chance that you did not know that February is canned food month, and that you don’t even know what that entails. Are you supposed to eat nothing but canned foods for the entirety of the month? Do you hang socks above the fire place and wait for them to be stuffed with apple-pie filling and creamed corn?
You don’t really have to do anything for National Canned Food Month. If you want, you can restock your pantry with canned goods, or make a donation to a food bank, or you can simply take the opportunity to appreciate how incredible canned food really is.
The canning process keeps foods fresh longer. Before we started pumping our produce full of preservatives and transporting it on refrigerated trucks, keeping food fresh was a big deal. If you wanted to ship peaches from one end of the country to the other without them going bad, you’d have to can them. In fact, the whole process of canning food was developed during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, in order to feed the troops. He knew that armies march on their stomachs.
Canning is still important today as it makes foods less perishable, and allows them to be transported and stored easily. Canned foods are also typically less expensive, making it easier for more families to get the nutrients they need in order to be healthy.
It’s easy to take canned foods for granted. When we walk through the grocery store aisles or glance in our pantry we simply see easily accessible food. We don’t often think about how remarkable canned food is, and the process required to make canned food readily available.
Canned foods wouldn’t be possible without the use of servomotors. Well, it would be possible, but not on the mass-scale that we can food today. It’s estimated that consumers go through 124 billion cans of food each year. There is no way that demand could be met without servomotors and industrial automation.
In fact, while some food processors still use induction motors, it is the servo motor that brings the speed and accuracy that makes canned foods a cheap alternative. So celebrate canned foods this month, but celebrate servos, too.