A Class on Pickling That Didn't Even Mention a Single Cucumber.

     A month or so ago, Sandy LeGette asked if I wanted to go to a "pickling" class with her at UGA. They had such an abundance of okra this year and she thought it would be a good idea to get certified in processing acidified foods.   Since I had only made pickles twice in my life and they were the kind you kept in the fridge rather than in the pantry for ten years, I thought it sounded like a great opportunity for some continuing education.   This "Better Processing" class is required before you can then go through the steps (about fifty bajillion of them it seems with a dozen different agencies) of actually putting a product on grocery store shelves along with a cute little label.  Other than homegrown tomato sauce for meals, I didn't have any product in mind to actually sell but I thought "why not?"

     Although Sandy had warned me the class covered not only small canning operations (like anyone who grew up on a farm did with the season's bounty for the winter) but also the huge massive canning operations (like Hunt's) I still thought it would be more of a "how-to" class.  When I got the "textbook" in the mail and it was filled with words like hydrostatic retort and diagrams of the seventeen parts of the anatomy of a glass jar, I briefly considered ditching it.  Luckily I had already paid and was looking forward to a trip with Sandy who always has these great "food system" insights. 

     So at 6:30 yesterday morning we were on the road to class at the Food Sciences Department.  And for two days we covered everything from breakthrough points for chloride treatment of cooling water to the lug v. continuous thread designs of jar lids.  We both learned a lot and I think went away with knowledge of safety & record keeping procedures that we will definitely use.  We also learned a ton about things we will probably never use such as names of valves for 300 head filling systems and juice box factories that run through a thousand cartons of juice aseptically within less than a minute. 

     In our last session yesterday we learned all about keeping a high concentration of chloride in the cooling water so that the surface area of the can won't have any bacteria on it.  When processing such a huge quantity of cans or jars in a plant, there are so many additional steps and checkpoints to make sure there haven't been any product defects, everything is sanitized, etc.  And pretty much this just meant lots more chemicals and/or higher temperatures.

    As soon as we left the classroom we just stared at each other with our eyes wide.  I mean, how can that much hypochloride be good for you?  What is really left of the food once it's been completely "sterilized?"

    I am by no means a microbiologist or a chemist.  I'm not even going to pretend like I know which chemicals are bad, worse or ugly because I am not an expert.  The goal of the class (with food science & technology staff from UGA and FDA guys there) was to help people SAFELY process these jarred/canned acidified foods.  This means how to keep it free from microorganisms while it sits on a grocery store shelf to be sold to the public and then at room temp in your pantry.  It was to make sure that nobody starting a small acidified foods business was risking the public's health by not having jars sealed properly, etc.  It was to inform us of proper recording procedures so that if the FDA visited your kitchen you had documentation of temperatures, pH levels of your products, etc. for every batch you made.  We knew that this was the goal and I think the course did an excellent job of meeting that goal. 

    But it made us think:  "Can food really be responsibly processed on such a mass scale?"  What, if any, sacrifices to our health have been made so we can have the convenience of canned vegetables year round?  How far have we gone into the direction of processed foods that now we eat them nearly every single day?  Sure, families have "put away" food for generations but weren't pickles and dried meats usually reserved for the winter when you didn't have the abundance of summer produce or more fresh milk? 

    We really did enjoy the class and are glad to have passed our exam and be able to get processes certified, etc.  I think it made me see a good "big picture" of food processing on both a large and small scale.  I've always found that the "inspection" agencies are really not bad to work with. (For some reason I always got kind of sentimental about the hospital's Joint Commission visits, thinking about how great it was we could all work together to help our patients get even better care).  The USDA, the FDA, the Georgia Department of Agriculture, the Health Department, independent or land grant university process authorities and even the Bioterrorism Agency are all involved in some way or another in the process. 

     It will be a while before I put my Better Practices certification to use (not planning on overseeing a canning plant anytime soon) but I am definitely glad to know I am now qualitifed to proceed to the next fifty steps of paperwork required to produce a jar of pickles.  I just wish that they would have at least given me a  recipe.