While there are many stories to be told about the Prince Edward County Cannery, the compelling narrative that animates my thesis focuses on how the cannery reifies tradition and innovation in the pursuit of survival. From its earliest iterations during World War II, the enactment of tradition defined the Prince Edward County Canneries. Today, the enlivening of tradition takes place in the relationship between the home and commercial canning branches and the partnership of the cannery with Virginia Food Works.
My introduction to life at the cannery, and to Virginia Food Works, came during my exhausting and exhilarating day in production with Nona’s Italian Cucina. Virginia Food Works (VFW) was founded in 2008 by Allie Hill, an engineer raising four young children in the
Charlottesville area, who wanted to find a way to incorporate more locally sourced food products into her family’s kitchen. Allie became passionate about supporting Virginia agriculture, and wanted to do so by helping to facilitate a nonprofit that would enable more local producers to establish food products in the region. One of the primary issues that faced VFW in the earliest stages was the feasibility of renting a commercial kitchen space. Especially in areas like Charlottesville, the rent for a co-packing production facility can be a huge barrier to entry for new businesses. Throughout her research, Allie was connected to the Prince Edward County Cannery and a symbiotic relationship was born.
In 2010, VFW procured a grant from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission to help the PECCC become a commercially certified
production facility. This included upgrading the facility to meet proper safety standards, and outfitting it with new equipment to help with processing. The process through which VFW works with local producers has evolved throughout the years, but its main vision is helping guide food producers in taking their products from recipe to retail. The phrase “recipe to retail” really encompasses the work that VFW does, and was actually added to an updated mission statement just a few months ago to help clarify the nonprofit’s goals. In full disclosure, as part of my involvement with the cannery over the past 8 months, I was actually asked to join the board of Virginia Food Works and was able to help decide on our new mission statement at a board meeting late in 2019.
Virginia Food Works partners with producers who create various kinds of products. These partnerships range from full-service co-packing to rental/co-packing hybrids. Some larger producers prefer to drop off their produce and have VFW employees complete the entire
production process, returning a finished product to the main producer. One example of a full- service client is Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. The historical site and former home to Thomas Jefferson has a growing garden enterprise on its grounds, and is constantly looking to expand ways to sell their own produce to visitors. The gardeners at Monticello produce an abundance of peppers and ship them to Farmville, where VFW processes and packages pepper jelly at the cannery before sending it back to be sold on shelves at Monticello. Other smaller food entrepreneurship businesses, like Nona’s, take a more hands-on approach, helping to facilitate each step of the process in house.
In 2019, Virginia Food Works helped clients to produce over 39,400 units of products, with an estimated retail value of over $293,00.41 These products included Monticello’s pepper
41 “Virginia Food Works.” Virginia Food Works: Co-Packing Services and Commercial Kitchen Rental.
jellies and Nona’s pasta sauce, as well as a variety of other foods including barbecue sauces, jams, hot sauces, apple butters, elderberry syrups, soups and spice rubs. Although the majority of clients use the facility to produce canned or jarred goods, one client, Birdie’s, even expanded their pimento cheese business by co-packing at the cannery. Their pimento cheese flavors range from jalapeño to smoked gouda and roasted red pepper. Rupen Rao uses the Prince Edward County Cannery to produce a wide array of Indian sauces and marinades, and recently signed on to a deal with Whole Foods to begin selling his products.
The diversity in VFW clients is evident in their myriad products. Although this is certainly a celebrated aspect of the nonprofit, it can sometimes be at odds with Allie’s original vision to help more locally grown produce to reach Virginia markets. Although VFW does still promote a five dollars per hour discount if “at least one Virginia grown/produced ingredient is utilized in the recipe,” 42 the focus has somewhat shifted to helping encourage local producers in their various food endeavors, whatever that might look like. There is a constant tension between helping local businesses thrive, and helping support local farmers and agriculture. Nona’s, for instance, sources many of their herbs locally, but a key piece of her heritage-based sauce is the San Marzano tomatoes that are imported from a remote region in Italy. The spices for Rupen’s sauces are likewise frequently sourced from outside of the area to uphold the integrity of his products. These specialty producers who bring in outside products, however, are usually locally based, and helping to contribute locally produced food into the Virginia food markets. There are, of course, also farms and gardens like Monticello, Westmoreland Berry Farm, Browntown Farm and Bellair Farm who bring their very locally grown produce to be processed by VFW.
42 “Virginia Food Works.” Virginia Food Works: Co-Packing Services and Commercial Kitchen Rental. https://vi rginiafoodworks.org/.
Conclusion:
There is very little interaction between home and commercial canners in Prince Edward County. In fact, before Ms. Lena retired, there used to be quite a bit of animosity between the two branches of the facility. Lena was not thrilled with giving up some of her canning days to accommodate a commercial entity when Virginia Food Works proposed the partnership with the county. Patty Gulick, now the manager of the home canning enterprise, began as a worker on the commercial side. Patty frequently tells the story of driving by the cannery for years and always assuming that it was a facility that manufactured tin cans, not realizing what a community cannery was. She was invited by a friend to come and make jelly for Virginia Food Works, then operating under the title Homegrown Virginia, and immediately fell in love. Over the next ten years, she worked her way up to managing commercial operations, and was eventually being asked by Prince Edward County to step in for Lena on the home canning side when Lena retired.43
Patty serves as the link between the two sides, knowing the commercial clients as well as the home canners. There is very little overlap otherwise. Commercial producers don’t typically use the facility for home use, and home canners don’t utilize the commercial protocols. The commercial canners go through different channels, reserving space in the cannery ahead of time instead of showing up unannounced; they are also required to follow more stringent sanitation and processing guidelines that are up to FDA standards. On the contrary, home canners actually use a more industrial machine-oriented process. Commercial canners can exclusively in glass, and use heat sealing techniques to properly pressurize their cans. Home canners can exclusively in tin, and use the large pressure retorts to process their cans in water baths.
43 Patty Gulick, Interview by Hannah Evans. In Person Interview. Prince Edward County Community Cannery, Farmville, Virginia, 19 August 2019.
Although there is little interaction between people, the two branches actually share more in common in their production processes than meets the eye. The daily operations of both home and commercial canning utilize the same cannery utensils, cutting boards, pots, scoopers and kettles. Many times, both commercial and home canners operate at the same production scale. It is not at all uncommon for a home canning family to drive down from Pennsylvania with 400 ears of corn to make use of the cannery’s corn de-kerneler to put up seventy five quarts, or for the local Hamden Sydney fire department to come in and make two hundred quarts of quail stew for an annual fundraiser. A typical yield on the commercial side falls in the same category, with a company like Pennacook Peppers producing 800 eight-ounce jars (approximately 200 quarts) of product on a given day. If you are a commercial producer looking to partner with Virginia Food Works, you are likely looking to produce at domestic scale while just beginning your entrepreneurial food business. The goal of VFW is to serve as an incubator for food producers entering the market at reasonable rates, with the understanding that many of their clients will one day outgrow the Prince Edward County facility.
The tension between public and private narratives of consumption has been at the heart of community canning since the 1940s. Bentley wrote, ““The produce Americans grew and canned no doubt was a vital part of the U.S. food supply, but the government and private industry portrayed these activities as public demonstrations of sacrifice when the benefits—fresh fruits and vegetables on the family table and canned ones for the winter—were almost entirely private.”44 The institution of a commercial canning division in Prince Edward County has expanded the notion of private consumption to public retail consumers, creating a new market for tradition to thrive.
One major difference between the commercial and home canning branches is the final destination of the produce. By definition, “home” canners are not allowed to resell their products in any sort of commercial market. The finished tin cans full of various kinds of produce are to be consumed by family and friends in “home” or private spaces. There is some grey area here with organizations like fire departments or rotary clubs who use the cannery for fundraisers, making stews in large batches for community events. Commercial canners sell their finished glass-jar products in retail spaces like farmers markets and health food stores for profit, with consumption intended by the general public and not by the maker.
Both public and private labor enacted in the cannery are driven by economic and aesthetic ambitions. For home canners, the preservation of food grown or purchased locally is often more affordable than buying large quantities of food at the grocery store. For commercial canners, their livelihood is wrapped up in their entrepreneurial endeavors. Danielle Christensen argued in “Simply Necessity?” that in addition to economic necessity, canning had an inherent aesthetic or expressive cultural value:
Canning during the war was particularly time-consuming work, but for women who had the time as well as the energy and money, it often brought great satisfaction and a certain amount of aesthetic pleasure. As the folklorist Charles Camp has observed, ‘Just as gardening provides a useful cover for aesthetic indulgences, home canning underscores food’s attractiveness.’ There had long existed what one scholar calls the “aesthetic of the full larder,” through which a woman gained “bourgeois prestige” by showing her friends and neighbors shelves of beautifully arranged preserved foods. For years, women had entered their canned goods in contests at county and state fairs, where the goods were judged by taste, color, arrangement, uniform size, clearness of liquid, and quality of the jar.45
Today, this aesthetic culture is present on both sides of the cannery. Commercial canners take care to choose glass jars that best showcase their product, and to choose the labels that announce their product brand to retail consumers. While canning in tin does not always offer the
same ability to emphasize aesthetics in the final production, one look at the cannery on a home production day demonstrates the care that canners take in selecting the freshest and most
beautiful produce to make it in to their finished cans. One patron even goes so far as to wait until her cans are cooled and dried to decorate the lids with small apples for the applesauce that she produces and gives as Christmas gifts each year, using red and green sharpies to complete the presentation.
Aesthetics extend beyond visual beauty into other senses in both commercial and home canning practices. Conversations about visual aesthetics, taste, smell and texture are frequently had throughout the canning floor. Many home canners debate the merits of using tin for certain products- some preferring to can black eyed peas and corn, while others insisting that freezing these products produces more desirable long-term flavor and crispness. Patty always touts that a tin of canned tomatoes at the cannery smells the same as a fresh tomato pulled from a summer garden when you crack the seal open months later. Others prefer to can their tomatoes at home in glass jars to enjoy the unmistakable bright red produce on their shelves. Home canners often grapple with maintaining taste and texture when bumping up recipes to mass scale. Yvonne is adamant that she never scrapes the top rim of sauce around the sides of the kettle once her product starts reducing because it adds a bitter taste to the rest of the batch. The presence of aesthetic culture does not diminish the reality of the labor enacted in community canneries, but rather enhances our understanding of the fullness of the experience from the lenses of both economic innovation and aesthetic tradition. The aesthetic world of canned food production therefore offers one potential area that is abounding in further avenues for future research.
The Prince Edward County Community Cannery functions as a physical collection of objects that are enlivened by the practices of both commercial and home canners. These two
practices, housed in a single space, resolve a mutual need for future longevity and the ability to continue to preserve tradition by finding innovative ways to share location. Commercial canners look to evolving markets, specifically the value-added food industry, to produce manufactured products that in turn provide economic stability to food entrepreneurs. Home canners look to partnerships with innovative commercial entities to sustain an established sense of community. Both production branches need each other. Had the home cannery continued to operate
independent of the commercial partnership, it would likely be struggling for survival like many other canneries throughout Virginia and the American South. Without the foundation and tradition embedding the Prince Edward County Community Cannery as a vital community resource, the Virginia Food Works would have never found an affordable option for a co- packing partnership. Together, both branches of the cannery continue to pave the way for innovation to resolve an ongoing need for tradition.
EPILOGUE
My most recent visit to the cannery was on the evening of March 4, 2020. That morning, I drove north on Route 15 from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Farmville, Virginia, arriving in time to spend an afternoon at Patty’s house. We ate soup made from ingredients that Patty had previously canned, and flipped through the dozens of newspaper articles that I had uncovered in the Farmville Herald about the history of the cannery. The two of us then made our way to the cannery in the afternoon, arriving just before 4pm. The boiler was shut off for maintenance, and I had never felt so cold inside of the concrete building before.
The recently appointed director of Virginia Food Works, Katharine Wilson, had organized an open house, primarily intended as a way for commercial clients and farmers to explore the facility before the growing season became too hectic. We ended up with a solid mix of both commercially minded clients and community members interested in home canning, all milling around and asking questions about operations at the cannery. Katharine, Kathleen (the commercial canning manager), Patty and I all stationed ourselves throughout the building and directed visitors to various machines, sharing our experiences and expertise about the process with the newcomers. At one point in the evening, Kathleen led a group tour for all of the guests, and as she spoke about the history of the cannery, she and Patty eagerly turned to me to share some of my new discoveries, graciously allowing my thesis work to enrich our collective understanding of how the cannery came to the place it is at today.
After the visitors had left and the four of us were cleaning up, we joked, wondering if burgeoning public concern over the COVID-19 virus had kept some potential customers from
joining us at the open house. By the following week our light-hearted jests were realized; UNC- Chapel Hill had transitioned to online classes, the Governors of North Carolina and Virginia had declared states of emergency and begun implementing stay-at-home orders, and within two weeks the cannery had shut down all operations in the interest of public safety.
In the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the significance of the Prince Edward County Community Cannery and my thesis research has become all the more salient. On March 25, the New York Times ran an article titled, “Food Supply Anxiety Brings Back Victory
Gardens,” where writer Tejal Rao described many ways that US citizens are dealing with their concerns for food security amidst a global crisis. Rao quoted Rose Hayden-Smith, author of “Sowing the Seeds of Victory: American Gardening Programs of World War I,” who stated that during WWI, “Gardens flourished on the home front because people were eager to build their own community-based food security, and to cultivate something beautiful and useful in times of great stress and uncertainty.” Rao likened the surge in personal food production during war times to our current global situation: “That idea [of self-sufficiency] resonates as trips to the grocery store become fraught with fears of coronavirus exposure, and shoppers worry that industrial agriculture could fail them during a pandemic.”46 The resurgence of victory gardens and
questions of food security have captivated the US audience over the past two months, but for the community in Prince Edward County, these questions have been on their hearts for decades.