Text 13. Canned food

One of the first men to make a commercial success of food conservation was Henry John Heinz. He started by bottling horse-radish, and he was so successful that in 1869 he founded a company in Pittsburgh, USA. Like other Americans of his generation, Heinz made his name a household word throughout the western world. At last, man seems to have discovered how to preserve food without considerably altering its taste. The tins оf food (Heinz tins!) which Captain Scott abandoned in the Antarctic were opened 47 years after his death, and the contents were not only edible, but pleasant.

The main argument against conserved foods is not that the canning of food makes it taste different; rather, people complain that the recipes which the canning chefs dream up are tedious or tasteless. But any recipe is tedious or tasteless when it is eaten in great quantities. And a company like Heinz can only produce something if it is going to be eaten in great quantities. The tomato is very pleasant to eat when it is freshly picked. A regular diet of tomatoes alone could well prove tedious. The canning companies try to cook the tomato in as many ways as possible. The Heinz factories in Britain use millions and millions of tomatoes every year. They claim that if all the tomatoes were loaded on to 15-ton lorries, the line of lorries would stretch for 60 miles.

But there are many people who do not like to eat food out of season. They like their food to be fresh, and they like to cook it themselves in “the old-fashioned way”. But it is very difficult for modern man to realise what it is like to live without the advantage of pre-packaged and canned food. European society in its present form could not cope without modern methods of food processing. Imagine your local supermarket without all the cans of prepackaged foods. Тhere wouldn’t be much variety left, and what was left would have to be increased enormously in order to give the same amount of food. The supermarket would turn into a chaos of rotting vegetables, stale bread and unhealthy meat. The health problems would be insurmountable, unless we all went back into the country to support ourselves.

So next time you reject canned food as being tasteless or unimaginative, remember that you can only afford to eat fresh food because canned food exists.

I. Read the text and decide whether the arguments contained in the italicized sentences are for or against food canning.

II. Translate the text.