Proust proceeds not by reflection but by recall. He is positively permeated by the truth that we all of us lack the time to live the real dramas of the existence assigned to us. That makes us age. Nothing else.
– Walter Benjamin
When was the first famine? Who built the first storehouse? Who froze the first turnip or cured the first hock, warding off the plague air with practical magic? Food preservation, pickling and canning, is a desperate business done between sustenance and time. To want to extend life is the wish that separates the raw from the cooked, just as it separates youth from age’s certainty of death. Isn’t ‘Perishable’ is a terrible word? Trite summary of the odds, of lives and shelf-life, a keyless accordion-chord over fields and tomorrows. Behind a screen of clouded glass is the pickled radish, putrefaction slowed down to a crawl, suspended in brine. And behind the radish waits that old bastard, Time.
Rows of preserved vegetable jars in the basement recall the old monstrosities of the carnival sideshow or Frankenstein’s lab. A shelf of preserved fruits remains a continual insult to the refrigeration age. The pickle is a fortress against the powers of heat and scarcity, as well as the aesthetic dictatorship of the smooth. And according to Christina Ward, in her new book Preservation: The Art and Science of Canning, Fermentation and Dehydration, preserved foods also recall the great revolutionary year of 1848. She begins in a public school…