The $8 Can of Vegetables

It started with Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1795, he offered a 12,000-franc prize for anyone who could devise a reliable way to preserve food for his sprawling, starving army; in 1809, a chef named Nicolas Appert claimed it with a heat-sterilized canning method that would forever change food preservation. By the mid-19th century, canning had made its way to New York City, where oysters, meats, fruits, and vegetables were packed into tin-plated cans, and the industry grew expeditiously from there. 

Canned food was heralded as a homemaker’s savior in the US around the 1950’s. But just a few decades later, as food TV reshaped consumer habits, the category took on a stigma as mushy and flavorless. Then, around the Covid-19 pandemic, tinned fish began to shift that perception again: fueled by lockdown pantry reliance, post-pandemic travel to places like Portugal, aesthetically-pleasing packaging (care of brands like Fishwife), and the snackification of meals (I am trying not to say Girl Dinner), it reemerged as a buzzy niche category — an it food. 

A $7.99 tin of vegetables sounds, at first, like a joke. Not a meal kit, not a restaurant dish — just 4.2 ounces of slow-cooked, vinaigrette-dressed produce, sealed in a can and sold online and at Whole Foods. It all looks a bit like the premiumization of a category that has long been defined by its affordability. But Row 7, the seed company founded by chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns (a $458-per-person restaurant with a troubled past), is betting that if you rethink what canned vegetables can be, you just might rethink what they’re worth.