A brief history of canned food

A In 1795, the French government had a problem: they faced the fact that it is not easy to win battles abroad when your soldiers are hungry and malnourished. That year they established a 12,000-franc prize for whoever could find a way to preserve food - from milk and meat to fruits and vegetables. French chef Nicolas Appert took more than a decade to develop a process that involved cooking food in glass jars and then using seals made of cork to make them airtight. In 1810, he published a bo...