“KITCHEN CRAFTERS”:
CANNING, FEMINISM, AND THE VALUE OF ‘WOMEN’S WORK’

by

Jessica Pikkarainen
B.A., Thompson Rivers University, 2013

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
GENDER STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
August 2020

© Jessica Pikkarainen, 2020

ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the enthusiasm and motivations for home canning in the twenty-first
century within the context of the DIY movement of the 1990s and the current urban
homesteading movement. Using interdisciplinary methodological approaches, including
feminist history, feminist auto/biography, and autoethnography, the author provides
historical background on home canning and homesteading in Canada and the United States;
she also uses her own lived experiences of canning and gardening while pursing an MA in
Gender Studies to analyze choice feminism. This thesis examines criticisms of the current
interest in home canning by journalists, and the reactions of canning/urban homesteading
bloggers to those articles. Ultimately this thesis argues that canning is a valuable skill and
that feminism and foodwork are not incompatible; furthermore, blogging about canning and
urban homesteading is breaking down the divide between the public and private spheres by
providing an income for some bloggers through advertising and book deals.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ iv
DEDICATION ...................................................................................................................................... v
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1

Methodology ........................................................................................................................ 4
An Introduction to My Feminist Auto/biography ......................................................................... 10

Literature Review ............................................................................................................. 12
Critiquing the Past/Present Dichotomy and the Term “Urban Homesteading” ........ 16
Overview of Chapters ....................................................................................................... 25
CHAPTER ONE................................................................................................................................. 29

The Enduring Power of Little House on the Prairie ....................................................... 36
CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................................................... 47

“New Domesticity” or “Punk Domesticity?” .................................................................. 55
Canning, Creativity, and Community ............................................................................. 61
CHAPTER THREE: Urban Homesteading, Blogging, and the Constraints of Choice ............... 69
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 86
CANNING IN THE TIME OF COVID: AN AFTERWARD ........................................................ 90
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................. 92

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you, Kristen Guest, for your belief, your encouragement, your patience, and your
insightful ideas. Thank you for helping me see this through, and for your thoughts on what I
should do next in my life.
Dawn Hemingway and Michel Bouchard – thank you for your positive comments on my
writing abilities, they meant the world to me. Thank you for your perceptive and constructive
comments that encouraged me to push further; your ideas helped me see what I was missing,
and I am grateful for that.
Undine – you are a rock in my life; thank you for going through the last few years with me.
Thank you for your kindness and encouragement.
Katherine – you are my feminist soulmate.
Susan – for being there when everything fell apart and helping me put the pieces back
together.
Ren – for being a queer feminist sewist and lover of food, let’s make more strawberry fig jam
together.
Thank you, Becky, for caring for your mother, my mother in law; you went through
something no university student should have to go through and you were an incredible
example of strength, grace, kindness, and love. Your caring work should be more than a
footnote in my thesis. Go write a memoir!
Thank you, Aaron, for the life we have built together, and for telling me that I should keep
on going and that all my work is valuable. I love you.

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DEDICATION

For Graeme and Matias
My sun, moon, and stars
May we always dig
In the garden
Together

And to my mother, mother-in-law,
Grandmother, aunts, cousins, and
My friends’ mothers:
I am sorry that your foodwork
Was/is not always valued
And was/is so often taken for granted
Thank you for the delicious food,
The love, the memories,
And the skills you passed on

And to my Dad
For teaching me to
Never, ever, ever, ever give up

1

INTRODUCTION
Rows of jelly glasses sparkling ruby and topaz in the sun; jars of plump pickled
peaches studded with pungent cloves, little pots of golden marmalade – these on the
pantry shelf, like hand-worked linens on the table, are homemade for the modern
household. Maybe you don’t need to put up fruit as grandmother did in order to feed
the family during the winter months. Maybe arithmetic proves that you can buy good
commercial products for less than the cost of home canning. But you want the fun of
saying, as you pass the breakfast jam, “Yes, I made it myself.”1
“I made it myself:” this proud statement from a 1947 cookbook resonates in the
twenty-first century with the resurgent popularity of home canning. New cookbooks and
blogs dedicated to the topic are continually being published as canning enthusiasts discover,
or rediscover, the art of DIY food preservation. Home canners are motivated by a desire to
carry on a family tradition, learn a new creative and useful skill, preserve produce from their
gardens or farmer’s markets, and eschew massed produced canned goods. Some canners take
the practice a step further by pursuing urban homesteading as a full or part time career.
Several of the bloggers to be discussed in this thesis quit jobs outside the home and forged a
career inside the home by pursuing urban homesteading activities and writing blogs and
manuals on the topic. While there certainly are men who can and preserve,2 most canning
cookbooks and blogs are authored by women; therefore, this thesis will focus on the ways
female gender roles are entrenched and contested through home canning and urban
homesteading.
The current interest in domestic arts is not without controversy, and I will analyze
reactions to the trend in media publications as well as the countering responses from canning
1
Woman’s Home Companion, The Woman’s Home Companion Cook Book (New York: P. F. Collier & Son
Corporation, 1947), 861.
2
See Kevin West, Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving (New York:
Alfred A Knopf, 2013); and Joel MacCharles, coauthor of the blog Well Preserved.

2

and urban homesteading bloggers to those critiques. I will also examine third wave feminist
perspectives on home making and use the theory of choice feminism to discuss the
implications of turning domestic pursuits into a full-time career. This thesis will address the
following questions: how does nostalgia for preserved food construct memories of mothers
and grandmothers? How is gender and domesticity being redefined by a new generation of
DIY-ers?3 Is choosing to can and urban homestead a feminist and political act, or is it a
return to traditional gender roles? Ultimately, I will argue that home preserving is a valuable
skill and that feminism and foodwork are not incompatible; the performance of gender
through preserving is not necessarily traditional, nor should it be viewed as a blind adherence
to feminine ideals.
The foodwork of canning and preserving is a form of “doing gender”. 4 The groundbreaking concept of gender as an everyday performance was first put forward by Candace
West and Don H. Zimmerman; they argue that gender is a production, a “routine, methodical,
and recurring accomplishment…doing gender involves a complex of socially guided
perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as
expressions of masculine and feminine "natures.”5 In one sense, canning can be viewed as a
production and an expression of traditional ideals of femininity, womanhood, and
motherhood that involve taking care of one’s family and nurturing them with homemade

The website Gender Spectrum defines gender identity as “our deeply held, internal sense of self as
masculine, feminine, a blend of both, neither, or something else.” Gender expression is defined as “how we
present our gender in the world and how society, culture, community, and family perceive, interact with, and
try to shape our gender. Gender expression is also related to gender roles and how society uses those roles to
try to enforce conformity to current gender norms.” Gender Spectrum, “The Language of Gender,” (accessed
August 31, 2020) https://www.genderspectrum.org/articles/language-of-gender.
4
See Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (June 1987): 125151.
5
West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” 126.
3

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food. Thus, the worry arises that preserving is a throwback to the past when women were
‘tied’ to the kitchen and cooking was knotted to their identities. In this regard, canning is an
expression of the “essential natures” of women as culturally constructed by society.
However, this is an incomplete picture of canning in the twenty-first century. In their
work to develop a feminist approach to food and a feminist food politics, Kate Cairns and
Josee Johnston argue that:
on the one hand, it requires an acknowledgement of enduring feminist issues of
structure and patriarchy – the structural and cultural inequalities that devalue
femininity and oppress women. On the other hand, it requires a simultaneous
appreciation for women’s desires and pleasures in the domestic sphere – a key insight
of third-wave feminists, as well as a generation of born-again canners, pickle-makers,
and cupcake bakers. 6
My third wave feminist approach to canning will strive to achieve these goals. It will
acknowledge that canning is a form of gender identity that adheres to traditional views of
women as homemakers; food preservation has long been the purview of women and Mason
jars represent a symbol of femininity. It cannot be ignored that home canning is enmeshed in
conventional gender principles that associate women with unpaid foodwork and caring for
their families. Canning has the potential to place further burdens on women’s shoulders in a
cultural climate that puts “homemade” and “natural” on a pedestal.
However, I doubt many home canners would consider their Mason jars as burdens;
rather, as is evident from numerous blog posts, they take pride in their culinary prowess of
knowing how to preserve food. Numerous women also grow the fruit and vegetables that
they use for canning. There is a great divide between the workplace and the home in society,
and activities that contribute to the well-being of the home are still not viewed as valuable.

6

Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston, Food and Femininity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 163.

4

Home canners and urban homesteaders are challenging this sentiment by making more
household and pantry items at home. Domestic tasks are being rediscovered and reclaimed as
more and more women view them not as drudgery, but as useful and enjoyable skills that are
on the verge of being lost in a consumeristic culture.
Methodology
I am a student in two respects: I am a student of academia and I am a student of
preserving and urban gardening. 7 Throughout the course of researching and writing this
thesis I have absorbed a wealth of information about preserving and gardening from the
blogs, cookbooks, and homesteading manuals that I have studied. I have analyzed these texts
for the purpose of investigating my topic, and then I have gone back to them when I need a
recipe for strawberry fig jam. My copper jam pan and the miniature size canner that I found
at a thrift store are two of my prized possessions. I bring lived experience to my research and
part of my methodology is placing myself in my writing by acknowledging that I am not
removed from what I am investigating. Claire Snyder argues that “third-wave feminists
rightly reject the universalist claim that all women share a set of common experiences, but
they do not discard the concept of experience altogether. Women still look to personal
experiences to provide knowledge about how the world operates and to trouble dominant
narratives about how things should be. Indeed, the personal story constitutes one of the
central hallmarks of third-wave feminism.”8 I have been guided through this process by
feminist auto/biography and reflexivity, and autoethnography.

I describe my own outdoor work as “urban gardening” for two reasons: one, I live within city limits and I have
no animals. All I do is garden. Two, continuing to use the term “homesteading” in the present romanticizes the
era of colonialism that took away land from Indigenous peoples. I will expand on this further later in the
introduction and in Chapter One.
8
Claire Snyder, “What is Third-Wave Feminism? A New Directions Essay,” Signs 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2008): 184.
7

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In defining feminist auto/biography and reflexivity, Gayle Letherby highlights the
work of sociologists Liz Stanley and C. Wright Mills who argued that the researcher is not
removed from what she/he is studying; our pasts, backgrounds, and interests inevitably shape
our work. 9 Letherby argues that “respondents as well as researchers are reflexive, theorizing
individuals. Reflexivity – both descriptive (the description of one’s reflection) and analytical
(involving comparison and evaluation) – are essential parts of the research process and both
researchers and respondents engage in it.”10 My background is white, working class, small
town, and conservative Christian. My family had a huge garden every year and my mom
made exquisite canned peaches that were globes of summertime captured in a jar. I have yet
to master her technique. My mom, my aunts, and my friends’ moms were almost all stay at
home mothers and families with four children were common in my world. My interest in
researching gender studies and feminism stems from the desire to unlearn much of what I
was taught growing up. My interest in canning and gardening stems from a desire to relearn
much of what I was taught growing up. I cannot discuss home canners and urban
homesteaders and pretend that I am sitting outside of this world. The feminist
auto/biographic aspect of this thesis involves critically reflecting on aspects of my past and
present life while respectively analyzing and sharing the stories of other home gardeners and
canners.
Autoethnography is a similar interdisciplinary approach that also questions if
objective research is truly attainable and argues that all researchers bring their own history

Gayle Letherby, “Feminist Auto/Biography,” in The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory, eds. Mary Evans, et al.
(London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2014), 45-46. She further argues that “feminists are concerned with who has
the right to know, the nature and value of knowledge and feminist knowledge within this, the relationship
between the methods chosen, how they are used and the ‘knowledge’ produced,” 46. See also Sandra
Harding, Feminism and Methodology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2008).
10
Letherby, “Feminist Auto/Biography,” 50.
9

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and personal experiences into their studies. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner assert that
“autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates
subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher’s influence on research, rather than hiding from
these matters or assuming they don’t exist. 11 As an undergraduate I did not know what
autoethnography was, but I always wanted to know why my professors were drawn to their
area of chosen study. I assumed there had to be a personal reason lurking on the edges. When
I began to write my thesis proposal, I knew that I could not analyze the resurging interest in
home canning without investigating my past and my own motives for wanting to preserve
and garden. Ellis, Adams, and Bochner explain that “a researcher uses tenets of
autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method,
autoethnography is both process and product.” A “process and product,” or product of a
process, is exactly how I would describe this thesis.
My academic training has been primarily in the humanities and my research for this
thesis has also been guided by my work in feminist history. Australian feminist historian Joy
Damousi articulates that feminist history plays a vital role in explaining and critiquing
current events and social problems. She argues, “in providing a historical context for
contemporary events[…], feminist historians will continue to play an enhanced role beyond
the academy and engage with events and occasions of social, political and cultural
importance.”12 Throughout this thesis I will provide historical context for the current interest
in canning and homesteading and disrupt grand narratives concerning canning in the past
versus the present, and canning for necessity versus pleasure. I will also critique the term

11
Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Historical Social
Research 36, no. 4 (2011): 274.
12
Joy Damousi, “Does Feminist History Have a Future?” Australian Feminist Studies 29, no. 80 (2014): 200.

7

‘urban homesteading’ and its colonial underpinnings. I approach my topic as a feminist
historian who desires to “historicize the present”13 by documenting and critiquing a current
movement before the blogs I have analyzed begin to disappear or not be updated.
When I began my first year of university as a social history major, I was amazed and
thrilled that the seemingly mundane aspects of life, such as food and cooking, had become
worthy of academic enquiry. As Ludmilla Jordanova explains, “if social history is an
approach, then it can be connected with the conviction that the lives of ordinary people, not
just elites, should be studied; that weight should be given to lived experience; that complex
relationships between people, no matter what kind, should be explored; that whatever
phenomena societies throw up should be investigated historically.”14 In this thesis
cookbooks, urban homesteading manuals, and food blogs – the work of “ordinary people” are used as primary sources. Cookbooks are a more unique but vital resource when studying
gender roles. The forwards of canning and homesteading cookbooks and the long prefaces
before each recipe contain some of the most valuable information for my research. They
reveal the authors’ memories of, and motivations for, home canning; its significance in their
lives; and their thoughts on canning as a sustainable living practice. Popular food and urban
homesteading blogs have also proven to be an outstanding resource - many home cooks have
shared their heartfelt feelings on why they preserve, and why they believe it is still relevant
in the twenty-first century.
I had many questions that I thought could only be answered through conducting
interviews; however, the authors of blogs and even cookbooks have satisfied most of my
queries. Paula M. Salvio argues that “Beyond displaying and enacting food-centered stories,
13
14

Damousi, “Does Feminist History Have a Future?,” 200.
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, 2nd Edition (London: Hodder Education, 2006), 43.

8

food blogs also invite the reader to participate in the life of the blog— and the blogger—
more readily than any related medium (cookbooks, food magazines, cooking shows) ever
has.” 15 Blogs are quickly becoming a new resource for researchers in the humanities and
social sciences. An endless stream of intriguing sources is at the fingertips of any scholar,
and they offer a cost-effective method for conducting research. 16
There are problems with studying blogs, one of them being the overwhelming
number of sources available. It is easy to get sucked into what Nicholas Hookway describes
as the “black hole of the blogosphere.”17 A challenge I have faced is having to conquer the
feeling that I am missing something – that the perfect blog or article is still out there, and I
have yet to find it. To overcome this hurdle I chose blogs that contain regular content, are
still being updated – with a few exceptions - and have a steady readership based on their
number of followers on social media. Several of these bloggers have also published
cookbooks. The overarching factor for choosing a blog was finding a post where the blogger
reflects on her own choices for canning and/or urban homesteading, or on her memories of
participating in these activities.
Letherby’s writing on feminist auto/biography has also informed how I approach my
method of using blogs as research. She articulates that,
Feminist auto/biographical work…acknowledges the relationship between the self
and the other within research and writing. Theorized subjectivity takes this
responsibility seriously by not privileging the voice of the researcher/writer over that
of respondents, constantly reflecting on the process/product relationship within

Paula M. Salvio, “Dishing It Out: Food Blogs and Post-Feminist Domesticity,” Gastronomica 12, no. 3 (Fall
2012): 31.
16
See Nicholas Hookway, “‘Entering the blogosphere’: Some Strategies for Using Blogs in Social Research,”
Qualitative Research 8, no. 1 (2008): 92.
17
Hookway, “Entering the Blogosphere,” 98.
15

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research and acknowledging and taking responsibility for differential power relations
within the research process and in terms of editorship and representation. 18
My “respondents,” as they would be called in a traditional interviewing process, are
the cookbook authors and bloggers whose words I am using as primary sources and I do not
want my voice to overshadow theirs. The bloggers do not know that I am using their words
in this thesis. Blog posts are published in the public domain, but as Kurtz et, al. note, “the
unclear boundaries between blogs as spaces for private reflection versus as content for public
consumption have ethical implications of interest for social scientists pursing research in
online environments.”19 Food blogs are written for the purpose of sharing recipes and they
often contain lengthy introductions of personal reflection that are meant to be consumed
along with the results of the recipe. However, I am still respectful of the fact that their
authors never intended for their writing to be featured in an academic study.
Also, blogs obscure the power relations of gender, class, and race. I cannot assume to
know the gender identity, economic background, or ethnicity of any of the bloggers – or
cookbook authors. Commentators who know the blogger personally can help provide clues;
for example, the author of the blog Grow and Resist does not reveal any identifying
information about her/himself, however a handle of commentators refer to this blogger as
Meg. I was also able to discover through reading comments that she/he is proudly queer.20
Throughout this thesis I will introduce bloggers and cookbook/homesteading authors by what
they have written about themselves in their “About Me” sections and introductions.

Letherby, “Feminist Auto/Biography,” 53.
Liza C. Kurt, et al., “Blogs as Elusive Ethnographic Texts: Methodological and Ethical Challenges in Qualitative
Online Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16 (2017): 7-8.
20
“Meg,” “Homestead Act 2.0,” Grow and Resist (blog),
https://growandresist.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/homestead-act-2-0/.
18
19

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An Introduction to My Feminist Auto/biography
For her book Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes interviewed men and women in
New England who were embarking on homemaking as a career.21 One of her interviewees,
Susan, had recently graduated from a prestigious private college and felt disillusioned with
climbing the ladder of success as defined by her parents and society. She was also
questioning what possibly rejecting it meant for her as a feminist.22 Hayes writes that she
wanted to tell Susan that “working alone or with a partner to create a nurturing home is not
antithetical to progress. Indeed, in a time of climate crisis, peak oil, and worldwide economic
and social unrest, it may be the only thing that saves us. It is possible to be a feminist and to
can tomatoes.”23 However, Hayes explains that she did not share these thoughts with Susan
because at the time Hayes herself was “still trying to figure out what it means to be not just a
homemaker, but a Radical Homemaker. How might I advocate for a meaningful and
sustainable domestic life without inadvertently condoning the further subjugation of
women?”24 I have asked myself similar questions throughout the research and writing
process of this thesis. Growing up, the unpaid and unending work I saw my mother, friends’
mothers, and aunts carry out in the home had little appeal to me.25 However, when it came
time to decide on a thesis topic I knew I wanted to give value to their foodwork and explore

Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Richmondville, NY:
Left to Write Press, 2010), 1.
22
Hayes, Radical Homemakers, 1-5.
23
Hayes, Radical Homemakers, 5.
24
Hayes, Radical Homemakers, 5.
25
Cooking and baking were the exceptions. I learned how to cook as a young girl and I have always loved
looking at cookbooks and trying new recipes. However, I was fully aware that cooking was “women’s work” in
the community I grew up in; at family gatherings and church events women did all the cooking and cleaning.
21

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if it was possible for women like myself, in the words of Hayes, to be “tomato-canning
feminists.”26
I am not a “born again” home canner, as Cairns and Johnston call those who have
taken up this domestic art; I am the oldest of four children born to a mother of Mennonite
heritage and I began helping with the cooking and canning at a very young age. I am,
however, a “born again” feminist; I was trained to be a homemaker but wanted nothing more
than to attend university and have a career. Discovering feminism and women’s history were
two of the most illuminating moments of my life. As an undergraduate student I presented
papers at conferences, chaired a conference, worked as a research assistant, and overall
relished four years of studying topics that interested me. I wish I could say that I also blazed
through graduate school but here I am, several years later, still finishing up my degree.
Throughout this process I have gone through the major life events of having children,
moving to a new town, buying a house, and losing my mother in law and my father.
I now find myself with a preschooler, a baby, a garden, and a pantry shelf lined with
jars of jam and pickles, wondering how this all fits with a Master’s degree in Gender Studies.
In the opening paragraph to her housekeeping manual Home Comforts Cheryl Mendelson
reveals, “I am a working woman with a secret life: I keep house.”27 She is a philosopher, a
lawyer, and a professor in public; in private she enjoys organizing and taking care of her
home. She notes how “until now, I have almost entirely concealed this passion for
domesticity…without thinking about it, I knew I would not want this information about me
to get around. After all, I belong to the first generation of women who worked more than

26
27

Hayes, Radical Homemakers, 1.
Cheryl Mendelson, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House (New York: Scribner, 1999), 3.

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they stayed home.”28 In my academic world, my “secret life” is that I married very young, I
chose to have kids in the middle of my degree in gender studies, and I enjoy spending days at
home being domestic. In my world of moms and babies my “secret life” is that I am trying to
finish a Master’s degree.
These competing sides of who I am is a conflict that I will explore in greater depth
through my discussion of choice feminism in chapter three. Claire Snyder-Hall states that,
“In my view, feminism cannot tell any woman how to resolve her internal conflicts, but it
does ask each woman to reflect on her own desires and seriously consider how her choices
might play a role in propping up or calling into question the sex/gender system.”29 As a
feminist scholar I will study these conflicts and contradictions by placing myself within the
argument and analyzing my own choices regarding canning, urban homesteading, and
careers inside and outside the home.
Literature Review
In their 2005 anthology on feminist food studies, Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara
Haber observed that “until recently…few scholars in food studies brought a gendered or
feminist perspective to their work on food, and feminist scholars focused only on women’s
food pathologies.”30 The interdisciplinary fields of food studies and gender and women’s
studies were separate entities in academe; the former rarely meaningfully studied women,
and the latter dismissed cooking as “merely a marker of patriarchal oppression and,

Mendelson, Home Comforts, 3.
Claire Snyder-Hall, “Third-Wave Feminism and the Defense of “Choice”,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1
(March 2010): 259.
30
Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, “Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History,” in From Betty Crocker to
Feminist Food Studies, edited by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber (Amherst: U of Massachusetts Press,
2005), 2.
28
29

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therefore, not worthy of attention.”31 In the late 1990s scholars increasingly embarked on
research that combined both disciplines, and the subfield of food and gender studies was
established. Anthropologist Carole M. Counihan led the way in studying food, culture and
gender in her field,32 sociologist Marjorie DeVault wrote a seminal book on the caring work
that women perform by feeding their families,33 and social historian Sherrie A. Inness has
produced several articles and books on gender, cooking, and kitchen culture in the United
States.34 Avakian and Haber provide a thorough history of the major works in food and
gender studies in the introduction to their anthology. The following literature review will
highlight new Canadian and American studies on food and feminism, food and nostalgia, and
canning and urban homesteading.
Feminist food studies is now a bourgeoning field in Canada with sociologists Kate
Cairns and Josée Johnston leading the way in studying the intricacies between food, gender,
class, and race. Cairns and Johnston’s recent book, Food and Femininity, works towards a
feminist food politics by investigating the relationship between women and shopping for
food, cooking for their families, eating healthy – but not too healthy - and cooking for
pleasure. They argue that “for a woman to ignore food is to risk being deemed a failure,
pushed outside the boundaries of hegemonic femininity.”35 Their female interviewees felt
the pressure of providing nourishing – and if they could afford it, organic – meals for their
families. In their conclusion Cairns and Johnston ask,

Avakian and Haber, “Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History,” 2.
See for example, Carole M. Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Food and Gender: Identity and Power,
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998.
33
Marjorie DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991.
34
See for example, Sherrie A. Inness, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture, Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2001.
35
Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 174.
31
32

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While a feminist food politics builds on women’s experiences with food, it also pays
keen attention to broader food struggles. This dual commitment requires that we ask
difficult questions of the collectivity: Who has the creativity, the care, the resources,
and the commitment to cook up a “good” dinner? (That is sustainable, healthy,
socially just, and delicious?) If the answer to this question is mainly “women” – and,
in particular, privileged groups of women – then a feminist food politics clearly has
work to do.36
The questions they ask are similar to the ones I am asking about home food preservation.
Cultural and economic resources have aided many urban homesteading ventures, and several
op-eds specifically discuss the highly educated, white, and middle-class women who are
taking up the domestic arts. 37
The twenty-first century urban homesteading phenomenon is only beginning to
receive academic attention; however, Brenda Park and Oona Morrow’s recent study on urban
homesteading and intensive mothering in the United States provides a vital starting point for
my work in this area. They interviewed urban homesteaders with children for their study and
they argue that “because of the types of labor that homesteading simultaneously demands
and celebrates – it may reinforce the ideology of intensive, elite motherhood and gendered
labor, even as homesteading mothers tend to describe their lives in terms of care, pleasure,
and choice.”38 Parker and Morrow found that mothers were more responsible for foodwork
and the addition of a child to the family was often the moment when women began to take on
homesteading activities.39 Furthermore, the majority of their interviewees were white, welleducated, and heterosexual, and Parker and Morrow address how these urban homesteaders

Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 173-174.
See for example, Peggy Orenstein, “The Femivore’s Dilemma,” The New York Times, March 11, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/magazine/14fob-wwln-t.html?_r=0.
38
Brenda Parker and Oona Morrow, “Urban Homesteading and Intensive Mothering: (Re)gendering Care and
Environmental Responsibility in Boston and Chicago,” Gender, Place & Culture (2017): 4.
39
Parker and Morrow, “Urban Homesteading and Intensive Mothering,” 6.
36
37

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can cause the “Othering” of mothers who do not fit this demographic and lifestyle. They
explain, “In our study, urban homesteaders often viewed themselves as leaders, teachers, and
role models, pointing out that there were people ‘admiring us and the chickens.’”40 While I
respectfully disagree with some of their statements, their work is extremely useful for
illuminating the elitism that can go along with home food preservation and how it can
become a status symbol of the ‘correct’ way of doing gender and foodwork.
Danille Elise Christensen’s essay on Southern home canning is a celebration of
women who preserve their own food; her research is intermingled with photographs of rows
of canning at county fairs, fully stocked root cellars, and women happily canning fresh fruit.
She discusses how much public commentary on canning “emphasizes creativity and choice
in canning’s (urban) present, but compulsion and need in its (rural) past.”41 Her research
challenges this rather ignorant assumption by highlighting the fact that many rural, working
class, and farming women simply love to can - in the present and in the past. Christensen
notes that she does not “intend to romanticize the hardships that have accompanied home
food production: during the 1930s, one sharecropper’s wife described late summer canning
as “a woman’s hardest time,” hot work piled onto everyday tasks and wedged between
tending the garden and harvesting cotton.” The goal of her work is to acknowledge that for
many rural, farming women canning was not simply a chore that had no aesthetic value. 42
Sociologist Jennifer Braun also studied rural canning by focusing on a small
community in Alberta; she interviewed a parent generation of canners and several of their
children in order to explore how “[canning] practices were sustained or broken

Parker and Morrow, “Urban Homesteading and Intensive Mothering,” 9.
Danille Elise Christensen, “Simply Necessity? Agency and Aesthetics in Southern Home Canning,” Southern
Cultures (Spring 2015): 17.
42
Christensen, “Simply Necessity?,” 18.
40
41

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intergenerationally.”43 For the parent generation, planting a garden and preserving the
surplus was necessary for many of their families due to poverty.44 Even though canning was
a necessity for this generation of participants, this did not mean it was stripped of emotion or
personal satisfaction in a job well done; Braun notes how “the symbolic significance of
having shelves full of canned goods was a symbol of provision and care, and carried great
meaning for them.”45 Braun does contrast the past and the present later in her article by
asserting that canning and gardening is “no longer done for survival, but more for pleasure,
for the sake of continuing a family tradition, or because of an aversion to highly processed
and commercialized food.”46 But she does note how both generations of her participants took
pride in their work and enjoyed seeing their pantries filled with Mason jars, she calls this the
“vital link” between canning in the past and in the present.47
Critiquing the Past/Present Dichotomy and the Term “Urban Homesteading”
A Brief History of Canning
The next few pages will place my study of food preservation and urban homesteading
in its historical context. In May 2013, blogger Valerie Lugonja of A Canadian Foodie
created the Canadian Food Experience Project with the goal of highlighting uniquely
Canadian food, culinary traditions, and food heroes.48 In the fifth challenge Lugonja makes

Jennifer Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices in a Rural Albertan Community,”
Rural Sociology 80, no. 2 (2015): 233.
44
Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices,” 235.
45
Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices,” 236.
46
Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices,” 241.
47
Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices,” 243.
48
Each month for thirteen months Canadian food bloggers were challenged to write a post on a particular
theme. For the fifth installment, “Preserving: Our Canadian Food Tradition,” food bloggers reflected on their
most prominent canning and preserving memories and favourite recipes. Valerie Lugonja, “Announcing The
Canadian Food Experience Project,” A Canadian Foodie (blog), May 6, 2013,
https://www.acanadianfoodie.com/2013/05/06/announcing-the-canadian-food-experience-project/.
43

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the argument that “preserving food is fundamental to our Canadian food heritage.”49 Her
argument is based on the premise that Canada is a winter country, and our ancestors had to
preserve food in order to survive. She muses, “The intrinsic knowledge of one’s food culture
that comes through witnessing the practice of food preservation within the family out of
necessity is fundamental to understanding Canadian food culture, yet now intangible.”50
When preserving blogs and cookbooks reflect on canning’s history in the United States and
Canada there is a common narrative that it was once a necessary task for families to
undertake in order to have food for the winter, but the advent of commercially canned goods
in the early and mid twentieth century provided families with the opportunity to go to the
grocery store rather than their root cellar to obtain preserved foods. These blogs and
cookbooks also mention how women were encouraged to plant “victory gardens” and
preserve the excess during both world wars, as canned food was shipped off to the front lines
to provide food for soldiers. There is an overarching assumption that after World War II
home canning became a more niche activity and ultimately a choice, not a necessity.
The past/present dichotomy of this popular account of home canning is indeed more
complicated. In their article on fabriculture, Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush argue that
the modern definition of time that relegates certain traditions to the past and specific eras is
problematic; “modern linear time is thus a cut that makes an ongoing tradition (one that
might vary in its power and visibility) seem like a “return” to the past.” 51 The narrative of
canning in food blogs often neglects the back to the land movement of the late 1960s and

Valerie Lugonja, “The Canadian Food Experience Project: Round Up Five,” A Canadian Foodie (blog), October
16, 2013, https://www.acanadianfoodie.com/2013/10/16/the-canadian-food-experience-project-round-upfive.
50
Lugonja, “The Canadian Food Experience Project: Round Up Five.”
51
Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush, “Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender,” Utopian
Studies 22, no. 2 (2011): 249-250.
49

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1970s. Canning gained popularity during the counterculture when gardening, preserving, and
other home arts were taken up by like-minded individuals who wanted to shun capitalism and
live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. In the introduction to the 1977 preserving cookbook
Stocking Up, the editor writes, “since organic gardening and farming’s earliest days we have
witnessed a growing need for a book that thoroughly covers the subject of natural food
preservation. That need is at its peak right now, because not since the “Victory Gardens” of
World War II have so many people been raising and preserving so much of their own food as
today.” 52 As the 1970s turned to the 1980s the counterculture faded from prominence, but the
DIY crafting movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s paved the way for canning to be
revived by home cooks and urban homesteaders in the twenty-first century.
In terms of necessity, Braun points out that “canning in the past was inextricably
linked to home gardening and food gathering. Gardens were planted to ensure there was
food, and canning was done so that food would not be wasted. It was expected that every
woman who had land would grow and preserve that food.”53 For rural women, canning was
certainly necessary. Ian Mosby discusses the difference between rural and urban women in
his study of food on Canada’s home front in World War II; during the war sugar for canning
was rationed and rural women voiced their complaints about urban women receiving more
sugar. He explains, “many rural women wondered why areas with the highest domestic
production of fresh fruit were being asked to cut down on their preserving in order to provide
sugar to urban women who had never canned before and who thus would likely either spoil

52
Carol Hupping Stoner, ed. Stocking Up: How to Preserve the Foods You Grow, Naturally (Emmaus, PA:
Rodale Press, 1977), x.
53
Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices,” 241.

19

good fruit through inexperience or simply put the sugar to other uses.”54 Rural women
argued that they did not have the same access to foodstuffs as urban women, and therefore
depended on their gardens and the ability to preserve their fruits and vegetables.55
Published in Winnipeg by the McFayden Seed Company in 1941, the Vegetable Cook
Book encouraged housewives to grow their own vegetable and herb gardens and can the
surplus for eating during the winter. The first half of the cookbook provides detailed
instructions on how to prepare and cook a variety of vegetables, and the second half
discusses canning, pickling, and salads. The introduction to the “Pickles” chapter notes,
“With a good supply of cucumbers, onions, celery, and other such vegetables, right at the
kitchen door as it were, the wise housewife not only cans a quantity of these for winter use,
but makes a number of delicious pickle mixtures.”56 The gardening and preserving skills
expected by a housewife in this cookbook is considerable. Although it was published during
the Second World War, there is no mention of war or victory gardens. The McFayden Seed
Company was targeting the book to their customers who had likely already been planting
gardens for years: “Our job is not complete even when we supply you with our carefully
selected seeds. You have to enjoy them or we do not get repeat orders, and so – our
Vegetable Cook Book; exciting new recipes, as well as standard ways of cooking new
vegetables, prepared especially for us by Canada’s leading dietician and cooking expert.”57
The image of the rural canning farm woman is historically accurate, even if it does
not represent the complete picture of the history of canning. Why is canning viewed as a

Ian Mosby, Food Will Win the War: The Politics, Culture, and Science of Food on Canada’s Home Front
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014), 72.
55
Mosby, Food Will Win the War, 72.
56
McFayden Seed Company, The Vegetable Cook Book (Winnipeg: McFayden Seed Co. Ltd., 1941), 26.
57
McFayden Seed Company, The Vegetable Cook Book, 27.
54

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tradition, and a form of women’s work? While this question is beyond the scope of this
thesis, I will briefly address it here. Canning was invented in 1809 by Nicolas Appert after
Napoleon Bonaparte offered a reward to anyone who could invent a method of preserving
food for his army. Techniques and patents for commercially preserving food in tin cans
quickly followed across Europe and the United States.58 The advent of home canning is
linked to the invention of the Mason jar by John Mason in 185859 and the rise of home
economics in the early twentieth century which strived to teach women scientific methods of
homemaking. Braun notes that “the presence of the Alberta Home Economics Association,
connected to the nearby University of Alberta, existed as a source of information and conduit
for information sharing among home gardeners.”60 Home preserving was also supported on a
national level, several of the women she interviewed still used the old canning pamphlets
they received from the federal Department of Agriculture.
In the United States, the girls’ tomato club movement swept the South in 1910 when
Marie Samuella Cromer created a program that economically benefited farm girls.61 These
young women grew tomatoes, canned them, and sold them for profit; they also kept careful
records of their harvests, canning yields, and plans for what they would do with the money.62
Part of the mandate of the club was for the tomato canners to have control over their own
finances.63 They were the original tomato canning feminists. However, Elizabeth Engelhardt
argues that “as the decades passed and the tomato clubs evolved into more general canning
Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Canning,” Britannica (accessed August 31, 2020)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/canning-food-processing.
59
Anna Goldfarb, “A Short History of the Mason Jar,” The Kitchn, August 29, 2016,
https://www.thekitchn.com/a-short-history-of-the-mason-jar-234146.
60
Braun, “The Making and Breaking of Food Preservation Practices,” 237.
61
Elizabeth Engelhardt, “Canning Tomatoes, Growing “Better and More Perfect Women:” The Girls’ Tomato
Club Movement, Southern Cultures (Winter 2009): 79.
62
Engelhardt, “Canning Tomatoes,” 81.
63
Engelhardt, “Canning Tomatoes,” 83.
58

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clubs and home demonstration programs, war, the Great Depression, and increasing
mechanization of agriculture all changed the politics of rural life in the southern United
States. In contrast to the earliest club messages of empowerment and social change, more
traditional visions of home, family, gender, and economics became ascendant.”64 Perhaps
this played a role in home canning becoming an extension of women’s work in the home,
and not for profit in the outer world of business.
Examining the Terms “Homesteading” and “Urban Homesteading”
Historian Brian Q. Cannon argues that “homesteading has been a malleable concept
that has been used to illustrate and reinforce a variety of ideological and interpretive
messages.” 65 In terms of foodwork, urban – or modern – homesteading is a movement that
involves relying less on the industrial food system and more on what can be grown, raised, or
preserved in one’s own apartment or property. Urban homesteading has philosophical roots
in previous back to the land movements; but instead of packing up a VW van and moving to
the wilderness of British Columbia, modern homesteaders are living out characteristics of
these movements in towns and cities with the belief that even the smallest of spaces can have
room for a few edible plants and Mason jars of homemade food. Michelle Catherine Nelson
explains that “homesteading doesn’t have to be defined by where we live, but rather by the
choices we make. It’s about slowing down and taking the time to do it yourself.”66 But
homesteading is not only about actions, it is also a worldview or frame of mind. Rebecca

Engelhardt, “Canning Tomatoes,” 91.
Brian Q. Cannon, “Homesteading Remembered: A Sesquicentennial Perspective,” Agricultural History 87,
no. 1 (Winter 2013): 2.
66
Michelle Catherine Nelson, The Urban Homesteading Cookbook: Forage, Farm, Ferment and Feast for a
Better World (Madeira Park, Douglas & McIntyre: 2015), 12.
64
65

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Gould points out that homesteading is “a ‘state of mind’ as much as it is a particular set of
practices or a particular level of – ever elusive – self-sufficiency.” 67
In his study of back-to-the-landers, Jeffrey Jacob includes a chapter on “Urban
Pioneers” and asserts that “in a technical sense one does have to live on country property in
order to qualify as a neohomesteader, but back-to-the-land is more than living on a
smallholding. It is also an interrelated complex of values (“a philosophy of how to live your
life”) that centers around the ideas of self-reliance, voluntary simplicity, and mindfulness and
the use of sustainable, soft technologies.”68 It is these qualities that appear in food
preservation blogs and cookbooks; the authors may not necessarily live on and off their own
land, but by canning fruits and vegetables they are eschewing the supermarket to a certain
degree, stocking away food for the winter, giving homemade gifts to friends and family, and
being mindful of what is in their food and where it came from.
Urban homesteaders embrace the domestic arts from food preservation to soap
making to homemade yogurt. An article in the Georgia Straight describes this trend in
Vancouver:
Picture the scene: you arrive at someone’s home to find a selection of home-dried
herbs in the kitchen, handmade soap in the bathroom, and home-brewed beer in the
fridge. Venturing outside, you’re greeted by the gentle clucking of chickens and the
industrious hum of bees. A garden of freshly planted vegetables completes the
picture. You’re not in the Southlands, the Okanagan, or a farm-stay B & B on
Vancouver Island. You’re in East Vancouver, and all of this is happening on a
standard-size plot of land, just steps away from the Commercial Drive SkyTrain
station.69

Rebecca Kneale Gould, “Modern Homesteading in America: Negotiating Religion, Nature, and Modernity,”
Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 3 (1999): 185.
68
Jeffrey Jacob, New Pioneers: The Back-To-The-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future
(University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997), 150.
69
Jessica Werb, “Vancouver's Urban Homesteaders Go Back to the Land,” The Georgia Straight, May 14, 2014,
http://www.straight.com/life/643821/vancouvers-urban-homesteaders-go-back-land.
67

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Rick Havlak opened the Homesteader’s Emporium in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in
2012 and he told The Georgia Straight that the majority of his customers “are maybe 20 to
35, people who live in the city that are just curious and maybe haven’t been exposed to
gardening and living outside…People use the word hipsters a lot, and I’d say that some of
the people that come in belong to that category, but it really is pretty varied.” 70 This age
category corresponds to the age of the back to the landers in the 1970s; once again a
generation of people in their twenties and early thirties are seeking a deeper connection to
nature. One main difference, however, is that this new generation is striving to go ‘back to
the land’ without leaving urban environments.71
The history behind the term “urban homesteading”, as well as the problems with the
continued use of the word “homesteading,” must be examined. The twenty-first century
urban homesteading movement can be traced back to settler dreams of owning and working
one’s own land. In the United States, the Homestead Act of 1862 gave “160 acres of land
free to anyone who would live on the plot and farm it for five years.”72 Although the
Homestead Act gave settlers land, it did not take into account the equipment and supplies
that were needed to begin farming. Furthermore, much of the land in the mid-west was not
suitable for small-scale farming.73 In Canada, homesteaders were also given 160 acres. Sarah
Carter explains that “we think of the term today as synonymous with farming, or generally
establishing a home in a rural area. But in Western Canada (and the U.S. West) the word

Werb, “Vancouver's Urban Homesteaders Go Back to the Land.”
Some urban homesteaders do move to more rural areas to buy property and raise animals. See Antonia
Smith, “The Farm Wife Mystery School: Women's Use of Social Media in the Contemporary North American
Urban Homestead Movement,” Studies in the Education of Adults 47, no. 2 (Autumn 2015): 142-143.
72
David Goldfield, et al., The American Journey: Volume 1 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.,
2009), 559.
73
Goldfield, et al., The American Journey, 559.
70
71

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“homesteader” had a much more specific meaning. It meant that you were located on a free
grant of 160 acres on offer from the federal government. You paid ten dollars to legally
locate there, and you then had to cultivate and live on the land before you legally owned the
land.” 74 Despite the trials and tribulations of homesteading in the West, the image of the
independent pioneer making a life on the land has remained an enduring image in American
and Canadian mythology.75
Homesteading involved the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands by
white settlers, and continuing to use the term “homesteading” in the twenty-first century
should not be done without taking this history into consideration. 76 The only time I found any
reference to the racist history of homesteading in my research was from the author of the
gardening blog Grow and Resist. She engages in homesteading activities and supports many
of the proponents of the urban homesteading movement, but she strongly feels that the term
“homestead” should no longer be used in the twenty-first century. She asserts, “when I hear
‘homestead’ I think manifest destiny & rugged individualism. A bit less resistance & selfsufficiency and more “Get out of our way – we own this place. You know, cuz it’s our Godgiven right. So move along. This is our land now. Mine, mine, mine!” When I think
‘homestead,’ I think racism, colonization and genocide. Not sun-warmed tomatoes, string
beans and kale. There is too much tainted history wrapped up in the term.”77 As a history
major who focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I appreciate the historical

Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian
Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016), xx.
75
See Cannon, “Homesteading Remembered,” 2.
76
Carter, Imperial Plots, xx.
77
“Meg,” “Homestead Act 2.0.”
74

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context and critical analysis that this article brings to the urban homesteading blogosphere.78
History cannot be idealized or oversimplified, and I will discuss this further in Chapter One.
Overview of Chapters
Nostalgia is a strong motivation for canning; many home canners preserve to carry on
family traditions and connect with their past. Grandmothers, mothers, and aunts figure
prominently in many cookbooks and blogs about canning. Food scholar Deborah Lupton
advocates for the value of studying food and memories by asserting that “the analysis of
memories about food serves to reveal the ways in which our memories of everyday life are
socially constructed and patterned, to demonstrate that individual memory of ‘banal’ events
and experiences is not simply the subjective property of individuals but is part of a shared
cultural experience.”79 Canning with relatives, particularly one’s grandmother(s), is a shared
cultural experience for many food preservation bloggers and cookbook authors. By sharing
these memories with their audience, they are recreating this (gendered) cultural experience
and projecting a gender identity onto their female ancestors. Chapter one will analyze the
implications of remembering one’s female ancestors through their foodwork. It will also
discuss the enduring power of one of literature’s most famous mothers: Ma Ingalls.
Chapter two will begin with a discussion of the DIY movement of the 1990s and the
role that BUST Magazine played in making domestic tasks seem useful, cool, and hip.
Canning can be viewed as isolated drudgery – standing over a boiling pot of water for hours
on end during the most sweltering months of the year to preserve food for the winter. The

Sarah Carter’s book Imperial Plots, contains examples of the outright racism of the British colonial mindset.
She asserts, “Prairie Canada was crafted as a colony of the British Empire, and hopes were high for its destiny
as the brightest agricultural jewel in the imperial diadem,” 5.
79
Deborah Lupton, “Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events,” The
Sociological Review (1994): 668.
78

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Mason jar can be seen as a symbol of women’s work in the home, an old-fashioned way of
life that predates feminism. On the other hand, canning can be viewed as a craft that creates
community and fills canners with a sense of pride that they created something tangible with
their own hands. The Mason jar can be looked at as a reclamation of preserving food in
season and standing up to the industrial food system. Canning is increasingly being viewed
in a positive light as home canners collect Mason jars and fill their pantries, closets, and
basements with home canned food.
The third chapter will define urban homesteading and focus on the food preservation
practices of its participants. My research on canning quickly led me to the world of urban
homesteading. Several of the canning blogs I found were also homesteading blogs, and when
I searched my local library for books on canning I discovered that urban homesteading
manuals contained the most useful sections on the topic for answering my research questions.
Urban homesteaders strive to live more sustainably and self-sufficiently; gardening,
shopping at farmer’s markets, and preserving food are all part of this goal. Urban
homesteader Rachel Kaplan argues, “The industrialization of agriculture and the widespread
distribution of commercial food products may have given us more time, but it has taken away
our local foods and food sources, heirloom food preservation practices, and our involvement
with the food we eat. It has impoverished our human culture.”80 For her and other
homesteaders, food preservation is a political act that draws attention to the state of the food
agribusiness and its complete disconnect from the seasons and local food systems. Home
canning is about giving food dollars to local farmers instead of food conglomerates,
connecting with nature and the earth, and creating community by sharing and trading one’s
Rachel Kaplan with K. Ruby Blume, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (Skyhorse
Publishing: New York, 2011), 140.
80

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surplus foodstuffs. This chapter will focus on the bloggers who have turned urban
homesteading and blogging into a career, and if this is a feminist act or a return to traditional
gender roles.
Conclusion
Why study something as seemingly mundane as canning and preserving? Why study
food in general? Canadian historians Franca Iacovetta and Valerie Korinek have extensively
studied women’s lives in postwar Canada, and they argue that, “food is about more than
recipes, cooking, nutrition and eating. The practices surrounding its purchase, preparation,
and consumption have long been a matter of conflict and contest…Food traditions evolve in
social and cultural contexts that are shaped by economic conditions and class politics, racialethnic relations, and other factors.”81 Food is never mundane, it is never quaint. It is an
expression of who we are and where we have come from in terms of gender, class, and
myriad other factors. For many home canners, preserving food is about caring for one’s self,
one’s family, and the planet.
Preserving is an integral aspect of various foodways across the world, and although
the methods and ingredients may be different the purpose is the same – to make a product
with one’s own hands at home that can be enjoyed by family and friends throughout the year.
The significant number of canning, preserving, and homesteading books that have been
published in the past several years prove that my research topic is a timely area of study.
With interest in sourcing local foods, planting gardens, and canning and preserving once

81
Franca Iacovetta and Valerie J. Korinek, “Jell-O Salads, One-Stop Shopping, and Maria the Homemaker: The
Gender Politics of Food,” in Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian
History, edited by Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2004), 190.

28

again flourishing, I am undoubtedly diving into a topic that allows for a close analysis of
gender and foodwork both in the past and the present.

29

CHAPTER ONE
Food, Memories, and Nostalgia - Preserving by Preserving
“The kitchen and the table, of course, have long been powerful sites that invite us to
engage our memories, enact our traditions, and affirm our identities, and, in so
doing, feel a connection to family and friends near and far, living and dead. They can
be timeless spaces, where the dishes and objects speak to us of people, place, and
ways long gone, or they can be spaces equally storied by modernity, change, and
conflict.”82
A simple Mason jar can invoke strong memories of food and family. Canning blogs
and cookbooks are filled with celebrations of women’s preserving work through the act of
remembering; the authors frequently describe moments when they watched or helped their
mothers and grandmothers bottle up the summer harvest. These nostalgic home canners take
pride in the fact that their aunts, mothers, and grandmothers canned and passed on the
tradition, and ‘putting up’ food is a way for them to feel connected to their ancestors. A
connection to the past and nurturing figures is constantly evoked in canning blogs and
cookbooks. Nostalgia is a powerful motivator for preserving food, but nostalgia also causes
the past to be looked at through rose coloured glasses. Remembering a woman only through
her foodwork erases the rest of her identity. Furthermore, the extensive focus on female
ancestors in food blogs and cookbooks inadvertently perpetuates the expectation that women
should make food from scratch for their families. On the other hand, remembering and
carrying on the tradition of women’s preserving work gives value to an important skill.
When food bloggers and cookbook authors ponder their first memories of home
canning, images of mothers, aunts, and grandmothers stirring pots of hot strawberry jam,
peeling golden peaches, and filling their root cellars with preserves all stand out. In her study
Whitney E. Brown, ““Eat it to Save It”: April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition,” Southern Cultures
(Winter 2009): 97.
82

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of food production in British Columbia’s Peace River region, Megan J. Davies asserts that
growing gardens, raising animals, and collecting wild foods and storing these goods in a root
cellar was the standard way of life for Euro-Canadian settlers during the 1910s to the
1940s.83 Davies argues that “frontier women of the Peace were intimately connected with the
work of creating and maintaining healthy settler bodies: food production was thus part of
‘motherwork’ which included everything from community midwifery to jam making.”84
Watching a female relative go about the daily task of preparing food for her family is
a memory most people have in common. In their study of “foodies” and gender, Cairns,
Johnston, and Baumann found that the memories of both male and female foodies “tended to
emphasize the role of food within the family home and almost universally revolved around
mothers.” 85 When fathers did factor into food memories it was due to their professional work
in the restaurant and industrial food industries. The feeling of being cared for through food
came from the foodies’ mothers.86 Canadian folklorist Diane Tye87 came to similar
conclusions in her study of the significance of bread and bread making traditions in
Newfoundland culture. She notes that “when folklore students88 remember the homemade
Megan J. Davies, “Stocking the Root Cellar: Foodscapes in the Peace River Region,” In Edible Histories,
Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene
Epp, 94-108 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 94.
84
Davies, “Stocking the Root Cellar,” 96.
85
Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston, and Sharon Baumann, “Caring about Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie
Kitchen,” Gender & Society 24, no. 5 (2010): 601.
86
Cairns, Johnston, and Baumann, “Caring about Food,” 601-602.
87
The work of Diane Tye led me to the field of folklore studies. Tye and fellow folklorist Pauline Greenhill
argue that “folklore offers women’s studies a closer empirical focus on everyday life. The two areas share –
among many other aspects – interdisciplinary orientation, a recognition of the social effects of
marginalization, an appreciation for the effects of context on meaning, an interest in common, everyday, lived
experience and a goal of advocacy for their subjects.” Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye, “Popular Theory:
Canadian Feminist Folklore and Ethnology in the 1990s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 36, no. 2 (Summer 2001):
193.
88
Diane Tye explains that her “research draws heavily on one aspect of the [Memorial University's Folklore
and Language Archive]’s collection: folklore survey cards that students completed as part of folklore courses
from the mid-1960s to the present day. These brief bits of folklore that students collected from family and
friends, or remembered from their own past, now represent a wealth of information on everything from turns
83

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bread of their childhoods, they also emphasize nurturing figures: mothers and grandmothers.
They speak of their maternal genealogy and of how bread connects them to their family and
their past.” 89 The memory of having a female relative make food for her family for the winter
invokes similar feelings of warmth, nurture, and security in today’s home canners and these
powerful feelings help explain why women are so often remembered through their food
work.
Blogger and cookbook author Ashley English writes of her grandmother, “My own
introduction to the alchemy of home canning came at a very young age. Ruby (aka
“Nanny”), my maternal grandmother, seemed to spend most of her summer days boiling,
stirring, pouring, and pickling something…while it would be years before I got around to
“taking up the jar” myself, Nanny’s garage full of homemade provisions hung around the
edges of my culinary memory, nudging gently from the sidelines.”90 Similarly, Valerie
Lugonja writes of her Grandma Maude, “She smelled of moist black earth each growing
season. She rose with the sun and faced each long day of really hard work, and thrived. She
never endured work. She challenged each day to conquer her, yet knew it could not. She
surrendered to dusk, deeply satisfied by the accomplishments of her day. I watched. I
learned.”91 Grandma Maude grew a garden every year and preserved its bounty, along with
fruit from the Okanagan. Lugonja can vividly recall the canning seasons and how groups of
women would get together to fill jar after jar of summer produce.

of phrase and remedies to children's games and supernatural beliefs,” ““Bread for the Road”: Intersections of
Food and Culture in Newfoundland and Labrador,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 26, no. 2 (2011): 175.
89
Tye, “Bread for the Road,” 188.
90
Ashley English, Homemade Living: Canning & Preserving with Ashley English (New York: Lark Books, 2010), 9.
91
Valerie Lugonja, “The Canadian Food Experience Project Challenge Five: Preserving,” A Canadian Foodie
(blog), October 7, 2013, https://www.acanadianfoodie.com/2013/10/07/the-canadian-food-experienceproject-challenge-five-preserving/.

32

English and Lugonja’s writing makes evident that the canning season did require a
considerable amount of exertion, but overall the memories of their grandmothers preserving
work and well stocked pantries are idyllic. The point of canning blog posts and cookbooks is
to sell the reader on the idea of canning, and painting a vivid picture of nature, abundance,
and jars that shine like jewels is an excellent way to accomplish that goal. Many blogs are
designed to generate revenue, cookbooks are written to be sold, and some authors could be
telling their readers what they want to hear. Is the preserving and gardening grandmother a
mythical figure for some authors? It is possible. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith assert
that “always mediated, cultural memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective
experiences articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they transmit
memory. Acts of memory are thus acts of performance, representation, and interpretation.”92
By sharing pieces of their personal memories, canning authors are adding to the cultural
memory of grandmothers who cooked, gardened, and preserved. They may – and some
absolutely do – have memories of male ancestors canning, but the cultural memory of
canning is focused on grandmothers. I would argue that canning bloggers and cookbook
authors focus on female ancestors because they – and their editors – know that their readers
will identify with this cultural memory; that does not mean these memories are false.
I also primarily remember my maternal grandmother and mother-in-law through their
foodwork. However, other memories can be erased and/or forgotten when one chooses to
focus on food memories. My grandma wrote poetry, which I did not know about until she
passed away. My mother-in-law was proud to be a nurse, and would it bother her if that was
glossed over in favour of remembering her foodwork? Cairns and Johnston note how
Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction,” Signs 28, no. 1
(Autumn 2002): 5.
92

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“throughout much of modern Euro-American history, the idealized woman was one who
cooked delicious, nourishing meals for her family, and maintained a smiling face in the midst
of domestic labour.”93 This is the memory that many canning bloggers and cookbook authors
have of their grandmothers. Of course, it is more than likely that their grandmothers did not
feel this way all the time, or even at all, but these are the happy, comforting food memories
that become etched in a child’s mind that carry on into adulthood. In her study of
‘mommyblogs’ and the future of history, May Friedman argues that while mommyblogs are
sometimes written by anonymous authors and could be made up, “a critical analysis of
mommyblogs from the perspective of feminist history allows us – and our future historian –
to consider the specific ways that mothers continue to be constrained by the ideology of the
‘good mother.’”94 Similarly, female ancestors are constrained by viewing them through the
lens of food nostalgia – even if these maternal figures are not real, the authors of canning
literature are inadvertently demonstrating that women are often remembered through their
food work.
Memories of grandmothers, mothers, and aunts, whether real or imagined, are being
used to encourage the author’s readership to take up canning. While this is certainly
constraining, the fact that some bloggers may be using maternal ancestors in order to
generate viewership of their blogs inadvertently gives value and voice to women’s foodwork.
In her discussion of Friedman’s article, Rachel Loew asserts that the popularity of blogs
about motherhood “is an incredible moment, for the social lives of women have typically
been among the most elusive and undocumented sectors of historical experience in the

Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 6.
May Friedman, “On Mommyblogging: Notes to a Future Feminist Historian,” Journal of Women’s History 22,
no. 4 (Winter 2010): 198-199.
93
94

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archives.”95 The comments on canning blogs are loaded with memories of the readers’ own
grandmothers, and I am of the positive mindset that these comments are real. Women’s
preserving skills are being celebrated in the public forum of food and homesteading blogs by
the readers of these works.
My mother in law knew she wanted to be a nurse from the age of five and she spent
her twenties travelling and working in various countries. In her thirties she started a family
and her four children became her pride and joy. After her three sons moved out of the home
to start their own careers and families, my mother in law looked forward to the holidays
when she could make huge dinners and shower her children with gifts of Mason jars filled
with pickles, ginger-peach jam, and my husband’s favourite, marmalade. These gifts came to
an end far too soon; my mother-in-law passed away from cancer shortly after I submitted the
first draft of this thesis. At her memorial services, my husband’s older brother spoke of his
mother’s cooking and how many of his most vivid memories of her involved food. As the
oldest child he would often “help” her in the kitchen, observing the way she cared for her
family through baking, cooking, and preserving. She paused her nursing career to
homeschool her oldest three children until they were in high school. She was proud of being
a nurse and travelling the world, however I believe her children’s memories of her caring for
them, especially through food, is exactly how she would want to be remembered.
My mother-in-law rarely showed interest in my academic studies until I told her I was
writing about canning and how it should be valued as a craft. I was pleasantly surprised that
she found it a worthy topic of study. For my mother-in-law, passing on the tradition of
canning and knowing it would be taken up by her daughter and daughters-in-law helped
Rachael Leow, “Reflections on Feminism, Blogging, and the Historical Profession,” Journal of Women’s
History 22, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 239.
95

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validate the time and energy she spent on preserving. While she still had the energy, she
made sure to teach her daughter96 and one of her other daughters-in-law how to make
marmalade. My mother-in-law took special pride in her marmalade and although I personally
strongly dislike any type of marmalade, I am glad the skill was passed down in the family.
Perhaps when the last jar in our fridge runs out I will teach myself how to make it. If the
skills of canning and preserving food are not continually passed on or rediscovered they will
be lost, and my mother-in-law understood this deeply.
The very act of carrying on the tradition of canning gives value to the foodwork one’s
female ancestors performed in the past, and in the present. The one food that conjures strong
memories of my childhood and my mother’s canning is pickles. There is nothing like the
taste of homemade dill pickles and I rarely bother buying pickles from the store because I am
always left disappointed. They are my number one canning priority; preserving pickles
reminds me of the steady supply of vegetables from my parent’s huge garden and how we
spent most of August and September eating nothing but Greek salad, potatoes, and corn.
They remind me of simple, small town life. Likewise, Diane Tye notes that “just as taste
defined home while I was growing up, now it takes me home.”97 She explains how making
her mother’s mustard pickles “tie[s] me as much to another time as to another place. Pickles
bring me back to long-ago autumns when I sat on the back step with my mother, and
sometimes my grandmother, helping prepare their pickles.”98 Stirring jam was therapeutic
and relaxing for me throughout the grieving process after I lost my mother-in-law. I made

My sister in law is several years younger than her older brothers. My mother in law passed away when her
sons and daughters in laws were in the midst of new parenthood. My sister in law, who is currently finishing
up her undergraduate degree, took a semester off from university to care for her mother.
97
Diane Tye, Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2010), 195.
98
Tye, Baking as Biography, 195.
96

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strawberry rhubarb jam with vanilla bean and balsamic, dill pickle relish, and bread and
butter pickles while thinking of the thousands of jars she filled in her lifetime. Female
ancestors live on not only through the act of remembering, but also through the production of
‘putting up’ fruits and vegetables for the winter.
In their study of food preservation, Melissa A. Click and Ronit Ridberg found that
their interviewees had “deep emotional ties to the process and the product” and that several
of them “described their food-preservation practices as extensions of family traditions.”99
Below a picture of rows of her home canning Lugonja writes, “I really do believe that the
shelves above were my homage to Grandma Maude, as preserving Canadian food traditions
from one generation to another provides a connection to those that came before in a very
intimate manner. I have preserved memories of my Grandma Maude in every single jar in my
pantry.” 100 Even though I do not like marmalade I have an emotional tie to the last Mason
jars my mother-in-law filled. I feel it is my responsibility as someone who likes to cook and
can to keep her food traditions alive and gift my siblings-in-law with gifts of canning at
Christmas. For many home preservers, including myself, canning is even more meaningful
when it has been passed on through the generations.
The Enduring Power of Little House on the Prairie
Many canning and homesteading blogs and cookbooks refer to a ‘simpler time’ or
‘getting back to our roots,’ and Ma Ingalls and The Little House on the Prairie books are a
strong influence for some bloggers in the canning/homesteading blogosphere. Meg of Grow
and Resist asks, “‘Homestead.’ What image does the word conjure up for you? An urban

99
Melissa A. Click and Ronit Ridberg, “Saving Food: Food Preservation as Alternative Food Activism,”
Environmental Communication 4, no. 3 (September 2010): 313.
100
Lugonja, “The Canadian Food Experience Project Challenge Five: Preserving.”

37

garden and a bent for gaining self-sufficiency? A white hippie co-opting dreads, going all
natural and eating sprouts? Laura Ingalls and The Little House on the Prairie?”101 Below
these questions is a trailer for the hit 1970s TV show based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books.
The Ingalls family is one of the first images that comes to mind when I think of
homesteading and the pioneer days. The enduring appeal of the Little House on the Prairie
books lives on in some canning and homesteading blogs.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote eight children’s novels
about her life as a pioneer girl. Cannon argues that “the books shaped young readers’
understanding of homesteading and pioneering for generations. Wilder structured her novels
to emphasize what she called “the values of life”: “courage, self-reliance, independence,
integrity, helpfulness” and “cheerfulness and humor.” Consequently, most readers came
away from the books with positive impressions of homesteading although Wilder and her
husband had actually lost their homestead.” 102 I was one of the many children to be swept
away by the pioneer girl who lived on the prairies; On the Banks of Plum Creek spurred my
love of all things nineteenth century and historical fiction in general.
While Plum Creek will always be one of my favourite Laura Ingalls books, it is the
food scenes in Little House in the Big Woods that absolutely fascinated me when I was a
young girl and still resonate with me today. The descriptions of smoking venison with fresh
hickory chips, churning cream and dyeing and molding the butter, and baking miniature
loaves of bread all seemed wondrous and delicious. I imagined that the little house must have
been the coziest place on earth with its attic stuffed to the rafters with delectable meat, herbs
and vegetables: Wilder pens, “the attic was a lovely place to play. The large, round, colored
101
102

“Meg,” “Homestead Act 2.0.”
Cannon, “Homesteading Remembered,” 9.

38

pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled
overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of
dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a
dusty-spicy smell.”103 Holly Blackford, a scholar of children’s literature, also writes that
“The attic’s cornucopia of plenty meant everything to me, and I liked the book’s evocation of
being safe in a kind of maternal, edible womb.” 104
The descriptions of the attic bursting with food are powerful images of selfsufficiency, hard work, and nurturance. The knowledge that Pa and Ma Ingalls had to grow,
process, and preserve food is memorable and inspiring. As Blackford notes, “The Ingalls
family can make everything from bread to bullets, houses to music, clothing to sugar – and
make it seem fun, too.”105 Little House in the Big Woods exudes a self-reliant way of life
where every member of the family has a role to play in keeping everyone safe, warm, and
well-fed. Ingalls writes, “All alone in the wild Big Woods, and the snow, and the cold, the
little log house was warm and snug and cosy. Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby
Carrie were comfortable and happy there, especially at night.”106 It is not surprising that the
Little House books are a source of inspiration for some women in their modern homesteading
endeavours.
Melissa K. Norris, author of the blog Living Homegrown and Handmade, is an avid
lifelong fan of the Little House on the Prairie books; she lives on her own homestead in the
Cascade Mountains in the United States. She describes herself as “a plain country girl who

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), 19.
Holly Blackford, “Civilization and Her Discontents: The Unsettling Nature of Ma in Little House in the Big
Woods,” Frontiers 29, no. 1 (2008): 147.
105
Blackford, “Civilization and Her Discontents,” 155.
106
Ingalls, Little House in the Big Woods, 38.
103
104

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loves Jesus, playing in the dirt, stuffing food into Mason jars…hunting down as many
traditional old-fashioned skills as I can to put into use on our homestead.”107 Along with
being a blogger, podcaster and homesteader, Norris is also a newspaper columnist and radio
show host. She has written books and e-guides on preserving, homesteading, and living life
from scratch.
Norris wrote a post entitled “8 Ways to Live Like Little House on the Prairie;” she
begins, “Laura Ingalls Wilder was my best friend growing up and I always wanted to live
like they did on Little House on the Prairie®.” Her third tip for living like Laura, after
cooking from scratch and growing a garden, is preserving food; Norris notes, “My favorite
[method] is canning. There’s just something about all those pretty jars filled with food sitting
on the shelf. Plus, I’m a self-proclaimed-no-shame-in-it admitted canning addict. Home
canned food is frugal, especially when you grow it yourself, and makes cooking from scratch
extremely easy because all you have to do is open a jar and heat on those nights you’re
pressed for time or plain don’t feel like cooking.” 108 The allure of the well-stocked
homestead glows from the pages of the Little House on the Prairie books, and Norris
channels it in her blog and in her own life.
Merissa Arink runs the homesteading blog Little House Living; she has also published
a book with the same title. She writes on her “About” page, “I’m a true country girl at heart. I
make my sun tea in an old gallon pickle jar and walk barefoot everywhere in the summer.
Since we live a ways from town we usually just have to make the best with what we have.

Melissa K. Norris, “About,” Living Homegrown and Handmade (blog), accessed June 25, 2020
http://melissaknorris.com/about/.
108
Melissa K. Norris, “8 Ways to Live Like Little House on the Prairie,” Living Homegrown and Handmade
(blog), (accessed January 21, 2018)
https://melissaknorris.com/livelikelittlehouseontheprairie/.
107

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Growing up my mom taught me a lot of great homemaking skills … and I’m definitely using
the skills I learned. I have a huge garden and I enjoy preserving the bounty.”109 The basis of
Arink’s blog is frugal living in the form of making one’s own household cleaning and
personal care products, cooking from scratch, canning, and sewing simple items such as
aprons. The blog’s name borrows directly from the Little House on the Prairie books and
Arink proclaims that “there is so much to be learned from the Little House books! As I read
through the books I’ve been inspired by the heroic (in my opinion!) acts and the bravery of
the pioneers.”110 One section of her website is dedicated to blog posts about the lessons that
can be learned from each Little House book. In a post titled “Living Like Little House in the
Big Woods” Arink admires Ma Ingall’s skills at storing food and references the same
passage about the attic that I quoted earlier; she notes that the book “paints a pretty picture of
Ma’s winter storage.111 The idea of being able to be at least partially self-sufficient by
growing one’s own food and “putting it up” for the winter is incredibly appealing to fans of
the Little House on the Prairie books.
Like Norris and Arink, I still get swept away to another era by the Little House
books; however, I now view them more critically. In regard to a “simpler time,” what strikes
me now as an adult is how often the Ingalls moved in search of the elusive perfect homestead
and the many unexpected tragedies they faced. The Ingalls were part of the migration of
settlers who tried to homestead on inhospitable land. Little House on the Prairie was my
least favourite book because I hated that the Ingalls left the coziness of their home in the Big

Merissa Arink, “About Me & Little House Living,” Little House Living (blog), accessed January 21, 2018
https://www.littlehouseliving.com/about.
110
Merissa Arink, “Living Like Little House,” Little House Living (blog), accessed January 21, 2018
(https://www.littlehouseliving.com/living-like-little-house.
111
Merissa Arink, “Living Like Little House in the Big Woods,” Little House Living (blog), November 19, 2019
https://www.littlehouseliving.com/living-like-little-house-in-the-big-woods.html.
109

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Woods to start all over again on the lonely and sweeping prairie. Blackford argues, “For the
reader, Big Woods results in a novel that retrospectively marks an idyllic pioneer paradise
before the “fall” of time and journeying West, where the trials of survival and growing up
take narrative precedence.” This accurately summarizes my reading experience of the books
as a child.
“Journeying West” also embodies Manifest Destiny, which was a doctrine first
espoused in 1845 by a democratic politician that America was destined by God to settle the
entirety of the continent; “central to Manifest Destiny was the assumption that white
Americans were a special people, a view that dated back to the Puritans’ belief that God had
appointed them to establish a New Israel cleansed of the corruption of the Old World.”112
White Americans believed it was their mission to spread their way of life and new form of
self-government across North America and be an example to the world. 113 Writing about and
participating in pioneer activities must simultaneously involve seriously reflecting on
colonial history and the injustices that made the “Pioneer Days” possible. As Meg of Grow
and Resist asserts, “I’m into the activities [of urban homesteading]. Use of the word
homestead… not so much. The word is capital-L-loaded. Loaded with history, loaded with
power, loaded with privilege.”114 Meg is my inspiration for taking part in gardening and
canning while being mindful of my white settler history and choosing not to use the term
“urban homesteading” to describe what I do.

Goldfield et. al., The American Journey, 359-360.
From Goldfield et. al., The American Journey: “Between 1815 and 1850, the term “Anglo-Saxon,” originally
loosely applied to English-speaking peoples, acquired racial overtones. Caucasian Anglo-Saxon Americans, as
the descendants of ancient Germanic tribes that had purportedly brought the seeds of free institutions to
England, were now said to be the foremost race in the world. The superior racial pedigree they claimed for
themselves gave white Americans the natural right to expand westward, a chosen people carrying the
blessings of democracy and progress,” 360-361.
114
Meg, “Homestead Act 2.0,” Grow and Resist.
112
113

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Blogs that focus on “pioneer living” also reinforce the narrative that canning was a
necessity in the past and that it is a choice in the present. Danille Elise Christensen
challenges the assumption found in blogs, newspaper articles, and even history projects that
canning was once a necessity, but now it is a choice. She stresses that she does not want to
paint the often exhausting work of home preserving in romantic terms; however she argues
that “archival work suggests that reducing past rural domestic practice to duty or deprivation
alone ignores the agency and aesthetic sophistication of people already marginalized by
gender, region, race, and other contributors to socioeconomic status.”115 To assume that
women in the rural past took no creative pride in their canning endeavours is short sighted,
and it contributes to the narrative that our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations were only
ever working in the kitchen to take care of their families. Christensen’s research puts a
spotlight on rural, Southern women who loved – and still love- to can; Rovertie Bolen Wills
of West Virginia spoke in a 1979 interview about how “she preferred the quick, high-yield
canning she’d done using metal cans at a community canning center – yet she also detailed at
great length her aesthetic preferences concerning the preparation and display of food jarred
in glass.”116 Christensen’s research on Wills complicates the idea that twenty-first century,
young, urban dwellers are the only people who have ever canned for aesthetic reasons.
A Canadian example of Christensen’s analysis can be found in one of Canada’s
national newspapers, The Globe and Mail. In October 1970, journalists from The Globe and
Mail visited five farm wives to investigate their way of life in a modern era of new
technology, second wave feminism, and interest in going ‘back to the land’.117 I want to

Christensen, “Simply Necessity?,” 18.
Christensen, “Simply Necessity?,” 23-24.
117
Joyce Carter, “The Life of Today’s Farm Wife,” The Globe and Mail, October 15, 1970, W1, ProQuest
Historical Newspapers.
115
116

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highlight the article here as a miniature case study for further critiquing the necessity/choice
dichotomy. The journalists report: “the second thing you [the farm wives] rarely if ever do is
have an egg route, or bake bread, or make butter. “What would anyone do that for, any
more?” And when you tell them that the cities are filled with back-to-nature romantics who
yearn for the Thoreusque joys of eating the food they’ve raised for themselves, they tell you
“They don’t know how hard the work is.”118 The farm wives enjoyed their rural lives but
embraced technology that made their work and lifestyle easier and more comfortable.
Mrs. Francis Walsh told the reporters that “‘I don’t can anything but pickles and jam
any more.’” She had freezers full of beef, fruits, and vegetables. However, the journalists
note how she “insist[ed] that we obviously deprived city folk take home sealers of her chili
sauce and hot dog relish.”119 This gesture demonstrates that even though Walsh used her
freezers to make preserving food easier, she still took pride in her pickling and jamming. The
“deprived city folk” comment implies that Walsh felt preserves like hers could not be
purchased in the city, and she was probably right in the new era of supermarket shopping. In
the photograph of Walsh for the article she is surrounded by Mason jars with four in her arms
and a smile on her face; although the tagline beneath her photo ironically reads “‘Why
should we do it the hard way?’” Another farm wife, Pamela Pind, said that she “had to keep
canning” because her sons took excellent care of their tomato plants and she wanted “to be
fair to them.” The journalists write that “her canning and preserving efforts far outweigh
those of the more traditional farm wives we’ve visited.” 120 Canning was likely not a
necessity for Pind, but she did not want her sons’ homegrown tomatoes to go to waste.

Carter, “The Life of Today’s Farm Wife.”
Carter, “The Life of Today’s Farm Wife.”
120
Carter, “The Life of Today’s Farm Wife.”
118
119

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Christensen’s research and The Globe and Mail article make evident that ignoring the
motives and attitudes of rural and farming women towards canning distorts the past. These
women did welcome new technology that made freezing food possible, but they also took
pride in their canning skills and recipes. Christensen also asserts that while it is wrong to
assume that “play, pleasure, and beauty are the exclusive property of the young, urban, and
well-to-do,” it is also “dangerous to assume that contemporary DIY efforts are nothing more
than play (emphasis original).” 121 As will be discussed in the chapter on twenty-first century
domesticity, canning bloggers and cookbook authors take their preserving work seriously and
see great value in it. Also, for women who urban homestead, canning is a necessity in order
to use up the surplus of their gardens. Defining canning in terms of necessity vs. choice is an
oversimplification of both the past and the present.
Conclusion
When anthropologist David E. Sutton first brought up the idea of academically
studying food and memory in the 1990s he was met with skepticism and derision; a fellow
anthropologist sarcastically told him to read Proust.122 In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of
Things Past, the protagonist experiences the infamous “Madeleine moment,” when a
spoonful of tea and Madeleine cake ignites powerful memories of his aunt.123 Proust
transcribes,
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the
things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more
unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain
poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their
Christensen, “Simply Necessity?,” 39.
David E. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Oxford & New York:
Berg, 2011), 1.
123
Marcel Proust, Translated by C. K. Sott Moncrieff, “Swann’s Way,” Remembrance of Things Past, Volume
One (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922), 28.
121
122

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moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost
impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. 124
For many canning enthusiasts, their Madeleine moments come from popping the lid of a
Mason jar and taking a bite of a juicy golden peach or eating a spoonful of ruby red
strawberry jam. Grandmothers, aunts, and mothers pass away, but they live on through food
memories.
Sutton strongly believed in this connection between food and memory,125 as do I. He
ruminates, “food memories work through the mutual reinforcement of the cosmic and the
mundane, feeding the dead and feeding the living.”126 Ancestors are brought to life through
memories of their food. While I do not want to remember my female relatives solely for their
food work, I do wish to bring value to the hours they spent in the kitchen. Canning is a part
of my family heritage, a form of crafts(wo)manship, and a source of pride and peace of mind
in knowing that my family has food laid away. As a teenager, I did not place a high value on
work done within the home. As I grew older and studied women’s history, I began to
appreciate the work of my female relatives. They are incredibly skilled sewers, bakers,
cooks, and preservers. It bothered me that the work of the female mentors in my life often
went unappreciated, and this had an influence on my decision to write an entire thesis on
home canning.
Still, after writing this thesis it now bothers me that all I know of my grandmother is
her food, and her caring work of being the mother to nine children and the grandmother to
twenty-seven grandchildren. She passed away when I was nineteen and I wish that I had

Proust, “Swann’s Way,” 29.
Despite the initial lack of support he received, David E. Sutton conducted research in Kalymnos, Greece
that led to his book Remembrance of Repasts.
126
Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts, 159.
124
125

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asked her more questions about her life when I was a teenager. I wish that I had not defined
her only as a home cook and a grandmother. Yet, I am encouraged by Hirsch and Smith’s
assertion that “feminist narratives can thus resituate the politics of nostalgia by recuperating
devalued, marginalized, or repressed cultural formations.”127 My canning work is partly
about honouring her memory and her skill; she is the only person I know who canned
salmon. I can also honour her poetry by developing my writing skills, and this thesis is partly
about giving value to all her work.

127

Hirsch and Smith, “Feminism and Cultural Memory,” 9.

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CHAPTER TWO
Canning, DIY Domesticity, and Third Wave Feminism
“And a couple of summers ago, when most of my house was pretty much built and a
lot of my tiny farm had some food squirting out of it, I actually did the “D” word
(“Domestic” for those of you who don’t use the word often) and bought myself some
canning jars. That first summer of testing out my hidden domestic, I headed down to
Val’s old farm and she taught me to pressure can a salmon or two. I brought the jars
home and lined them up in my cupboard. I admired them and they gleamed back at
me.”128
To choose to take up the home arts such as preserving is a matter of contention. The
rediscovering of traditional domestic skills has caused some journalists to wonder if this is a
return to the drudgery of the kitchen for women; others have declared that food preservation
is a frivolous, unnecessary pastime. Furthermore, their motives for embarking on workwithin-the-home are strongly questioned or not taken seriously. In an article for Slate, Sara
Dickerman denounces the home canning trend as being primarily narcissistic: “These
culinary trophies are emblematic of a project-based food relationship that we urban food
junkies are prone to indulge these days: athletic all-weekend bouts of cheesemaking, or
bacon curing, or jam and pickle making are so much more bloggable and boastworthy than
making a decent brown-bag lunch five days in a row.”129 She sees little value in canning
beyond boosting one’s foodie bragging rights.

Robin Wheeler, Food Security for the Faint of Heart: Keeping Your Larder Full in Lean Times (Gabriola Island,
BC: New Society Publishers, 2008), 20. The biography on her publisher’s website notes that “Robin Wheeler
was a permaculture activist, author, teacher and founder of the Sustainable Living Arts School. She taught
traditional skills, sustenance gardening and medicinals at Edible Landscapes…a nursery and teaching garden in
Roberts Creek, British Columbia.” New Society Publishers, “Robin Wheeler,”
(https://www.newsociety.com/Contributors/W/Wheeler-Robin) accessed January 14, 2017. Sadly, Wheeler
passed away in 2012. She left a legacy of valuing gardening, preserving, and food security.
129
Sara Dickerman, “Can It,” Slate, March 10, 2010,
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2010/03/can_it.html).
128

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The title of an op-ed by Emily Matchar for The Washington Post asks, “The new
domesticity: Fun, empowering or a step back for American women?” In the article Matchar
questions and analyzes the motives for embracing what she terms the ‘new domesticity’ 130
and worries in her conclusion that what appears now to be a choice could easily turn into an
obligation. She notes how her “baby boomer mother does not can jam. Or bake bread. Or
knit. Or sew. Nor did my grandmother, a 1960s housewife of the cigarette-in-one-handcocktail-in-the-other variety, who saw convenience food as a liberation from her immigrant
mother’s domestic burdens.”131 Seemingly simple jars of jam are causing journalists to write
strong opinions about the topic in major American publications that question the motives of
the women – and also men – who participate in jam making.
Gender and domesticity are being redefined by a new generation of DIY-ers. The
home canners highlighted in this chapter view their efforts as a way forward to a future that
places value on domestic skills and the ability to make and create using one’s own hands.
They do not view canning as frivolous or a step back in time. Likewise, Cairns and Johnston
found in their research that “some women have reclaimed foodwork as a site of pleasure and
empowerment. Instead of rejecting a homemade dinner as a sign of oppression, old-fashioned
domestic skills – like canning, making jam, and baking pies – have been reframed as hip,
handy, and fun.” 132 The “hip and handy” woman who cans, jams, and bakes is celebrated in
canning blogs and cookbooks.

Matchar’s article turned into a book titled Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New
Domesticity, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.
131
Emily Matchar, “The new domesticity: Fun, empowering or a step back for American women?,” The
Washington Post, November 25, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-new-domesticity-funempowering-or-a-step-back-for-american-women/2011/11/18/gIQAqkg1vN_story.html.
132
Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 11.
130

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To be able to “put up” one’s own food is an art and a science that takes knowledge
and skill – in part because a mishap could make someone seriously ill from food poisoning.
Also, as demonstrated by Danille Elise Christensen, many women can because it is
enjoyable, and they take great pride in their work. In her essay, the photographs of Mason
jars adorned with blue ribbons speak to the skill and artistry that goes into each batch of
canning. 133 I am terrible at drawing or painting but when I see my kitchen table loaded down
with dill pickles, Okanagan peaches, and blackberry jam, I feel enormously proud of my
efforts and the fact that I am carrying on a family tradition. As Christensen asserts, “Craft
satisfaction – pride in a materially productive task well done – is one reason for finding
enjoyment in such hard work.”134 Although canning is not always an easy job there is an end
reward of seeing rows of colourful jars lined up in a pantry. This finished product that lasts
through the winter is what separates canning from ordinary cooking and places it more in the
category of crafting and other DIY activities.
The DIY movement of the 1990s – a movement that was embraced by many third
wave feminists - brought attention to the domestic arts and the skill and knowledge that is
required to create using one’s own hands. When BUST magazine launched in 1993 the
creators did not intend on having a strong DIY component, but in 1997 they created a new
DIY column titled “She’s Crafty,” an oddity for a feminist magazine. Debbie Stoller, one of
the creators of BUST, explains the reasoning behind this decision in The Bust DIY Guide to
Life:
“Rather than rejecting all those things that our feminist foremothers had considered
oppressive, we chose to re-examine them, and sometimes reclaim them, making them
133
See Danille Elise Christensen, “Simply Necessity? Agency and Aesthetics in Southern Home Canning,”
Southern Cultures (Spring 2015): 15-42.
134
Christensen, “Simply Necessity?,” 22.

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our own. Was sewing really such a suffocating and unsatisfying task, or did it just
seem oppressive because women had been limited to performing this task and held
back from performing others? And was this sense of oppression multiplied by the fact
that the tasks themselves weren’t given much value? After all, the women who
performed this work were never really given credit for their skill and experience. We
found ourselves thinking, as feminists, that instead of shutting the door on these
skills, perhaps we should be celebrating them.” 135
The DIY movement and the explosion of food and homemaking blogs has made it more
acceptable to embrace making jam. Canning is now in the mainstream as a respected kitchen
craft - perhaps not in all social circles; however, in my town, making a blackberry-jalapeño
jelly would certainly be considered hip, economical (blackberries are weeds here), and
sticking it to the (corporate) man. In 2001, BUST unapologetically published an entire issue
on the “womanly arts” and Debbie Stoller, a creator of the magazine, notes that “our readers
rejoiced, many letting us know how grateful they were to see proof that feminism and the
home front need not be at odds with each other.” 136
I agree that feminism has a complicated relationship with domesticity, but I disagree
with the conjecture that feminism caused the devaluation of women’s work within the home.
Likewise, in her examination of knitting and third-wave feminist magazines, Elizabeth
Groeneveld argues that “the refiguring of knitting as feminist relies on an assumption that
feminists have historically devalued domestic activities.”137 This presumption ignores
historical context. In “Family and Domesticity,” Alice Julier discusses the history of how
household labour was devalued as men began to work for wages outside the home. She
explains, “reliance on the marketplace for goods…created a gendered dependence whereby

Debbie Stoller, “Introduction,” In The BUST DIY Guide to Life: Making Your Way Through the Every Day,
edited by Laurie Henzel and Debbie Stoller, 7-11 (New York: Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 2011), 9.
136
Stoller, “Introduction,” 10.
137
Elizabeth Groeneveld, “Join the Knitting Revolution”: Third-Wave Feminist Magazines and the Politics of
Domesticity,” Canadian Review of American Studies 40, no. 2 (2010): 268.
135

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women did not receive wages for their labors within the home, and men were excused from
them by the nature of their work outside the home. While food labors and cooking were still
highly valued as part of family life, the shift reinforced a gendered division of labor which
suggested that unpaid work done in the household was less critical than work done for
wages.”138 In her classic book on women’s work in the home, historian Meg Luxton
discusses the invisibility of housework and how it is not actually considered work, but a
“labour of love.”139 She argues, “as a “labour of love,” this work is not respected in the same
way as wage work, partly because it is not directly supervised and because its standards and
schedules seem to be determined by the women who do it…on the one hand, it is important,
necessary and potentially satisfying. On the other hand, it has a low status and is often
isolating and frustrating.”140 The gendered division of paid and unpaid labour caused
domestic activities to be deemed less important.
Joanne Hollows researched media backlash to domesticity for her article on Nigella
Lawson, postfeminism, and cooking; she explains that the publication of Lawson’s How to
Be a Domestic Goddess “provoked a huge debate in the press about the relationship between
feminism, femininity, and baking.”141 The reaction to the cookbook reinforced the
feminist/housewife dichotomy – Hollows refers to the housewife as “the feminist’s cake
baking ‘other’.”142 Within feminism, cooking and baking has primarily been viewed in terms

Alice Julier, “Family and Domesticity,” In A Cultural History of Food: The Modern Age, edited by Amy
Bentley, 145-163 (London: Berg, 2012), 149.
139
Meg Luxton, More Than A Labour of Love: Three Generations of Women’s Work in the Home (Toronto:
Women’s Press, 1980, 2009), 11.
140
Luxton, More Than A Labour of Love, 12.
141
Joanne Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism and Cooking,” European Journal of
Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2003): 180.
142
Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess,” 180.
138

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of servitude and caring for others. Hollows argues that cooking does not need to be
completely at odds with feminism:
The representation of a mode of femininity that is based around cooking and eating as
pleasure, rather than servitude and denial, may begin to offer a way of experiencing
cooking and eating differently. It also provides an alternative means of representing
women’s relationship with food to that offered by (some very good) feminist
criticism. Furthermore, for this author at least, while there are times when I want to
feel ‘like a feminist,’ there are other times when I really do want to feel ‘like a
domestic goddess’.”143
From following Nigella Lawson on Instagram and reading a few of her cookbooks, I
personally feel like Lawson gives me permission as a feminist and a foodie to make a
chocolate cake entirely because I am craving a giant slice, not because I am obligated to bake
for someone else. She gives women permission to make cake and eat it too, for the sheer
pleasure of a piece of chocolate indulgence. 144
Recently at 10:00PM I decided I simply had to open a jar of strawberry preserves I
made last summer. I ate them straight out of the jar and for me it was a “Nigella moment” –
enjoying a late-night snack of something special I had made simply because I was craving
them. Cairns and Johnston assert that “when women in our study described cooking as
pleasurable in its own right…they tended to emphasize the embodied practice of making
food. These embodied narratives ranged from the “meditative” pleasures of chopping to the

Hollows, “Feeling Like a Domestic Goddess,” 197.
Nigella Lawson once said in an interview, “When I wrote How to Be a Domestic Goddess, many felt I was
saying that women's place was in the kitchen, but the ironic pictures on the endpapers surely undermined
that, except for those people who consciously chose to misread my intent. Feeling comfortable in the kitchen
is essential for everyone, male or female. At the time it seemed so many people were fearful of cooking, and
that meant home was never more than a stop-off from work. Women of my generation were keen – rightly –
not to be tied to the stove, but the ramifications of this were that they felt a sense of dread in the kitchen.
How can this be good for anyone? I also feel that to denigrate any activity because it has traditionally been
associated with the female sphere is in itself anti-feminist (Italics mine),” Elizabeth Day, “Nigella Lawson: 'I'm
not a chef – I'm not even trained,'” The Guardian, October 19, 2013,
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/19/nigella-lawson-chef-feminism-interview.
143
144

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“therapeutic” experience of kneading dough and the sensory joys of home canning.”145 With
my strawberry preserves the ‘sensory joys’ came from teaching myself the technique of
cooking them so that the strawberries stayed whole, rather than turning to mush. I was so
proud when the jars shone back at me containing two pounds each of glistening strawberries,
which I later enjoyed during a snowstorm in February, creating another moment of sensory
joy.
Canning for pleasure is evident in the world of food blogs and preserving cookbooks.
Aimée Wimbush-Bourque writes on Simple Bites, “I’ll admit it, making my own jam is a
huge boost to the ‘Holly Homemaker’ in me. I just love how much like a domestic goddess I
feel when I hear those jars go POP as they seal.” 146 For myself, that is one of the most
satisfying moments of canning. Hearing the jar lids ‘pop’ is the moment of truth that makes
all the hours of canning worth it. Robin Wheeler’s tongue in cheek classification of
‘domesticity’ as a swear word demonstrates how much it is valued in Western society.
However, she proudly writes of the satisfaction to be found in canning salmon and dabbling
in the domestic. She notes, “I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to gaze on a row of full
preserve jars.”147 The word choices of Wimbush-Bourque and Wheeler suggest that they
know their love of canning may not be taken seriously, but they give their readers permission
to also take pride and pleasure in domestic activities.
Gardening, cooking, and canning are all activities I enjoy. Occasionally they feel like
chores, because sometimes gardening and cooking must be done even when I do not feel like
doing either activity. A few summers ago when I made blackberry-vanilla bean jam I had fun

Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 151.
Aimée Wimbush-Bourque, “Q & A: Why Do You Can?,” Simple Bites (blog) July 9, 2010,
(http://www.simplebites.net/q-a-why-do-you-can/.
147
Wheeler, Food Security For the Faint of Heart, 21.
145
146

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while jamming, but canning it felt like a chore because I was in a rush to get the process
finished and a jar broke inside the canner. There were a few colourful words said that
afternoon. But one of my jars made it to Namibia, Africa with a friend who went to visit her
family, and they ate the whole jar with breakfast one morning. I take pride in that. Blogger
and preserver Theresa Loe notes, “canning and preserving is a great way to extend the
“story” of your own garden. By passing on a jar of deliciousness to a friend, you are giving a
bit of your garden and yourself. And that, my friends, is one of the best benefits of all!”148
When I gift a jar of home canning I am essentially saying, “canning is a skill I have that I am
proud of, and I am lucky that it was taught to me. I want to share it with you.”
To Pierre Bourdieu, this would be embodied capital, the form of capital that is second
nature to a person and contained in her body.149 He would likely argue that canning comes
naturally to me because I learned these skills from a young age. In Distinction, Bourdieu
argues that our tastes – in food, art, music, and so forth – are markers of social class.150 At
first glance, this thesis could appear to be written by an upper middle class academic
suddenly interested in the “revival” of the domestic arts. In an article titled “Co-opting the
Coop,” Marianne Kirby notes how the “media focuses on middle- and upper-class craft
revival stories without acknowledging those who have preserved these skills in the first
place.”151 But my skill and interest in canning stems from the fact that I am a working class

Theresa Loe, “What is all this talk about Canning?,” Growing a Greener World, August 19, 2010,
http://www.growingagreenerworld.com/canning-preserving/.
149
Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. See the article
“Cultural Capital,” in Social Theory Rewired for an explanation of Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus and the
three forms of cultural capital: the embodied, the objectified, and the institutionalized (accessed June 18,
2020).
150
See Pierre Bourdieu, “Introduction,” in Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Translated
by Richard Nice, Routledge: New York, 1984.
151
Marianne Kirby, “Co-opting the Coop,” Bitch Media, November 21, 2012,
https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/co-opting-the-coop.
148

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kid whose family gardened and canned to save money, and because that is how my mother
grew up. She absorbed the embodied capital of my grandmother who lived through the Great
Depression and raised nine children. She never wasted a drop of food, and neither does my
mom. My mom and stepdad have also always been adamant that the homegrown and
homemade tastes better than store bought; therefore my family canned out of necessity but
also from the belief that store bought food was inferior. This is embodied in me by the fact
that I will not buy store bought pickles because they do not taste anything like homemade
ones. Freshness and flavour are two of my main motivations for canning.
“New Domesticity” or “Punk Domesticity?”
In “The New Domesticity,” Emily Matchar details her own forays into homemaking:
“I’m planning on canning homemade jam this holiday season, swept up in the same do-ityourself zeitgeist that seems to have carried off half my female friends. I picked and froze
the berries this summer, and I’ve been squirreling away flats of Ball jars under my kitchen
sink for months.”152 Although Matchar classifies the current interest in canning, baking,
knitting, and DIY-ing as “the new domesticity,” referring to this movement as new is
problematic as it ignores the DIY movement of the late 1990s and the back to the land
movement of the 1960s. As will be discussed in the chapter on urban homesteading, none of
these trends are truly “new.” I prefer the term “punk domesticity,” as borrowed from Sean
Timberlake, the creator of the community-based preserving website Punk Domestics, who in
turn borrowed the phrase from a review of Karen Solomon’s preserving and pantry staples
cookbook.153 The book review on Eat Me Daily states that Karen Solomon’s pantry

Emily Matchar, “The New Domesticity.”
Sean Timberlake “About Punk Domestics,” Punk Domestics (blog), accessed April 5, 2018
(https://archive.punkdomestics.com/content/about.html.
152
153

56

cookbook “owes a debt to depression-era canning pamphlets as much as to the punk
domesticity of the hipster DIY movement.”154 Sean Timberlake created Punk Domestics for
“DIY food enthusiast[s]” to contribute their recipes; along with canning, there are tutorials
and recipes on his website for smoking meat, brewing beer and kombucha, making cheese,
and foraging.
I would characterize this “punk domesticity” as the desire to rebel against companies
like Kraft and Campbell and the entire realm of convenience and fast food. It is about
stubbornly saying, “I can do it myself.” Qualifying it as punk separates it from the
dominating and enduring image of 1950s domesticity. Within punk domesticity men can be
in the kitchen and women can get their hands and clothes dirty. Punk Domestics notes that
“increasingly people are trying their hand at the old foodways. We are making jam, curing
meats, raising chickens. This is not anathema to modernity; it is an imperative part of it. We
are preserving: food, culture, community, ourselves. We are celebrating our punk
domesticity.”155 “Inventiveness” and “creativity” are the key aspirations of punk DIY foodies
and preservers.
In the introduction to Jam It, Solomon explains that she created the cookbook she
always wanted to buy; the kind that would teach her how to thwart “Big Mayo” and other
processed food stuffs. She pens, “stocking the pantry and our own refrigerator doors with
ingredients that were made by hand for centuries should not be so cumbersome. Here, I hope
to share the joy of real, obtainable DIY kitchen crafting projects at their best. I hope you are

154

Helen Rosner, “Jam Packed: Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It by Karen Solomon [book review],” Eat Me Daily, June
24, 2009, (http://www.eatmedaily.com/2009/06/jam-packed-jam-it-pickle-it-cure-it-by-karen-solomon-bookreview/).
155
Sean Timberlake, “Yes We Can (And Pickle and Jam!),” Punk Domestics, June 18, 2010,
(https://archive.punkdomestics.com/content/yes-we-can-and-pickle-and-jam.html).

57

moved to grab a wooden spoon and a jar because food crafts are fun.”156 Solomon’s
cookbook could be the preserving companion to BUST’s DIY Guide to Life. I am going to
borrow a term straight from Solomon for this thesis: kitchen crafters. She describes herself as
“a crafter and food is my medium of choice.”157 Canning is a form of crafting in the kitchen
that is being embraced by DIY foodies. It is hipster-esque in its quest for authenticity, the
desire to eschew big brands such as Miracle Whip, and the desire to say, “this is handmade.”
Although she is critical of the white middle-class connotations of DIY culture within third
wave feminism, 158 Groeneveld asserts that “in terms of their political potential, third-wave
crafting practices do offer an alternative to mass-produced products sold by multinational
corporations and reassert the value of the art of making one’s own goods.”159
The postwar era taught women to be consumers of commercial foods and to purchase
rather than produce. As Julier states, in the 1950s “American women, immigrant or native
born, were pushed by the food industry desperate to sell products, into embracing a
contradictory ethos of care and convenience embodied by meals in tin-foil trays.”160 This
also occurred in Canada. The cover of the 1955 cookbook Appetizing Recipes Using
Canada’s Canned Foods portrays an image of white middle class prosperity and motherhood
– mother and daughter in matching aprons with a large pantry completely stocked with store
bought canned goods behind them. The mother is pointing at a recipe in a cookbook while

Karen Solomon, Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It: And Other Cooking Projects (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2009), 1.
Solomon, Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It, 1.
158
Groeneveld argues throughout her article that there is a decidedly middle-class component to crafting. She
reasons that the average reader of Venus Zine and Bust is “young, white, urban and middle-class,” thus
articles on crafting are directed to this audience, “’Join the Knitting Revolution,’” 264-265. She further asserts
that “the word “crafting” suggests a skilled activity that requires time and thought and that has value as a
potential art form; in this sense, applying the word “crafting” to particular kinds of domestic activities recasts
them as not just everyday, menial jobs and thus attributes to them more cultural capital, 264.”
159
Groeneveld, “’Join the Knitting Revolution,’” 267.
160
Julier, “Family and Domesticity,” 149.
156
157

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the daughter studies it with a can of food tucked under her arm. The cookbook claims that
“the average home probably uses a can opener more frequently than any other piece of small
equipment in the kitchen.”161 The introduction assures the reader that canned foods retain
their nutritional value and that “many women like to use canned foods as an ingredient of
interesting recipes. The canner has done the first hard work of preparation, so it is easy to
add variety to the menu with very little effort.”162 Julier argues that “making households
independent units of consumption was central to the global rise of industrial capitalism.”163
In the consumer culture of Western society, it goes against the grain to make something
when one is told repeatedly that buying it is much more convenient.
Thus, if canning is to be considered a throwback to the past, it should also be viewed
as a way forward to the future where we rely less on industrial grown and processed food and
purchasing everything that we need at the grocery store. In Radical Homemakers, Shannon
Hayes laments that “we have lost the innate knowledge and traditional crafts essential to
countless functions for our daily survival, with the end result being disconnection from our
communities and our natural world.”164 Similarly, in her manual The Hands-On Home, Erica
Strauss writes of how little time is actually spent living in and making a home; the economy
makes it possible to outsource all the production that used to be done within the home. She is
encouraged, however, by the many people who are beginning to cook and create with their
own hands; she argues, “if a movement as diverse as the hands-on-home trend can be said to

American Can Company, Appetizing Recipes Using Canada’s Canned Foods (Hamilton: American Can
Company, 1955), 45.
162
American Can Company, Appetizing Recipes, 5.
163
Julier, “Family and Domesticity,” 150.
164
Hayes, Radical Homemakers, 82.
161

59

have any universal philosophy, it’s that as our time and space allow, we nudge our home
from consumption to production, from a mentality of “just buy it!” to “let’s try to DIY it!”165
Strauss wrote a response to Matchar’s article in which she discusses “the political act
of making dinner.” She notes that the article is “excellent,” but in answer to Matchar’s
question, “Could this “new domesticity” start to look like old-fashioned obligation?” Strauss
argues, “The enemy of my mother is no longer my enemy. Women of my generation aren’t
feeling particularly oppressed by Fortune 500 companies that won’t promote us past the
secretarial pool.”166 She points out that the CEOs of Kraft, PepsiCo, and ADM are all
women. However, these companies produce and market food – or “non-food,” in the words
of Strauss – that is full of refined sugars, preservatives, and additives. She continues, “With a
tremendous thank you to the feminists of the Boomer generation, you have succeeded and
made possible a world where women can be the enemy every bit as much as the men. When
the true fight is with the pervasive influence of a food system gone toxic, it doesn’t matter if
the hand signing off on the strategic agenda is decorated with a sport length neutral tone spa
manicure.”167 Unlike Matchar’s grandmother, Strauss does not view convenience food
products as a liberation when it is often unhealthy and hardly recognisable as food; rather,
she views making dinner as a feminist and political act. She stresses, “Today’s radical
homemaker feminist shows his or her disapproval for the food, the tactics and the subsidy
system that makes corporate box-o-crap food economically possible by pulling household
dollars away from these products…we respond by making dinner.” 168

Erica Strauss, The Hands-On-Home: A Seasonal Guide to Cooking, Preserving, and Natural Homekeeping
(Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2015), xix.
166
Erica Strauss, “The Political Act of Making Dinner,” Northwest Edible Life, November 28, 2011,
https://nwedible.com/political-act-of-making-dinner/.
167
Strauss, “The Political Act of Making Dinner.”
168
Strauss, “The Political Act of Making Dinner.”
165

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Alana Chernila of the blog Eating From the Ground Up wrote a response to
Dickerman’s article; she writes, “I’ve got to take issue with what seems to me to be a
dismissal of the power of the individual kitchen…whatever the product, every time someone
is drawn to incorporate real, whole, and homemade food into their lives, you better believe
they’re shaking their fist at industrial food. Because those acts of filling, preserving, creating,
feeding–I really do think it’s the actions themselves that create change.”169 Home canning is
imbued with meaning in an era where everything is becoming more instant and
technological. For many home preservers, canning takes them back to a time when people
were aware of what was in their food and took the opportunity to get together with family
and friends to preserve it for the winter.
In a blog post aptly titled “Home Canning: Drudgery or Creative Outlet?” Theresa
Loe addresses the quote from the “Can It” article as well as Dickerman’s comment that
canning is “serious drudgery.” Loe states, “I do not consider canning/preserving drudgery.
Far from it! Just as a real home-cooked meal can be an art form, so too is canning and
preserving. It is a creative outlet.”170 For Loe canning is a form of art and a form of food
security; it is a method of creating much more flavourful and healthier canned goods than
what can be found in a grocery store. Loe emphatically argues, “Industrialized food does not
hold a candle to home-canned food in nutrition or flavor. So, yes – I do feel that home
canners can shake their fist at industrialized food. Home canners are making a difference in
their lives and health by avoiding industrialized food as much as possible. – and for that, I

169
Alana Chernila, “Basic Tomato Salsa,” Eating From the Ground Up (blog), September 13, 2012,
http://www.eatingfromthegroundup.com/2012/09/basic-tomato-salsa/.
170
Theresa Loe, “Home Canning: Drudgery or Creative Outlet?,” Living Home Grown (blog) accessed June 5,
2017, https://livinghomegrown.com/home-canning-drudgery-or-creative-outlet/.

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thank them.”171 I also feel like I am shaking my fist at the food corporations every time I fill
up my canner with mason jars of pickles. I am supporting a local farmer up the road by
buying his cucumbers, and by making pickles myself I am producing a preservative free food
that has not had to travel miles to get to my pantry.
Canning, Creativity, and Community
The Washington State Fruit Commission and Northwest Cherry Growers have a
website titled “Sweet Preservation” that provides tutorials on freezing, drying, and canning
fruit, as well as instructions on how to host a preservation party. Plans for “the perfect retrohaute party” include inviting guests using personalized paper invitations – “vintage or retropatterned cardstock makes for the perfect invite, or use a gingham check if you’ll be
jamming country style” – making cocktails that include the fruit that the guests will be
canning at the party, and creating a preservation themed playlist because “no one said
karaoke and canning didn’t mix.”172 The last step is to “circle around the table and get crafty.
Have a variety of labels printed, and pens and decorative ribbons and cloth on hand, so
guests can create personalized wrappings to add to their jars when ready.”173 Etsy designers
created Mason jar labels for “Sweet Preservation” that home canners can download and print
to personalize their jars. The elements for creating this party sound expensive and appear to
be more focused on creating a bloggable photo-op rather than actual canning.
The canning parties and the jazzed up Mason jars are the essence of Sara
Dickerman’s views on preserving: “It's not about producing serious food for the future, and
it's not about shaking a fist at industrial food…Rather, it’s about making and sharing
Loe, “Home Canning: Drudgery or Creative Outlet?.”
Northwest Cherry Growers, “Preservation Party,” accessed November 6, 2017
https://www.nwcherries.com/preservation-party.
173
Northwest Cherry Growers, “Preservation Party.”
171
172

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delicious, idiosyncratic things that are also, not insignificantly, very pretty.”174 “Serious”
food and “pretty” food are mutually exclusive in Dickerman’s article; she does not consider
twenty-first century canning to be practical or political, rather it is purely beautiful and
bloggable. But is it wrong if filled canning jars are pretty? Does this further associate them
with femininity and women’s work in the kitchen, thus making them less valuable? One of
Click and Ridberg’s interview participants mentioned how much she loves the sight of one of
her cabinet shelves loaded down with filled canning jars, and they assert that “this reflection
suggests that a sense of accomplishment is strongly tied to the pleasure of the visual display
of canned food.”175 For many home preservers, jars full of home canned food become a form
of artwork, a dazzling array of colours that offset the dreariness and greyness of winter. Their
prettiness is an added bonus to the pride of having shelves full of home canned food.
When I first read the “Sweet Preservation” tutorial I thought it was over the top in its
expectations for the perfect party. While I still feel that the level of detail that the tutorial is
encouraging the hostess to achieve is extreme, I am also reminded of Christensen’s
arguments about community: “it’s dangerous to assume that contemporary DIY efforts are
nothing more than play. Creative “making” can help to develop relationships that incur the
mutual obligation so integral to “community” – even if the making itself is sporadic or
solitary.”176 Friendships could be made at a canning party, and making a jar of preserves to
give as a gift instead of buying something from a box store certainly constitutes as eschewing
consumerism, even if it is only on a small scale. Chernila writes of the meaning that canning
in community brings to her life; “When it comes to filling jars, there’s also another aspect to

Dickerman, “Can It.”
Click and Ridberg, “Saving Food,” 314-315.
176
Christensen, “Simply Necessity?,” 39.
174
175

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it all–what I can only describe as the community piece. I’ve done a lot of canning with
groups of other people. I’ve learned so much of what I know from the other canners with
whom I’ve stood at the kitchen counter, and all the conversation and experience of those
days has gone into the jars with the chutney and applesauce to be reopened later when I need
it most.”177 Countless commenters on food blogs have shared their memories of canning with
family members, proof that preserving has the ability to bring people together to share the
pleasures of homemade food.
Punk Domestics argues that the “movement toward making food a commodity has
robbed us of something important: Community. For millenia, food was at the very core of
human interaction. It brought families together across generations, extending beyond the
grave as recipes were passed from parent to child again and again.”178 This statement, as well
as the entire article, glosses over the fact that this foodwork was done primarily by women,
but it speaks to the emotions that contemporary DIY preservers are trying to create. In Brown
Eggs and Jam Jars, Wimbush-Bourque provides instructions on how to organize a jam swap
where each guest makes a batch of preserves to contribute, saving everyone the time of
individually making several varieties of canned goods. She pens, “everyone takes pride in his
or her efforts. You can see it in the way the jars are carried to the table and set out in rows,
with an array of decorated tops. You can read it on the faces of these DIY enthusiasts, where
a gleam in their eye means “Try mine!””179 After several rounds of tea, scones, and other

Chernila, “Basic Tomato Salsa.”
Timberlake, “Yes We Can!”
179
Aimée Wimbush-Bourque, Brown Eggs and Jam Jars: Family Recipes from the Kitchen of Simple Bites
(Toronto: Penguin Group, 2015), 145.
177
178

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treats to use as vehicles for tasting the preserves, the swap occurs and everyone gets to leave
with a wide variety of goods.180
Poverty, however, puts a strain on one’s ability to be creative in preserving. When
considering cooking and canning as a creative endeavour, it is vital to note that the
opportunity and choice to be adventurous is often correlated to one’s social class. In More
Than a Labour of Love, Luxton reports that “of all the tasks, women unanimously listed
cooking as one of their favourite jobs. They considered cooking to be the most potentially
creative of all their tasks. However, they qualified their responses by noting that cooking
could only be creative when the cook had sufficient time and resources.”181 The money to
buy bourbon, vanilla beans, and cardamom to jazz up a jar of peaches is not available to all
home canners. In their discussion of classed cooking pleasures, Cairns and Johnston argue
that pleasure and privilege are intertwined: “viewing cooking as a hobby rather than
necessity suggests that one is not only unburdened by the responsibilities of daily foodwork
but also has ample time and resources to devote to culinary pursuits.” 182 Time and resources
are needed to devote to canning, however preserving food can save time in other ways.
It is a common assumption that the abundance of canned and processed foods
available in grocery stores has freed women from hours of household labour. However,
Marjorie Devault’s seminal research on “feeding the family” demonstrates that women still
spend many hours each week keeping track of needed food items, making lists, planning
menus, shopping for groceries, and cooking according to the preferences of individual family
members. She describes planning a meal as invisible “thought work,” and asserts that

Wimbush-Bourque, Brown Eggs and Jam Jars, 145.
Luxton, More Than a Labour of Love, 140.
182
Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 152.
180
181

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“shopping for food can be seen as a complex, artful activity that supports the production of
meaningful patterns of household life by negotiating connections between household and
market.”183 Making grocery lists and going shopping are time consuming activities; the
women Devault interviewed were responsible for making sure cupboards were stocked with
foods everyone in the family would enjoy. 184 Staying within a budget and deciding between
“thousands of products” creates anxiety and takes time.185 She also notes that “reading labels
is a special skill”186 – I find this to be the most time-consuming aspect of shopping, and one
of the reasons why I do my own canning. I do not want to have to take the time to google
“polysorbate 70” on my phone when I go to the grocery store. The work of canning replaces
the work of shopping, reading labels, and choosing from a huge range of products.
Having a well stocked pantry saves a significant amount of time on procuring food.
Anneke Geyzen studied the communication of canned foods in three Belgian women’s
magazines from 1945 to 1960. The agrarian magazine encouraged farming women to keep
canning at home; “[it] acknowledged that home bottling did take up a lot of time and effort,
but it also ensured that the jars were as time – and labor – saving as canned foods once they
were filled, sealed, and stored. It even proclaimed that the time spent on preserving foods
probably equaled the time spent on food shopping.”187 Working together with other family
members or friends to preserve large batches of food can save time and money on meal
planning and trips to the grocery store. Growing up, a trip to the “store” usually meant
running down to the basement to bring my mom a can of green beans or tomatoes.

DeVault, Feeding the Family, 56, 59.
DeVault, Feeding the Family, 60-64.
185
DeVault, Feeding the Family, 59, 68.
186
DeVault, Feeding the Family, 69.
187
Anneke Geyzen, “The Ideology of Convenience: Canned Foods in Women’s Magazines (Flanders, 1945–
1960),” Appetite 94 (2015): 23.
183
184

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Eugenia Bone addresses the time component by asserting that “I’ve also learned that I
do indeed have the time to can, because by putting up small amounts of foods from which I
can make subsequent meals, I expend less energy by preparing dinner.”188 Likewise, the
authors of Fermented Vegetables write, “You can make delicious, nutrient-dense fermented
vegetables whenever you have the time. Later, when there are no fresh veggies in the crisper
drawer, or you don’t have the time to cook up something quick, you’ll have instant side
dishes, salads, or flavorful foods around which to build a meal. Fermented vegetables are the
ultimate convenience food!” 189 While it may still be awhile before fermented vegetables
replace drive-thru fries, having fermented foods in the fridge is a fantastic idea as they keep
for months.
Bone writes of canning, “because it takes time and care to accomplish, the craft of
home canning slows down my relationship with food. Preserving is not about immediate
satisfaction (for that, eat the cherries fresh). It’s about anticipation. And in that sense it’s an
act of optimism. Yes, the world will be here in two weeks when my marinated artichokes
have finished seasoning. And no, life is not slipping past unacknowledged and unrevered.”190
The anticipation aspect of canning adds to the feeling of satisfaction when a preserved
product turns out just right – canned pickles, for example cannot be eaten right away. They
must, as the name makes obvious, pickle first. Canadian Thanksgiving was the time when
my mother would bring up the first jar of homemade pickles from the basement and I also
carry on this tradition. Canning allows home cooks to be creative and create something
tangible.

Eugenia Bone, Well-Preserved (Clarkson Potter: New York, 2009), 9.
Kirsten K. Shockey and Christopher Shockey, Fermented Vegetables (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing,
2014), 11.
190
Bone, Well-Preserved, 9.
188
189

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Conclusion
The DIY movement gave value to domestic tasks and publications like BUST strived
to show that feminism and domesticity did not have to be incompatible. I work in an office
part time and although it is fulfilling to earn my own paycheque, I am still happier planting
seeds in the garden with my toddler and making dill pickles. In a world where so many
individuals like myself spend their working hours staring at computer screens, it is not a
surprise that canning, cooking, and other household crafts are once again enjoying a
renaissance. It is easy to get lost in the routine of motherhood and work, and gardening and
canning has given me a creative outlet. When I look at my garden and my Mason jars I feel
proud of what I have accomplished.
Master Preserver Christina Ward argues that gardeners and canners like herself
worked tirelessly to preserve these traditions and give them value. She recounts her
experience of growing up in an era of third wave feminism while helping her Gramma with
the gardening and preserving, which she refers to as her Gramma’s “craftwork.” Ward
writes,
As a teenager discovering punk rock and feminism, my eyes opened to the value of
so-called ‘women’s work.’ The making of things. Food preservation became more
than a jar of pickles; it became a direct link to our matriarchal history. Looking back
now to the early 1990s and the rise of Third Wave feminism, music…is often cited as
that moment in the cultural zeitgeist that birthed a new consciousness. Maybe so, but
the DIY maker movement of the early 2000s has its roots in that same early 1990s
period where women, like myself, worked to keep the old ways alive.”191

Christina Ward, Preservation: The Art and Science of Canning, Fermentation and Dehydration (Port
Townsend, WA: Process Media, 2017), 14.
191

68

Women – and men – have always canned. Its popularity has gone in waves but there has
always been preserving enthusiasts working “to keep the old ways alive,” and in the twentyfirst century canning and other domestic tasks are being reconsidered as valuable activities.

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CHAPTER THREE
Urban Homesteading, Blogging, and The Constraints of Choice
“But now, everything old is new again. The resurgent interest in local foods and
home-scale preservation – from canning, jamming, freezing, brewing, fermenting,
and otherwise experimenting with food – is happening coast to coast. Taking up the
pot and the pan, the cheesecloth and strainer, the canning jar and the wine bottle,
homesteaders are beginning to reweave the web of culture lost in the toxic downdrift
of the industrial food supply. Food preservation is hooked into all the values of
homesteading – self-sufficiency, community resilience, DIY for fun and pleasure – a
reminder that food is not something that’s done for us, but something that we do with
one another.”192
Canning is an integral component of the urban homesteading movement; for
homesteaders who grow their own food, canning and preserving is a natural extension of
becoming self-sufficient throughout the whole year. As Kaplan and Blume describe in the
quote above, home canners who also urban homestead are taking control of their food supply
by gardening and preserving the surplus. This chapter will discuss if choosing to can and
urban homestead is a feminist act, or if it is a return to traditional gender roles. Exactly what
defines an action or decision as feminist is a highly debateable topic – in this chapter I will
discuss canning and urban homesteading through the lens of choice feminism to attempt to
answer if these activities can be considered feminist. I will also use autoethnography as
method and choice feminism as theory to delve into my own conflicts between the academic
and the domestic.
Educated women with successful careers who dabble in the domestic or quit their
jobs to become fulltime homemakers/urban homesteaders are not always taken seriously in
news publications and academic literature. The problem is that individual choices, such as

192

Kaplan and Blume, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living, 141.

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“dropping out” of the work force to urban homestead, can structurally move women back
into a traditional gender role of being the primary caregiver and food provider for their
families. However, the bloggers to be discussed in this chapter do not view their work or
roles as traditional or a burden – they see urban homesteading as a solution to problems
surrounding the food supply, industrialism, and consumerism. They want to take care of their
family’s well-being. Furthermore, food blogs are blurring the divide between the private and
public spheres and thus complicating the definition of paid work and being engaged in the
outer world. Antonia Smith argues that “the urban homestead movement…is a community of
practice that is almost completely defined by its online relationships. While participants are
doing real-world work – in their gardens and homes – and while there certainly must be
participants in the movement who are not active participants in the blogosphere, I would
argue that it is the blogosphere that nevertheless defines the scope of the movement.”193
Female urban homesteaders are forger careers not only through the unpaid work they do at
home, but also through the paid work of writing stories and tutorials about their lifestyle in
blogs and homesteading manuals.
September 8, 2017: My tomatoes are finally all starting to ripen! It feels amazing to harvest
a crop of something I have grown, even if it is only a small bowlful at a time. Unfortunately, I
will not have enough Roma tomatoes to make into sauce or salsa, I thought I had planted
four Romas but it turns out there are only two plants. I of course ignored the number one
piece of advice from every urban homesteading book I have read about keeping a gardening
journal. I have Brussel sprouts and green cabbage starts in the shed and I have no idea

193

Smith, “The Farm Wife Mystery School,” 145.

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which is which because I didn’t think about labelling them. Babies take a chunk of their
parents’ brains when they are born. I can only remember to do so much.
The days of taking little G into the garden with me and sifting dirt are long gone. One, I got
sick of digging dirt, and two, he’s a toddler who doesn’t understand that the only acorn
squash on the plant was not ready to be picked.
Such is life.
My pepper plants that I thought were dead before I even transplanted them are doing great!
There are several peppers on them. The beans look phenomenal and I am starting to harvest
them. Beans are such amazing plants; I love coming out to the garden every morning and
seeing how they have managed to further wrap themselves around my make-shift trellis of
scavenged sticks.
Planting and looking after a garden have been wonderful lessons in patience and hope. Due
to several factors almost everything was planted late, and we haven’t been able to eat that
many veggies out of the garden yet. Most things will be ready this month and I get emotional
thinking that I did much of the work myself with my baby beside me. There were times when I
wondered what I was doing all this work for when I could just buy all my produce, but in the
end it felt good to get dirt underneath my finger nails and watch my garden grow. Everything
is too instant, too convenient in our society; we don’t have to work with our hands anymore
to procure what we need. I think that’s part of the reason why canning is becoming popular
again – it’s so satisfying to be able to say “Yes, I made it myself.”194
My renewed interest in gardening and home canning often feels in conflict with the
academic and admittedly, competitive side of me and I often wonder, must I choose one over
194

Woman’s Home Companion, The Woman’s Home Companion Cook Book, 861.

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the other? I am the oldest of four children and I began helping with the cooking and canning
at a young age. My Mennonite grandmother canned fruit and vegetables, made applesauce,
baked bread, and cooked from scratch. These skills were passed on to my mother and then on
to me. My most vivid memories of canning are measuring sugar into jars for peaches and
running cucumbers through a meat grinder to make relish. We lived in a tiny town on five
acres with a huge garden, fruit trees, and space to run around. While this sounds like an
idyllic existence, my number one goal was to venture out on my own and attend university. I
had absolutely no desire to be a stay at home mom and be domestic. I fulfilled my dream of
attending university and it was there that I experienced the “profound personal
transformation” 195 of becoming a feminist.
Despite reading “The Problem that has no Name,”196 cooking and baking were my
favourite ways to procrastinate in university. I found that kneading bread was relaxing and
therapeutic; it connected me to my soul and the earth in a way I find hard to explain. I also
could not live without my mom’s dill pickles and I started making my own with the help of
my spouse. I wanted to plant a garden but never lived in a place where that was an option. In
July of 2016 my partner was offered a job transfer to a town on the Sunshine Coast. 197 We
were extremely fortunate to find a little house on two acres with a small garden plot. I spent
the first rainy winter dreaming of spending sunny summer afternoons in the garden with my

Sandra Bartky famously wrote that “to be a feminist, one has first to become one. For many feminists, this
involves the experience of a profound personal transformation, an experience which goes far beyond that
sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as ‘political.’” “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist
Consciousness,” Social Theory and Practice 3, no. 4 (Fall 1975): 425.
196
The first chapter of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
197
The Sunshine Coast is a strip of land north of Vancouver; it is on the mainland but can only be accessed by
boat and BC Ferries. It extends from Gibson’s in the south to Powell River in the north, although this town has
not always been included in the Sunshine Coast.
195

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son. I underestimated how much work it would be to start a garden, especially with a oneyear old baby by my side, but I was proud of what I accomplished and it felt significant.
Studying food preservation and urban homesteading inspired me to grow some of my own
produce and start canning and baking bread again. At the same time, I restarted working on
my thesis in January, 2017 after a yearlong Leave of Absence. It felt good to use my
academic brain again.
Michelle Catherine Nelson, author of the Urban Homesteading Cookbook, also
grapples with my Conflict. She explains, “There were two conflicted sides of me: one in a
black pencil dress and stiletto heels walking the red carpet on Queen Street, the other
daydreaming about keeping fluffy heritage chickens, growing food, stocking
preserves…about not being dependent on a grocery store.”198 Nelson spent her childhood
summers visiting her grandmother’s farm on the Sunshine Coast; she has memories of
collecting eggs, helping make pies and preserves, and biting into homemade bread. Her
grandmother’s farm as well as her advanced degrees in agriculture and conservation inspired
her to grow as much food as she could in her Vancouver apartment as well as forage for
greens in the city. Nelson was able to bring the skills and values she learned on her
Grandmother’s farm and in her university studies to her life in Vancouver.199 Despite
drawing on traditional foraging and preserving skills, her cookbook does not feel like a step
back in time, but a step into a future of not relying solely on a grocery store for food.
Choice Feminism, Domesticity, and “Blogging About It”
Whatever a woman decides to do – make jam, urban homestead, or pursue a career is viewed as her choice in the name of choice feminism, but choices are anything but simple,
198
199

Nelson, The Urban Homesteading Cookbook, 10-11.
Nelson, The Urban Homesteading Cookbook, 11-12.

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and the same choices are not available to all women. Choice feminism glosses over the fact
that class and race and myriad other factors create inequalities for women which affect the
number of opportunities available to them. Cairns and Johnston write that “because we are
all assumed to be equal players at the gender table, women are framed as individuals who
freely “choose” to “empower” themselves with activities previously linked to femininity’s
subordinate status – including shopping and cooking.”200 The fact that women always have
and still do the majority of the cooking in Western society is glossed over when it is assumed
that gender equality has been achieved.
The choice of urban homesteading (on a very small scale) and staying at home with
my baby is only available to me because I have a partner with a job that pays the bills and
comes with full medical and dental benefits. In a blog post titled “Where the Men Aren’t,”
Strauss acknowledges that the world of self-sufficiency blogs is primarily female-centric and
there are often male partners behind the scenes making this lifestyle possible by earning a
paycheque. She writes,
If your guy is like Homebrew Husband, maybe he only goes to work so he can come
home again, to the family he loves and supports. Maybe he sits through mindnumbing meetings and dreams of tractors…But instead, every damn day, maybe he
wakes up early, commutes, sucks it up and earns money because, until we can pay the
mortgage in potatoes, people he loves count on him do to so. The men are there. I
know they are. Quiet, not flashy, behind the scenes. Supporting in their own way.
Important figures in the equation that adds up to a productive home. If modern
homesteading is in-part about community building, the first community to build is the
one under your own roof. So even if the guys don’t show up too often in this blogger
world of primarily female voices, let’s remember them, shall we?201

Cairns and Johnston, Food and Femininity, 13.
Erica Strauss, “Where the Men Aren’t,” Northwest Edible Life (blog), June 16, 2012,
https://nwedible.com/where-the-men-arent/.
200
201

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Strauss’ article superbly addresses the fact that being an urban homesteader is unlikely to pay
all the bills, and someone needs to go out and work. Due to my research, I can corroborate
Strauss’ assessment that women dominate the world of urban homesteading and food
blogging. But there are men, and of course other women, in the background making their
choices and efforts possible. In response to Strauss’ article on the political act of making
dinner, one commentator noted that “I can’t ask my husband to work in a killer corporate
world because I want to garden. The goal is a world where there are more options for all, but
living off the labor of a person I love is not an option for me, because that’s not what he
wants either.”202 I feel the same way – my partner wants to change careers and I cannot ask
him to continue on with his current job so I can urban homestead, especially when he has
helped support me through my years of university. I also do not want to stay at home full
time – I want to put all my years of academic study to use in a job outside the home.
Michaele L. Ferguson articulates that according to choice feminism, women’s
freedom comes down to the ability and opportunity to make their own individual choices; it
separates the public from the private and the personal from the political. It is a feminism that
wants to include everyone and judge no one.203 Under the mantel of choice feminism, if a
woman chooses to quit her job to grow heirloom tomatoes, raise chickens, and bake bread,
she should feel empowered to do so without judgement. Parker and Morrow critically ask, “If
women are so bound up with the intricacies of home life via home-grown probiotics, food
preservation, and blogging, how can they participate in other important social and economic
urban transformations?”204 Similarly, Ferguson argues that feminists must be willing to

K. Coghlan, in response to Strauss, “The Political Act of Making Dinner.”
See Michaele L. Ferguson, “Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1
(March 2010): 247-253.
204
Parker and Morrow, “Urban Homesteading and Intensive Mothering,” 10.
202
203

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engage in the world of politics and make judgements – this does not mean being judgemental
– about the personal. She stands behind feminists who maintain that for women to be truly
free we need political freedom; she asserts, “Women are free only to the extent that they are
engaged in the political practice of creating, reimaging, and transforming the shared world in
which they live.”205
As far as engaging in politics is concerned, it is evident that many food preservers
and urban homesteaders view their actions as a political act and a form of resistance against
the industrial food complex. In writing about the back to the land movement, Jeffrey Jacob
notes that the “movement was, in its own quiet way, a broad-based protest against what the
spirit of the sixties saw as the irrational materialism of urban life.”206 Twenty-first century
urban homesteaders - despite living in towns or cities - also share this sentiment; their
decisions to live a less consumeristic and more sustainable lifestyle is an important political
act. As Master Preserver Theresa Loe observes, “Canning and preserving is an important part
of the self-reliant and urban homesteading movement that is growing right now. People want
to be more responsible for their own survival as well as for the survival of the earth. All food
preservation is a part of that. In addition, by preserving our own food, we know exactly what
is IN that food.”207 If it is true that ‘actions speak louder than words,’ then choosing to live
by example as a tomato canning and/or urban homesteading feminist is a way of making a
judgement about the pitfalls of a consumeristic society and a food system that is full of
preservatives and additives.

Ferguson, “Choice Feminism and the Fear of Politics,” 251.
Jeffrey Jacob, New Pioneers, 3. Jacobs notes that “rather than unconsciously submit to the social forces
that move most of their fellow citizens in the same direction, back-to-the-landers turn counterclockwise
against the grain of prevailing fashion,” 18.
207
Loe, “What is all this talk about Canning?.”
205
206

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It is also important to recognize that deciding to “stay at home” is not a simple
decision, and not necessarily a privileged one either. Stable and decent paying work can be
difficult to find; also, daycare can be incredibly expensive and it is hard to find a daycare that
has space available. In the fall of 2018 my son was on a waitlist for daycare for two months;
I was only able to work because my partner could write his schedule around mine. The
“choice” of staying home is often made because of economic reasons and governments that
will not put universal daycare in place. As Claire Snyder-Hall states, “the rhetoric of
“choice” focuses attention on the individual choice-maker and so takes the focus off the ways
in which women’s choices are often overdetermined by societal structures and cultural
traditions.”208 The individual is blamed for her choices outside of the societal and familial
context that created those choices.
Blogging has made it possible for some women to combine having a career and
staying at home. Beyond being a potential source of income, I would also argue that blogs
are the twenty-first century version of attending a consciousness-raising group. Peggy
Orenstein writes in her article “The Femivore’s Dilemma,” that “a generation and many
lawsuits later,209 some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others
merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not
changed — an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic
dependence on your husband — only now, bearing them was considered a “choice”: if you
felt stuck, it was your own fault.” 210 Based on the number of homesteading and homemaking
blogs I have read, I believe it is safe to assume that many twenty-first century homesteaders

Snyder-Hall, “Third-Wave Feminism and the Defense of “Choice,””256.
She is referring to the middle-class housewives of the 1950s and the publication of The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan. Orenstein, “The Femivore’s Dilemma.”
210
Orenstein, “The Femivore’s Dilemma.”
208
209

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and homemakers want to feel validated in their endeavours. Cooking, gardening, cleaning,
and taking care of children can be lonely jobs, and blogging about homemaking probably
makes one feel a little less isolated.
Although Parker and Morrow do not see much potential in blogging for inciting
social change, many women who can and urban homesteader are engaged with social and
political issues, especially the adverse effects of the industrial food system. They share their
memories, thoughts, and ideas about canning on the internet to inspire others – women and
men – to create with their hands and preserve local produce. Kurtz et al. argue that “online
environments are used to produce meaningful and complex interactions of all different kinds
including providing places for people to connect with others for support and to share
thoughts, ideas, and stories.”211 Communities form on the internet, and the incredible number
of blogs and books that exist about urban homesteading and food preservation is proof that
many of the authors want to reach a larger audience and do not wish to live in isolation.
Aimée Wimbush-Bourque is a Canadian food blogger who has turned her love of
cooking for her family, raising chickens, and gardening into a career. She is a trained
professional chef who now urban homesteads and runs the popular Canadian food blog
Simple Bites. Wimbush-Bourque grew up on a homestead in northern British Columbia so
the work of homesteading and canning/preserving is not new to her.212 She recently moved to
Nova Scotia from Montreal with her husband and three children. She writes, “after falling in

Kurtz, et al., “Blogs as Elusive Ethnographic Texts,” 2.
Wimbush-Bourque notes, “Cooking has always been my preferred recreational activity, creative outlet, and
source of relaxation. My biggest inspiration is my mother, who was about 30 years ahead of the recent “real
food” movement. She and my father homeschooled us four kids and raised most of our own food, which gave
me ample ‘Little House on the Prairie’ opportunities as a little girl. Milking goats, collecting eggs, hauling
wood, and baking bread were just a few of my daily activities.” “Meet Aimée,” Simple Bites (blog), accessed
June 25, 2020, https://simplebites.net/about/meet-aimee/.
211
212

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love with motherhood and wanting to stay at home with my babies, and after nearly ten years
in the professional cooking industry, I traded my tongs and chef whites for cloth diapers and
a laptop, and married my two passions by becoming a food/mommy blogger.”213 She has two
published cookbooks and has written an extensive section on canning on her website.
Due to the popularity of her blog and cookbooks, it is likely that Wimbush-Bourque
makes a comfortable income from her endeavours. Thus, the question arises, if a woman can
make money from canning and blogging about it, does that count as a career, and as being
involved in the outer world? I would argue absolutely - successful bloggers have a far wider
influence than they likely would at work. Some canners and urban homesteaders are breaking
the divide between the home and the workplace by making money from their homesteading
and/or canning blogs. The blogosphere is redefining what it means to work from home and
combine having a career with raising a family.
Another example is the urban homesteading blog Northwest Edible Life, run by Erica
Strauss.214 She describes herself as “a professional chef turned gardening and urban
homesteading fanatic.”215 Strauss married her passions for writing, cooking, and gardening to
create her blog; she explains, “I wasn’t actually trying to be a writer. I was a secret hippie in
the suburbs. You know the type: looks perfectly normal in the preschool pick-up line, but is
always in the garden or canning something or letting their kids run around without pants.”216
She felt others might benefit from her knowledge of growing vegetables in the Pacific
Northwest climate, and her blog became a huge success. She has also written a book, The
Hands-On Home, with tips and recipes for ‘from-scratch’ living. She is not afraid to address

Wimbush-Bourque, “Meet Aimée.”
Erica Strauss, “About,” Northwest Edible Life, accessed January 4, 2018, https://nwedible.com/about/.
215
Strauss, “About.”
216
Strauss, “About.”
213
214

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potentially controversial topics or bring up the “f” word – feminism. For Strauss, feminism is
about having options, for both men and women: she writes, “Feminism must be dedicated to
expanding options, including the option to not compete in a traditional corporate sense, for
both women and men, or it loses its relevance.”217 Strauss does not buy into the conventional
definition of success which involves climbing the career ladder and establishing wealth
through money and possessions.
On her blog Strauss addresses the question of why she undertakes all the chores that
urban homesteading entails; a friend had recently told her that she was “really crazy”218 for
staying up until two in the morning to finish canning tomatoes. First, she acknowledges that
many people live this lifestyle for political reasons and to shake their fist at giant
corporations. But Strauss notes that these motivations are often underlined with fear and
anger, and at the end of a very long day of canning tomatoes other reasons must supersede
these negative emotions. She pens, “all that political spitfire, as much as I enjoy it
occasionally, isn’t really why I do any of this. I don’t bake my own bread to fuck over
Wonder Bread (owned by Hostess) or can my own tomatoes to stick it to Muir Glen (owned
by General Mills).” Why then, does she can? Strauss answers:
Because I have a pantry that reflects a summer spent in relaxing work and joyful
creation.
Because cooking dinner makes me proud.
Because the food is delicious.
Because this kind of work makes me happy.
That’s why. And that’s enough.219

Strauss, “The Political Act of Making Dinner.”
Erica Strauss, “Zombies Vs. The Joy of Canning: Motivation in the Productive Home,” North West Edible Life
(blog), August 21, 2012, https://nwedible.com/zombies-canning-motivation-in-the-productive-home/.
219
Strauss, “Zombies Vs. The Joy of Canning.”
217
218

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Strauss finds happiness and pride in everything she does at home; it is clear from her blog
posts that urban homesteading is the life for her.
There is a caveat, however; Simple Bites and other domestic/food blogs espouse an
ideal where mothers take on the responsibility of happily cooking delicious and nutritious
meals for their families. In her study of food blogs and post feminist domesticity, Salvio
compares the domestic centered food blogs written by and for women to cookbooks from the
1950s that firmly placed women in the kitchen. She argues that in many blogs “post feminist
sensibilities persist. They exacerbate distinctions between men and women and provoke
middle-class anxieties about having children, finding a husband, and securing the comforts of
home.”220 While she is critical of the traditional gender roles being evoked by many female
food bloggers, she does note that “while limited feminist sensibility is apparent in many of
these blogs, one could argue that the bloggers demonstrate a potential for resistance by
combining their work in the home with their work in the public world of published
writing.”221 She refers to the writing of domesticity in a public space as “fracturing the split
behind the public and private spheres.” 222
In a blog post titled “Women’s Work,” Shannon Hayes argues that “entrepreneurship
is a woman’s chance to truly have it all. We don’t face glass ceilings, and as business
owners, we build lives that center around the things that matter to us: families, children,
good food, joyful living. But there’s more happening. Entrepreneurship is our chance to rewrite the economy so that it makes sense: so that marriages work, so that kids have viable

Salvio, “Dishing It Out,” 35.
Salvio, “Dishing It Out,” 38.
222
Salvio, “Dishing It Out,” 38.
220
221

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futures, so that the soil gets richer and the water gets cleaner.”223 For her, this is women’s
work. In the county where she lives, several of the successful small businesses are run by
women. Blogs that make money are a type of small business, a form of entrepreneurship that
women have turned to in order to be their own boss and balance work and home life.
One example is the blog Living Home Grown, run by Theresa Loe. In her personal
blog biography, she explains how she learned to can and preserve at her “mother’s apron
strings,” but as she grew up she “shifted focus and followed in [her] father and brother’s
footsteps toward technology.”224 She received a degree in engineering and she writes that “I
knew I had made a mistake.”225 She went back to school to study sustainable horticulture,
culinary arts, and food preserving. Her official biography states that “Theresa has a diverse
and successful background as a digital entrepreneur, the Co-Executive TV producer of the
top organic-gardening series on PBS, and as an on-camera expert in small-space food
growing, homesteading and preserving. She has developed her brand, Living Homegrown
Media, into a dynamic 6-figure business that includes online courses, business coaching and
a membership site for organic, sustainable living.”226 Leaving a male dominated profession
to urban homestead, preserve food, and create a blog did not mean Loe “dropped out” of
having a career.
Blogger and cookbook author Ashley English left her office job to become a
homesteader. She explains, “two years ago, I was hopping in my car each morning, heading

Shannon Hayes, “Women’s Work,” The Radical Homemaker (blog), June 1, 2018,
http://theradicalhomemaker.net/tuesday-post/womens-work/.
224
Theresa Loe, “About Me, Theresa Loe,” Living Home Grown (blog), accessed May 31, 2017
https://livinghomegrown.com/about/.
225
Loe, “About Me, Theresa Loe.”
226
“Theresa Loe’s Official Bio,” Living Home Grown (blog), accessed May 31, 2017
https://livinghomegrown.com/theresa-loe-bio/.
223

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off to a job in a medical office. Things changed, though, when a whirlwind romance quickly
resulted in marriage, a little homestead at the end of a dirt road, and just the encouragement
and support I needed to make some serious life changes. Combining my long-standing
interest and education in nutrition, sustainability, and local food, I made the bold decision to
leave my stable office job and try my hand at homesteading.”227 English started a blog to
record her adventures and became the author of several cookbooks and homesteading how-to
manuals. Canning and Preserving with Ashley English highlights other home canners
throughout the cookbook in a subsection titled “Portrait of a Canner.” The home preservers
describe how they started canning, what it means to them, and why other people should also
can. One canner, Amy, was inspired to start making jam after going to France on vacation;
she now runs her own successful jam making company.228 Home canning and urban
homesteading is certainly not a money making career path for everyone, but the women
highlighted in this chapter demonstrate that there is value in growing your own food and
preserving it.
Conclusion
August 1st, 2018: My garden looks amazing – so much better than last year. My tomato
plants are beautiful and are starting to produce little tomatoes. I have a “wall” of drying
beans growing above sweet dumpling delicata squash, buttercup squash, and yellow zucchini
in a bed of soil that I made. I’m so proud of that. I built a lasagna garden bed with layers of
carrot tops, cabbage leaves, autumn leaves, grass clippings, and peat moss. It was awesome
to see it decompose.

English, Canning and Preserving with Ashley English, 8.
English, Canning and Preserving with Ashley English, 87. Amy’s jam company is called Lemon Bird Preserves,
https://lemonbirddesign.com/.
227
228

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I also have purple bush beans, a type of black drying bean, peas, beets, Wisconsin pickling
cucumbers, Super Red cabbage, January King cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, red bull’s
horn peppers, Hungarian cheese blend peppers, dill, chamomile, rosemary, oregano, and
sage. I’ve had to water everyday the past few weeks since it’s been so hot, and there’s
usually something to take care of everyday, but it’s lots of fun and it’s amazing to be able to
eat veggies I grew myself.
I’ve made bread and butter pickles and dill pickle relish this year so far – the relish turned
out great. My second batch was better. I also made strawberry rhubarb jam with balsamic
vinegar and vanilla bean yesterday. It’s incredible. Blackberry season is finally starting
which is exciting! They are still G’s favourite and he always asks for “blackbees.”
This year I have been rethinking exactly what I want to do with my life, and about work
inside and outside the home. The danger with urban homesteading is that it could become the
new “angel in the home” ideology where the “perfect” wife and mother gardens, makes
soaps, preserves, cooks everything from scratch, uses cloth diapers, and homeschools.
Yesterday I came home to G’s cloth diapers drying on the front porch and thought, ‘multiple
women’s movements were fought so I didn’t have to do this.’ And when I was pregnant, I
never really thought about whether I should or shouldn’t use them – it just seemed like the
thing to do.
But I also think of the intro to the BUST DIY Guide to Life and how the creators of the
magazine believed homemaking skills and feminism don’t have to be incompatible. To
devalue domestic tasks is to devalue women’s work in the home. For me the answer is to pick
and choose what I am capable of doing with the energy and time I have available. I did not
do as much canning as I would have liked this summer but that is how life goes sometimes.

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It is the nature of the work both inside and outside the home that makes it fulfilling
for the person undertaking it. Shannon Hayes points out that “What Friedan understood, but
what many of us ultimately forgot, is that simply landing a job does not guarantee selfactualization. At the same time, the homemaker who simply learns to cook dinner, keep a
garden and patch blue jeans will probably not find deep fulfillment, either. Those who do not
seriously challenge themselves with a genuine life plan, with the intent of taking a
constructive role in society, will share the same dangers as the housewives who suffered
under the mystique of feminine fulfillment.” 229 My “life plan” has entailed volunteering at
my town’s museum in order to put my history degree to use and become more involved with
my community. I have interests and hobbies outside of work and motherhood, which I think
is incredibly important for my well-being.
Defining success only by what a person accomplishes in the public sphere devalues
women’s work, and second it devalues jobs that are not viewed as “masculine” or “career”
type jobs. It depends upon the person doing the valuing, but overall, I feel that my canning of
produce is valued. People want my preserves. I recently decided to conduct an experiment by
posting on my Facebook page that I am thinking of canning extra pickles, fancy jams, and
barbeque sauce to sell to family and friends. I hardly use Facebook and I do not have that
many “friends,” therefore, I doubt many people saw my post, but ten friends responded with
resounding enthusiasm. I did not mention anything about prices, and no one asked.

229

Hayes, Radical Homemakers, 45.

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CONCLUSION
Home preserving is an activity that maintains links with a person’s familial past.
Learning how to preserve and teaching the skills to the next generation honours the
preserving work of female ancestors; many canners feel they are honouring the women who
have come before them by learning how to preserve. Lugonja writes,
The first time Grandma taught me how to preserve fruit she was 72 and I was living
in Lethbridge with my first baby, getting domestic. She came to visit and so I bought
a case of pears and peaches and apricots and we canned. It was a lot of work…the 36
quarts of fruit looked like jewels in the morning sun. That was a profound experience,
and one I cherish and have worked to preserve as I have continued this tradition my
entire life.”230
Women’s preserving skills are being remembered as exactly that – a skill – and it is being
appreciated and preserved by a new generation of home canners.
Even though I believe these skills should be valued, I do not expect everyone to share
my love of canning and other domestic skills. In an article titled, “I am a Radical
Homemaker Failure,” in which she discusses Hayes’ book, Madeline Holler shares different
sentiments about canning and bread baking. She muses, “I had considered -- sometimes
seriously -- canning produce as a way to keep costs down. Canning is a common theme in
Hayes' book. Just thinking about putting up a winter's worth of green beans and apricot jam,
though, made me want to take a nap. Even baking all of my own bread sounded dreadful. For
me, kneading dough was the physical manifestation of pushing and pressing all of life's
ambitions into one yeasty ball of carbs.”231 When she wrote this article, Holler and her
husband were living on one third of their previous income; Holler had left her career to take

Lugonja, “The Canadian Food Experience Project: Round Up Five.”
Madeline Holler, “I am a Radical Homemaker Failure,” Salon, June 30, 2010,
https://www.salon.com/2010/06/30/radical_homemaker_failure/.
230
231

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care of their baby, and her husband had decided to switch careers. She notes how “Living on
the cheap is exhausting, mentally and emotionally. I don't mind going without. But for what
you do need? That takes planning. It takes so much time.”232
My research indicates that canning is one of the most popular modern homemaking
activities because it does not require a large financial investment. Mason jars and canners can
be found at thrift stores and garage sales. However, accessing in season fruit and vegetables
that are affordable is not always easy. For people experiencing urban poverty, lack of
transportation may be a barrier to finding this produce. The romantic notion of driving to a upick farm to collect strawberries is not possible for someone who does not have a vehicle. I
did not can during the times in my life when I could hardly afford groceries, or when I lived
in a large city with no car.
Furthermore, canning is not always leisurely. I also want to take a nap at the thought
of canning a winter’s worth of green beans. I do not always enjoy canning, or cooking, or
gardening. Sometimes I am simply too busy or too tired. I still have a container of raspberries
macerated with sugar in the freezer waiting to be made into jam because I grew tired of
canning last summer. I like preparing the fruit and the vegetables for canning, but I will
admit that processing the jars is a bit of a chore. Canning in community can address issues of
not always having the time to can; ‘do it yourself’ does not have to mean ‘do it all by
yourself.’ Last year a friend came over to make jam, and it was reassuring to know that there
was someone to help me in case my baby woke up in the middle of processing jars. I am also
fortunate to live in a place with several small farms – my husband and I are subscribed to a
CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share that we receive every other week. When this

232

Holler, “I am a Radical Homemaker Failure.”

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farm share first started a few years ago we had to drive out to the farm to pick up our boxes,
but for the 2020 season, pick up is available in the neighbourhood where we live. In the fall
of 2018, a small produce market also opened near our house. My neighborhood has a varied
mix of incomes, many on the lower side, and these options make local produce affordable
and accessible for people who may not have a car or are struggling to make ends meet.
A blog post by Strauss makes evident that viewing canning through a ‘necessity in
the past’ vs. ‘pleasure in the present’ dichotomy is an oversimplification of canning
throughout history and the present. She writes in “The Crush of the Harvest,” “perhaps you
are questioning this whole, damned endeavor. Maybe you’re starting to remember how your
grandma never actually sat down from July through October. Is the gingham-marketed joy of
the grow-your-own, preserve-your-own, cook-your-own life starting to look a bit more like a
self-made hell, than the modern road to freedom?”233 In this post she is referring to the time
of year when all the produce is ready at once and the home canner is racing against time to
get it into jars. For urban homesteaders who grow their own gardens and are committed to
preserving it, canning is still a necessity. Strauss further notes, “When the sheer thrill of that
DIY jam lets go, you’re left with a simple truth: what you started with passion has become
obligation.”234 My garden is looking fantastic this year, and once my tomato plants start
producing, I know I will be canning for both enjoyment and necessity.
The term “having it all” can mean different things to different women, and the
definition can change over the course of one’s life. Right now my definition of “having it all”
is being able to work part time outside the home so that I can be with my kids more at home

233
Erica Strauss, “The Crush of the Harvest,” August 20, 2015, Northwest Edible Life,
https://nwedible.com/crush-of-the-harvest/.
234
Strauss, “The Crush of the Harvest.”

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before they go to school. I have always wanted a career, and that has not changed, but what
has also become important to me at this stage in my life is that I work for someone who is
supportive of working moms and flexible with what shifts I can work. “Having it all” also
means that I have time to pursue my creative and homemaking interests. I want to keep on
writing, and I have plans to start my own blog and turn some of the sections of this thesis
into blog posts. I do not have to choose one side of myself over another, I will always love to
cook, write, preserve, research, and garden.
I want my sons to know that the skills of gardening, canning, and cooking are vital,
and that women AND men are perfectly capable of learning them. My oldest son has been
digging in the garden with me since before he could walk, and these are some of my
favourite memories of spending time with him. Without meaning to I have become a radical
homemaking feminist, striving to give value to all work, whether it is paid or unpaid, in the
home, or outside of it. I am thankful that writing about something as seemingly mundane as
home canning allowed me to explore domestic work in depth, and I hope that I have inspired
you to think about your food memories, your ancestors, where your food comes from, and
what foodwork means to you.

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CANNING IN THE TIME OF COVID: AN AFTERWARD
It seems fitting that I am completing this thesis during the COVID-19 pandemic –
throughout this year I have observed another explosion of interest in gardening, bread
baking, and other domestic tasks. At first my social media feeds were filled with posts of
sourdough bread; by midsummer those posts switched to gleaming photos of Mason jars
filled with strawberry rhubarb jam, tomatoes, and pickles. I am writing this at the end of
August, and canning equipment has now overtaken flour and yeast as one of the most in
demand commodities of 2020. According to an article in Better Homes and Gardens
magazine, would be canners are having a difficult time tracking down canning lids. Mason
jars can be used for years if there are no cracks or chips in them, but lids can only be used
once otherwise they may not seal properly. Marie Bregg, owner of the online shop Mason
Jar Merchant, told Better Homes and Gardens that “‘Earlier in the year, many people looked
for ways to pass the time in their own backyards, and now we have a bunch of baby tomatoes
running around just begging to be turned into salsas and pasta sauces, or strawberries into
jams and preserves. It’s the summertime version of spring’s sourdough-baking craze. I call it
Sourdough 2.0.’”235 Bregg’s store experienced a massive increase in sales during August
from customers searching for canning lids due to a lack of supply in stores.
I went shopping for extra jars and lids a couple of months ago because I was worried
about a shortage; as I was perusing the shelves a sales associate told me that the canning
section of the store was twice as large as last year. Food security/sovereignty and food prices
are major concerns this year. Knowing how to grow our own food in our communities and

235
Karla Walsh, “If You’re Struggling to Find Canning Supplies Right Now, You're Not Alone,” Better Homes and
Gardens, August 31, 2020, https://www.bhg.com/recipes/how-to/preserving-canning/canning-suppliesshortage-coronavirus/.

91

preserve it is an answer to these concerns. I am not saying that every person must garden and
preserve, or that every woman – or man – should become an urban farmsteader. However,
we should try and support people who do these things by buying their produce, cheese, and
jams.
While COVID-19 certainly brought its stresses, I enjoyed the opportunity to plant a
brand-new garden in raised beds this spring, bake with my oldest son – not sourdough, I will
admit – and flip through cookbooks I have been neglecting. I believe life should involve
appreciating the every day things, and creating a home life that gives you a sense of peace.
That is what the past few years of my life have been about, and I think that is what women –
and men – who choose to farmstead on a larger scale are striving to accomplish.236 They are
redefining what work and success looks like. In this new era of a global pandemic, interest in
the domestic arts is here to stay. I predict that academic articles are going to be written on the
sourdough bread craze, and I cannot wait to read them.

See for example Ashley English’s “About” page on her website Small Measures,
https://www.smallmeasure.com/our-roots.
236

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