It’s worse than I thought

Last weekend my wife and I went to a strawberry festival and brought home a flat of fresh berries for a pretty reasonable price. We had the intention of using quite a number of them to make jam and give us further practice in learning how to can, as we’ve only canned one batch of tomato salsa since learning of Peak Oil.

The lids we used for the tomatoes were from a canning kit I had received as a gift several years ago, and we’ve since acquired a number of jars. We’ve heard from a variety of sources that you shouldn’t use the lids more than once, and being beginning canners we’re complying with that for now.

So, that meant we needed to purchase some lids. No problem, we thought. We stopped into Bed, Bath & Beyond -- a warehouse store full of kitchen supplies -- and searched around for a bit until we decided to ask an employee.

“Canning?” she responded. “Um…”
“For canning your own food,” we replied.
“Okay.” She picked up her walkie-talkie. “Hey Joe, do we have any canning supplies?”
“No, we don’t have anything like that.”

We frowned and headed for the door, running into Joe on the way. “Hey, you should try World Market,” he suggested, referring to a nearby store.

At World Market, we again looked around on our own and then reluctantly went to find an employee.

“Canning? I don’t know what that is.”
“How about mason jars?” I asked. “With special flat lids?”
The girl pointed to the row of ceramic jars for dry goods behind her. “You mean like those?”
“No, for canning food,” answered my wife. “You know, if you grow your own food and want to preserve it.”
The employee looked at us as if wild ferrets were dancing on our heads. “I’ve never…done that before…so…”

Returning to the car, we consulted my wife’s mother for advice. She recalled finding them at her grocery store in Iowa fairly recently. We went to our local Publix – nothing.

Kitchen stores! we thought. I sensed we were near success when I spotted both a jar lifter and canning funnel in the first store we tried. The clerk looked at us quizzically when we asked about the actual jars and sent us on our way.

After striking out at yet another kitchen store, we were forced to consider the other suggestion from my mother-in-law -- the one we had hoped couldn’t be true. We wandered the myriad aisles, slowly working our way to the kitchen section, the horror building in our stomachs. We approached one of the grossly underpaid clerks, a woman in her late sixties, who was surely old enough to at least have heard of canning. She had -- and led us to the section filled with jars and lids of all kinds.

We sighed simultaneously: Super Wal-Mart had saved the day.

Up until this search, I still had a little hope that there was a latent know-how of many of the necessary skills in a sizable fraction of the population. Surely many grandparents had passed their skills down to their children and grandchildren: canning, woodworking, gardening, and so forth. It is not so.

Imagine if Peak Oil occurred in 30 years as the optimists predict -- these skills would be completely forgotten and not even Wal-Mart would still carry the supplies. The world (at the very least, America) is less prepared for disaster than I realized and more people are going to suffer than I could have imagined.