Q: What inspired you to write a book about canned food?
Coupland: The idea has been simmering for a long time. When I interviewed for my faculty position at Penn State decades ago, part of the process included visiting a local canned food factory. I walked in as a young scientist and realized I was surrounded by people with tremendous expertise that was very different from my own. These were people who had spent generations figuring out how to turn vegetables into a successful business. That experience stuck with me.
Years later, after serving as president of the Institute of Food Technologists, and teaching Penn State's large general education course “Food Facts and Fads” about food and culture, I became increasingly interested in how people develop expertise and how technologies evolve. Canning turned out to be the perfect lens.
Q: What is an interesting fact from the history of canned foods?
Coupland: The inventor of canning, Nicolas Appert, was a leader in the French Revolution. He even escorted the king to the guillotine. There is myth that he was somehow paid to develop military rations by Napoleon, but, in fact, his workshop was destroyed twice during the Napoleonic wars.
It’s interesting that Appert had no scientific training and made his discoveries by trial and error making products for sale in his high-end grocery store in Paris. Ironically, the first scientists who tried to explain canning were completely wrong, not because they lacked intelligence, but because they were working with the knowledge available at the time.
Later advances in bacteriology and food science helped explain why foods spoil and how to prevent it. Science is a process of building knowledge, revising ideas and responding to new questions.
Q: How did canned food affect long-distance exploration and sea travel?
Coupland: The first London canners were successful because the British wanted to send ships to explore the Arctic. These missions took several years, and so the Navy would pay a premium for preserved foods to keep the sailors alive through the long cold winters when the ships were trapped in ice.
Before reliable preservation, long voyages were constrained by which foods could survive the journey. Canned foods made it possible to travel farther and remain at sea longer. They helped support military expeditions, exploration and global trade. In many cases, advances in preservation expanded what people believed was possible because they removed one of the biggest logistical challenges: feeding people safely over time.
One thing that stood out throughout writing the book is how often necessity drives innovation. Many developments in food preservation emerged from the needs of the military or explorers. Even modern retort pouches, like baby food packets, can trace their roots to solving practical problems for soldiers.
Q: Public concerns about food safety appear throughout the history of canning. How did issues like botulism shape the industry?
Coupland: Food safety concerns drove some of the most important innovations in the history of canning. Canners had developed new methods for sterilizing cans using pressure cookers, but they didn’t understand the conditions that worked best and there were some tragic cases of botulism.
The need for a scientific understanding of botulism and other hazards led to an intense research effort in the 1920s, resulting in improvements in standards and food safetly. It's a good example of how science can support technology in response to a pressing need, but it also illustrates that technological achievement often comes before scientific understanding.
Q: What do the recent concerns surrounding food packaging materials tell us about the continuing evolution of canned food?
Coupland: The can may seem like a mature technology, but it's still changing. New concerns create new research questions, and those questions lead to the next generation of improvements.
For example, plastics were the new, wonder materials in the years after World War II, and they were quickly used to make linings for tin cans. By the 1990s, concerns grew that the BPA which leached from these linings was dangerous in the food. Some scientists thought the evidence was compelling and BPA should be banned, others thought the experiments used to establish harm were sloppy and BPA was fine. There were years of bitter debate that never fully resolved scientifically but, despite this, the canning industry developed alternatives.
Q: One of the themes in the book is that innovation rarely happens through a single “eureka” moment. Why?
Coupland: We often tell stories about genius inventors changing the world overnight, but that's rarely how innovation actually works. Progress usually comes from countless people making small decisions, solving local problems and improving on what came before. Over time, those incremental improvements add up to something transformative.
This is something people working in technology today should remember. You may never be as famous as Steve Jobs or Jennifer Doudna, but it’s the accumulation of the small projects you and your peers work on that make a technology really useful.
Q: What do you hope consumers think about when they pick up a can?
Coupland: Honestly, I hope they develop a sense of wonder. The fact that we don't think much about canned food is evidence of how well the system works. Behind that simple object are generations of engineers, scientists, factory workers and manufacturers whose expertise makes modern life possible.
I can't look at a can the same way anymore. What seems like a simple object contains generations of accumulated knowledge. Once you start noticing those details, it's hard to stop.