Post G22-011: Canning lids, from shortage to wide-mouth surcharge.

Above:  Used Ball lids.  The one on the left clearly shows the groove left by the canning jar.  The one on the right was boiled for 20 minutes, which flattened that groove considerably.  I picked up this tip boiling lids if you plan to re-use them from the blog A Traditional Life.

One of the many U.S. shortages that occurred during  the COVID-19 pandemic was a shortage of lids for use in home canning.  I’ve posted extensively on that here. Continue reading Post G22-011: Canning lids, from shortage to wide-mouth surcharge.

Post G22-010: Energy required for various methods of preserving tomatoes at home.

 

Source:  Wayfair

The vacuum sealer is that rare device that serves as both a kitchen appliance and a source of entertainment.  Every time I run my new Nesco VS-09, I practically want to applaud when it finishes.

I don’t normally give much thought to air.  Until it’s all gone.  Then the arithmetic of 15 pounds per square inch leads to the realization that this goofy little countertop appliance generates a literal half-ton of crushing force on a 6″ x 10″ pint-sized bag.

But I digress.  I actually bought this for the serious purpose of preserving garden produce.  The fact that I find the process and results to be so entertaining is just icing on the (perfectly flat half-inch thick piece of) cake.

In any event, there is a serious purpose to this post.  And that is to show that if you have a freezer that’s already running, then freezing your tomatoes is by far the most energy-efficient way to preserve them.  The only method that would beat that is solar drying, and I haven’t quite figured out how to do that well in my humid Virginia climate.

 


Tomatoes as freezer free-riders.

The last thing I need is another kitchen appliance.

But I bought this vacuum sealer anyway, after thinking through all the food preservation I did last year.  Of all the pickling, canning, drying, and freezing, by far, the tastiest, most garden-fresh results came from freezing.  With drying (dried tomatoes) a close second, due to the intense flavors that produces.

And so, purely from a quality standpoint, for tomatoes to be used in soups and stews,  my wife and I agree that freezing is the best option.  It preserves that fresh tomato taste. But how does it stack up in terms of energy use?

Freezing gets a bad rap, as a means of home food preservation, for its relatively high energy use.  But I think that’s not entirely correct.

If you run a freezer expressly for the purpose of preserving garden produce, then, sure, I’d bet that freezing has a fairly high energy cost.  In that case, you’d have to pro-rate the annual electricity use of that freezer over the pounds of produce preserved.  (Because, by assumption, you wouldn’t be running that freezer if you weren’t using it to preserve your garden produce.)

Just tossing out some round numbers, based on past experience, I’d bet that a typical 15-cubic-foot chest freezer has enough space to store 300 pounds of produce, and consumes about 300 kilowatt-hours (KWH) of electricity per year.

So, roughly speaking, if you run that freezer because you use it to preserve your produce, you’d consume about 1 KWH of energy for every pound of produce preserved. 

By contrast, if you are already running a freezer, and will continue to run it regardless, and you have the space, then freezing your produce only costs you the energy needed to freeze it in the first place.   The cost of running the filled freezer doesn’t count, because you’d bear that cost in any case.

My fridge comes with a big freezer.  It’s not like I’m planning to unplug that any time soon.  And so, I’m perfectly happy to let my frozen garden produce be a free rider here — taking advantage of the fact that the freezer is running, but not being asked to “pay” for it.

In that case, the only additional energy cost is the cost of getting the room-temperature produce down to the 0 F temperature of the freezer.  Given that  (e.g.) tomatoes are 94% water, that’s more or less the energy required to bring one pound of room temperature water down to 0 F.  Including the one BTU per pound required to cool the water, and the 144 BTUs per pound required to convert to ice, that works out to (70 + 144 =) 214 BTUs, or (at 3.4 BTUs per watt-hour) 63 watt-hours.  So, if you are just tossing your produce into a freezer that is going to be running in any case, freezing it takes 0.063 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.

You might think that’s a bit of a cheat, because one way or the other, you’ll want to peel those tomatoes before you use them.  The most typical methods for peeling them involve heat (either boiling water, or holding them in the flame of a gas stove).  But — surprise — it’s actually a snap to peel them after they’ve been frozen, per this YouTube video.

Take a look around 47 seconds into that video.  My jaw dropped just after the tomato did.  I know the term life-changing is overused, so let’s just say this was a tomato-life changing revelation for me.  As in, I’m never going blanch and peel a tomato ever again.  Arguably, it may actually take less energy to freeze-and-peel than to blanch-and-peel, what with the energy costs required to boil the water and cool the tomato afterwards.

Other preservation methods

I have already tracked the energy costs of preserving by canning or drying, in various earlier posts.  Let me bring all of that together in one place, below.

Drying tomatoes in my four-tray Nesco dehydrator consumed 8 KWH of electricity (per Post G21-049).  That was in the humid outdoor Virginia summer.  I am fairly sure that each tray can hold less than a pound of quarter-inch-thick tomato slices,, but a) I could stack up to 12 trays at a time for drying, and b) those were very “wet” slicing tomatoes, not the paste tomatoes that are normally used for drying.  That said, for illustration, let me just assume one pound per tray, four trays, yield 2 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.

Canning tomatoes in a water-bath canner consumes a considerable amount of energy as well.  I did the full workup on the energy cost of home canning two years ago, in Post #G22.   I had to do that because, as far as I can see, the rigorous research literature on this crucial topic looks like this:

 

In any case, the all-in energy cost for canning five quarts of pickles, on a gas stove, in an air-conditioned house, was 5528 kilocalories (kcal).

Source:  Post #G22.

Per the USDA guide to home canning, quarts of pickles require a much shorter processing (boiling) ,time (15 minutes) compared to quarts of tomatoes (45 minutes) in a water-bath canner.

Based on my prior calculation (shown above), I need to add another 800 Kcal to account for that, bringing the total up to 5300 Kcal for 5 quarts (= 10 pounds) of tomatoes.  At 1.16 watt-hours per kilocalorie, that works out to be 0.6 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.

I should note that this is a little conservative, because you have to peel the tomatoes first.  That’s going to involve a little additional boiling time.  But with all the boiling that’s taking place with the canning, I figured that was more-or-less rounding error.

Finally, I can take a rough guess at the energy cost of my crock-pot spaghetti sauce.  Crock-pot spaghetti sauce (Post #G21-048) absolutely minimizes the labor input, and is idiot-proof to boot.  But it requires processing tomatoes in both a pressure cooker (briefly) and a crock-pot (overnight).  For four quarts (eight pounds), the crock-pot portion uses about 4 KWH. But the pressure-cooker portion (20 minutes at pressure) likely used almost as much energy as canning, so for four quarts I need to add one-third of my pickle canning estimate above, which, by the time all the arithmetical dust has settled, adds another 2 KWH.  Or a total of 6 KWH for 8 pounds of tomatoes, or 0.75 KWH for every pound of produce preserved.

There’s no additional energy cost for peeling in this method, because the entire batch of tomatoes is run through a Foley mill after pressure-cooking.  That takes out the peels and (most of) the seeds.

Let me now produce the nice neat table of energy required for food preservation, all of it expressed in terms of KWH of energy per pound of produce preserved.

All of that comes with some caveats.  The canning was done on a gas stove in an air-conditioned house.  The drying was done outside, in humid air.  I could dry up to twelve trays at once, instead of the four that I already owned.  Maybe there’s a little more energy required for the blanch-and-peel step in some methods.  And so on.

Nevertheless, the results are so clear as to be undeniable.  (So clear that I double-checked that freezer math a couple of times).  If you have space in your freezer, and you’re going to run that freezer anyway, by far the most energy-efficient way to preserve tomatoes is to toss them in the freezer.  And, per that YouTube video above, peel them as you thaw and use them.

I surely need to mention the one common method that isn’t on the list, solar (or open-air) drying.  Plausibly that has zero energy cost, but I have not (yet) figured out how to do that in my humid Virginia climate.  I’m already working on how I’m going to improve my simple $18 plastic-tote food dryer (Post #G21-049).  The solution might be as easy as “don’t overload it”.



Two minor caveats:   COP and GHG sold separately.

Two minor factors make this conclusion somewhat less that complete.  Those are coefficient of performance (COP) of a freezer, and the different rate of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for natural gas and electricity used in the home.  Near as I can tell, neither of these results in any material change in the relative efficiency of the various preservation methods.

First, this calculation isn’t complete because it doesn’t factor in the energy conversion efficiency or coefficient of performance (COP) of refrigerators or freezers.  The coefficient of performance for a heat pump is the amount of heat energy it can move, for a given amount of electricity supplied to it.  Almost all commercially-used heat pumps have a COP greater than 1.0.  That is, they can move more than 1 KWH of heat energy for every KWH of electricity they consume.  COPs for modern AC or heat pump units typically run around 2.5 to 3.5 (per the link above).

The estimate above — 0.063 KWH — is the amount of heat that needs to be (re)moved from the interior of the freezer.  It will actually take less than 0.063 KWH to do that, because fridges and freezers are just another form of heat pump with a COP greater than one. While Wikipedia (cited above) assures me that they have a COP greater than 1.0, I have yet to find a source that will pin that down further. The best I’ve found is a passing reference to a COP of around 1.0 for a deep freeze unit (per this reference).

The bottom line is that a typical home freezer might use somewhat less than 0.063 KWH to remove 0.063 KWH of heat energy from its interior.  But how much less, I can’t find the source that will let me pin that down.  I suspect that, given the large temperature differential between interior and exterior, the COP of most freezers isn’t much higher than 1.0 or so.

Finally, KWH is not the same as GHG (greenhouse gases).  This only measures energy consumed within the home, and does not differentiate between natural gas and electricity.  Fossil-fuel based electrical generation is far from 100% efficient, so the actual amount of fuel consumed (to generate the electricity) is a low multiple of the energy actually delivered to the house.  But in addition, electrical generation consists of a mix of generation sources, some of which create greenhouse gases, some of which do not.  If the ultimate question is one of carbon footprint, we’d have to modify this calculation, treat electricity and natural gas separately, and then redo it for some assumed electrical generation mix.

That said, when I take a rough cut at the difference between natural gas (burned in a stove) and electricity (produced with a typical U.S. generating mix), I’m not sure that adjusting for each fuel type separately would make much difference.

Natural gas releases 100% of its energy within the home.  But a typical natural gas stove is only about 40% efficient.  That’s the energy that goes into whatever you are trying to cook, with the rest simply serving to heat up the kitchen.  Basically, for every 100 units of C02 produced, you get 40 units of usable energy from your gas stove (Whatever units might mean, in this case).

For electricity, by contrast, the amount of fuel burned at the generating plant is far more than the amount that makes it into your home.  But once it gets to your home, I’ve either directly measured 100% of what was consumed, or the theoretical calculation (for freezing) should be close to that.  And so, as with natural gas, for every 100 units of C02 produced in generating electricity, you get X units of usable energy in the home.

The problem is that X depends on the generating mix that feeds your particular section of the grid.  Even so, let me do the arithmetic for Virginia’s electrical grid.

Last time I checked, Virginia’s electrical grid released 0.7 pounds of CO2 per KWH of electricity delivered.  Starting from that, I’m going to compare C02/KWH of usable energy for the Virginia grid versus a 40 percent efficient gas stove.

The EPA shows that burning a therm of natural gas releases an average of 0.0053 metric tons of C02.  At 2204 pounds per metric ton, that’s 11.7 pounds of C02 per therm.  A therm is 100,000 BTUs, and there are 3.4 BTUs per watt-hour.

Slapping that all together, burning a therm of natural gas produces 11.7 pounds of C02 and 29.4 KWH of (heat) energy, or 0.4 lbs C02 per KWH.

But a natural gas stove is only 40% efficient.  A stove has to use (1/.40 =) 2.5x as much natural gas to deliver that usable KWH of heat.  The bottom line is that a 40 percent efficient natural gas stove releases 1.0 pounds C02 for every usable KWH of heat delivered in the home.

And so, per KWH of usable energy, in terms of GHG emissions, electricity (in Virginia, at 0.7 lbs C02 per usable KWH) is slightly cleaner than natural gas burned in a (typical) 40 percent efficient stove.  But only slightly.  So the electrical options actually perform a little bit better than shown in the table above, relative to the gas-stove-intensive canning. 

There’s nothing in any of that to change the conclusion that tossing your tomatoes into a freezer that would be running in any case is by far the most energy-efficient way to preserve them.


So, what about that vacuum sealer?

All of the above brings me back to my new toy, the vacuum sealer.  If I’m going to freeze my tomatoes, the binding constraint is now the space they take up in the freezer, and secondarily, the length of time they’ll last once frozen.  Both of which will be best addressed by vacuum-sealing them.

Most sources suggest that you freeze the tomatoes before vacuum-sealing.  But at least one source shows tomato chunks that were vacuum-sealed and then frozen.  That’s what I’m now aiming to do, only using whole tomatoes, not chunks.  Given the literal tons of force that one of these sealers can generate, I’ll have to use the setting that allows the strength of the vacuum to be controlled manually.  In the end, I’m aiming for a freezer stocked with nice, flat, well-preserved packages of energy-efficient frozen tomatoes.

With any luck, we’ll see how that all plays out in a few months.

 

Post #G21-053: The 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved.

 

I’m getting ready to can some pickled vegetables, so I decided to take one last look at the 2021 canning lid shortage.

Upshot: It’s a problem that was never resolved.  Even now, in most parts of the country, you aren’t going to be able to go to your local store and buy Ball wide-mouth canning lids.


A little history

I first stumbled across the pandemic-driven shortage of home canning supplies last year (Post #G12, July 2020).  At that point, I had to look around a bit to find wide-mouth jars.  I noted the logical progression from that year’s shortage of garden seeds, to last year’s shortage of common garden chemicals, to, inevitably, last year’s shortage of canning supplies.  By August 2020 stories about the canning supply shortage had gone mainstream (Post #G21, August 2020).

In 2020, a shortage didn’t really stand out.  The first pandemic year was rife with shortages of consumer goods.  (Fill in toilet paper joke here.)  A shortage of canning supplies was nothing unusual.  It was just one of many.

And it’s not as if a shortage of canning supplies had never happened before in the U.S.  During the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, and the resulting U.S. energy crises, Americans faced a shortage of canning lids (documented in Post #G21-003, March 2021).

The roots of that shortage were attributed to the same source as the modern shortage.  Insecure people instinctively turn to growing their own food, and as a result, there’s an increased demand for home canning supplies that can’t be met by the existing supply chain.

But I was more than a bit surprised to hear that there was still a shortage of canning lids in spring of 2021 (Post #G21-003, March 2021).  Seriously, that was then, this is now.  This is America.  We don’t do shortages.  I more-or-less laughed it off, figuring that once manufacturers started shipping product for the 2021 canning season, the shortage would disappear.  That, after pointing out how irrational the price of lids had become.  Vendors were asking more for twelve lids than for twelve jars — the joke being that jars come with lids.

My assumption that the early 2021 canning lid shortage would go away was dead wrong.  Except for a brief period this spring when the new shipments arrived for the 2021 canning season, canning lids have been in-and-out-of-stock ever since. 

It’s an odd sort of shortage, in that you can go on-line and order lids at any time.  So it’s not as if lids are unavailable.  It’s more that name-brand lids cost three times the pre-pandemic price.  So you either pay far more for lids, you make do with imported lids of dubious quality, or you switch to re-usable lids (Post #G21-010) of a sort that are not familiar to most canners.

Or, at a last resort, re-use your canning lids.  While I never had to do that, but I did check out the method of boiling used lids for 20 minutes.  That’s supposed to remove the groove in the silicone from the prior use, making them more nearly fit for re-use.  And my observation is that boiling them does, in fact, relax the old groove in the silicone sealing material, as shown in the contrast of an un-boiled and boiled used lid, below.

One final oddity of the U.S. situation is that we’re dealing with a monopoly supplier, more-or-less.  All of the familiar top-drawer brands of U.S. lids (Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest) are made by one subsidiary of a corporate conglomerate (documented in Post #G21-009).  The history of the one U.S. lid manufacturer — bought and sold and re-sold — is like a short course in what has gone wrong with U.S. industry.

In the end, my summary is that Ball canning isn’t even rounding error on the bottom line of its current owner, Newell Brands.  They’re the only supplier of trusted domestic single-use canning lids.  And as a result, they may not have to care very much if they meet home canners’ needs or not.


Lid availability at start and end of 2021 U.S. canning season

As of today (10/9/2021), my local Warmart has wide-mouth Ball lids back in stock, at the normal price of about $0.30 per lid.  And while that’s great for me, and while I check my local stores periodically, that doesn’t really indicate what the lid situation looks like nationally.

In the spring, I took 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes, and used the Walmart website to check local availability of wide-mouth Ball lids (Post #G21-025).  The results are shown below, with only 15% of stores having those lids in stock at that time.

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Source:  Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.

Mid-summer, I tried to repeat that.  But by mid-summer, Walmart had simply pulled the listing for Ball wide-mouth jars off their website entirely.  I couldn’t repeat the analysis because I could no longer search for that product on their website.

But now that item is back on the Walmart website.  And, while the format of the results has changed a bit, the bottom line remains just about the same.  At the end of the 2021 canning season, the vast majority of Walmarts have no Ball wide-mouth lids on the shelf.

Source:  Analysis of search on the Walmart website, 20 randomly-chosen ZIP codes.

One further interesting change is that Walmart won’t ship you three packages of lids, at a reasonable price, as they were sometimes willing to do back in the spring.  If the lids weren’t in stock, in every case, Walmart offered you a single internet vendor who would sell you wide-mouth lids for more than $1 each.

The bottom line is that the 2021 canning lid shortage was never resolved.  Near as I can tell, the situation at the end of the canning season is just about the same as it was this past spring.  In large parts of the country, you probably can’t go into your local stores and buy wide-mouth canning lids.

This has dropped out of national news entirely.  You’ll still see a tiny bit of reporting in areas where home canning is common, as in this August 2021 piece from Minnesota, or this farm-oriented article in June 2021.

I don’t know if there’s a larger lesson in this or not.  I had a reader email me about the monopoly-supplier aspect of this shortage (to which I am now sorry that I never replied).  The idea being that the concentration of market share into fewer and fewer hands, throughout the U.S. and global economies, is giving results that are not in consumers’ best interests.  While I’d certainly believe that monopolies are bad for consumers, I have no way to know whether the persistence of the shortage of this plain-vanilla, low-tech product is in any way related to the near-monopoly position of the Newell Brands conglomerate.

Canada, for example, seems to face the same monopoly supplier situation as the U.S., with the two major brands there (Bernardin, Golden Harvest) owned by Newell Brands (via its Jarden subsidiary).  And yet, despite monopoly supply there as well, there does not seem to have been a Canadian canning lid shortage.

So it remains a puzzle.  Going on two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s still hard to get hold of name-brand canning lids in the U.S.  Of all the shortages you might have expected, that has to be pretty close to the bottom of the list.  And yet, of all the shortages we faced, this seems to be among the most persistent.

If you want to see my list of what you can do if you can’t get Ball/Kerr/Golden Harvest lids, try the end of Post #G21-020.

 

Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited.

See post #G21-013.  Looks like seasonal shipments of canning supplies have begun.  In Vienna, VA, lids are back in stock.  (Or, at least, were as of 4/18/2021).

See Post #G21-003 for the background.  In a nutshell, it’s hard to get lids for home canning right now.  If you can find them, your choice is between expensive (name-brand) and potentially inferior (foreign-made).  (If you doubt that inferior part, read some of the reviews on Amazon.)  And, of course, the predators are out in full force, so you will see people offering to sell you lids for more than the cost of a “set” (jar+ring+lid).

I’ve now done a little shopping locally, and tracked the trends for on-line sources, and it’s time to update that prior post.

It’s clear that the situation is getting worse, but I stand by what I said in my prior post.  To me, it looks like the U.S. manufacturer hasn’t yet started shipping to major retailers for the 2021 canning season.  And so, I think that most of what we’re seeing right now is still the aftereffect of the 2020 canning season.

If that’s true, then things are going to continue to get worst, right on up to the point where the seasonal shipments start for the 2021 canning season.  And that that point, I expect to see lids available again.

That’s a guess.  But that’s still my best guess.

Details follow.  This turned out to be a long post.  I cover the topics listed below.    I’ve put the headings in red so you can just scroll down and find them.

  • My local stores.
  • Canning lid arbitrage, or why the local shelves should be empty.
  • Recent changes in on-line sources.
  • A brief note on re-using lids.
  • Only Newell, Inc. knows what’s actually in store for us later this year.
  • Afterword, or why a shortage of canning lids isn’t just some quaint little oddity.

Continue reading Post #G21-009: Canning lid shortage revisited.

Post #G23: An aside on lacto-fermentation and pickles

This is a second of two pickle posts.  The prior post was about the energy cost of canning pickles.  This post is about making pickles via lacto-fermentation.

If you want to try making pickles with the least possible effort, lacto-fermentation is the way to go.  It’s a lot easier than making a traditional vinegar (canned) pickle. Continue reading Post #G23: An aside on lacto-fermentation and pickles

Post #G21: We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.

Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article about a shortage of canning jars and other canning-related supplies.

I saw this one coming a month ago, as described in Post #G12.  At that time, I couldn’t find the jars I wanted at my go-to canning supplier, Twins Hardware in Fairfax.  Or anywhere else I normally shop.  I finally got a hot tip on jars in stock at one of our local WalMarts, and bought some wide-mouth pints there. Continue reading Post #G21: We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.