It could be argued that the world’s cuisines owe a lot to the long history of food preservation — the ingenious and unexpected ways to prolong the lifespan of food that have allowed humans not only to feed themselves year-round, but also to experiment with recipes, expand their palates and find new flavors.
With the dawn of home appliances and shelf-stable packaged goods, some of these millennia-old methods have lost their urgency. Still, preserving can be a crucial tool to help prevent food waste, prolonging ingredients’ lifespan beyond what simple refrigeration will allow while saving the bounty of a CSA, a backyard tree or a garden haul for future meals — or giving new life to scraps like rinds and stems. A preservation project can also be about more than just the food: a way to spend time in the kitchen, to intentionally incorporate sustainable cooking into your lifestyle or to pass down generational knowledge. That there are so many ways to do it is icing on the cake.
