The demise of canned food has been predicted for sometime. Some sectors are in terminal decline - tinned fruit, rice puddings, sauces, custard. It's those more attractive forms of packaging like resealable pouches, cartons, and glass that makes cans look old school.
Now tinned new potatoes are old school, and occasionally I buy them but it feels like a culinary offence worthy a suspended custodial sentence. They were the standby for the "hunger gap" when what was left from the last of autumn crop and the first of the new season. Now those lean months are covered by imports from places warmer and a lot further south - Egypt, Cyprus, and Sicily. They are also the standby for the can't cook won't cook types...
Baked Beans remain the biggest seller in the canned vegetable department. Their sales march ever onwards. Britain is the biggest consumer of them in the whole wide world. True story and it is one I point out to those misguided folk who deny baked beans. Ellen MacCarthy sailed solo around the world in the fastest possible time, it was back in 2005, and I followed every piece of news as it progressed. It was some achievement. First meal back in Blighty, beans on toast with the family on the yacht. It's that much part of the national pysche.
Links : Food Manufacturing : The decline and fall of canned food
Photo credits from Flickr: Co-op Historian (top); Lorenzo23 (bottom)
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