Canning and Preserving play an important role in any AT endeavors, since any progress in enhancing food supply will require some method to make food available outside of the time of harvest or other natural cycles that determine availability of food.
Established Traditional Technologies
- Charque a.k.a Jerky, basically drying with excess salt
- Smoking phenols act as preservatives, usually combined with other natural chemicals and processes. Nowadays deprecated since phenols are known carcinogens.
- Pickling
- Drying - probably the most used preserving technology worldwide, and the one where the results/investment ratio is the highest. See also Category:Solar dehydrating.
- Freezing
- Using sugar to create Jams Jellies preserved dry fruits
AT Improvements on Traditional Technologies
Improvements in food storage have the highest impact in bottom-line availability of off-season foodstuffs, much more than preserving itself. Better dryers are probably the next positive improvement, one that assures consistent quality and eventually opens the way for export.
Doubtful Technologies from an AT point of view
- Canning Countless World Bank and other such projects worldwide have proven unsuccessful because of reliance on containers that cannot be produced locally. Logistics in the supply of those, as well as distribution, etc., often assure the failure of such development initiatives.
External links
- Wikipedia has a non-AT canning article that provides some basic notions
- videos I star on of some canning techniques - not quite AT unless you live in a country where AT is a hobby choice, not a survival necessity.
initial post Yamaplos 19:52, 8 May 2006 (PDT)