Containing Nature - by John Coupland (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Chapter 1: All the Science You Don't See. The way we use technology reflects the way we live our lives. Much of the technology we depend on is "invisible" to us and this has costs for society in general and for technology workers in particular. This book will tell stories from the history of canned food to illustrate the nature of technology work and how it forms our lives.

Chapter 2: The Invention of Canned Food. Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century. An entrepreneurial chef perfects a process for preserving food by sealing it in a glass jar with a cork then cooking thoroughly. He struggles in business but writes a book so his methods can be copied. Invention as an evolutionary process. Inventions are only important if they are copied.

Chapter 3: The Invention of the Tin Can. The tangled path from Paris to London in the early 19th century. Appert's invention is copied and improved. Metal cans become commercially important in the niche market of naval expeditions. Microinventions and macroinventions, sub-technologies and innovations. The phylogenetic tree of canning.

Chapter 4: The Industrialization of Tin Cans. Largely America from 1824 to WWI. The processes of making and cooking metal cans are modified to replace skilled labor with integrated systems of machines. Industrialization. The evolution of technology by a hierarchy of microinventions that encompasses even the smallest technical modification.

Chapter 5: Canning Salmon from the Pacific. The Pacific Northwest 1862-1905. Managing labor and technology for a canning season that lasts only a few weeks. The replacement of labor by technology is not an inevitable law but depends on local circumstances and individual choices. Race, labor, and technology.

Chapter 6: Canning Soup in New Jersey. Camden, New Jersey 1862-1935. The development of the Campbell's soup company under the leadership of Jack Dorrance. Managing technology and labor for both large scale production of complex recipes as well as the annual tomato glut. Labor unions and management gurus. Canners must work with their consumers to make brands people will choose to buy.

Chapter 7: The Early Science of Canning. Europe from about 1665 to 1870. The scientific ideas that will explain canning develop largely independently from the technology of food preservation. An incorrect chemical explanation of why canning works is eventually superseded by a better microbiological explanation - but without making any difference to the practice. How science changes its mind.

Chapter 8: The Birth of a Science of Canning. Wisconsin and Massachusetts 1894-1902. A growing canning industry meets a new generation of academic scientists trained in microbiology and motivated to help. The scientists quickly translate their experience from other contexts and provide useful results which are disseminated by trade across the industry. The social and political frameworks needed for collaboration.

Chapter 9: Botulism - The Applied Science of Canning. America from 1919 to the mid-1920s. Well-publicized cases of botulism from canned foods threaten the entire industry. Scientists from the National Canners Association collaborate with State and Federal governments and with university researchers in an organized research program to solve the problem. Science is used collaboratively by industry and government to guide regulation.

Chapter 10: BPA - Conflicting Communities of Scientists. America at the turn of the 21^st century. A community of environmental scientists identifies a novel risk from a component of can linings, and campaigns to get it banned. The limits of what we can know about risk. How the social networks of scientists shape their values and conclusions. Science and politics.

Chapter 11: The Continuing Invention of Canned Food. What we can gain by recognizing the technologies that support us. Virtues of technology workers.

From the Back Cover

Nicolas Appert invented canned food in Paris in 1810 and is celebrated as the founder of modern food processing and the field of food science, but does he deserve the recognition? Appert was no scientist and the "cans" he made by a process of trial and error were expensive glass bottles with corks held in place with twisted wire. Reliable, affordable, modern canning depends on the accumulation of small improvements made by the generations of innovators who followed and whose names are largely forgotten. Containing Nature uses the histories of the science and technology of canning to show how the ways we understand and shape the world evolve.

The story follows Appert's cans from Paris to London, where engineers built a business supplying the British Navy, and then to America, where small innovations made canning faster and cheaper. But cans alone aren't enough -- the stories of salmon in the Pacific Northwest and soup in New Jersey show how canning must adapt to the nature of the food, labor conditions, and consumer demands.

Meanwhile, the science of canning lagged behind the technology. Enlightenment-era paradigms led to mistakes only corrected decades later. An applied science of canning only emerged after the industry grew large enough for its needs to matter and groups of scientists were organized in campaigns to eliminate botulism and BPA.

Containing Nature is valuable to anyone working in science and technology and interested in how their contributions, often individually unseen, collectively shape the world.

About the Author

John Coupland is a Professor of Food Science at Penn State, where he teaches a large general education course exploring how food and food technologies are integral to human culture and conducts research on the physical chemistry of foods. He is a former president of the Institute of Food Technologists.