Having grown up in a household where canning, pickling, and curing were standard practices and having married someone with the same background I can confidently say that these activities can definitley be cost-effective. To give an extreme example, ever price out a 10 lb prosciutto? Much cheaper (and satisfying) to cure your own. So what's going on?

Immediately upon reading this column I was struck by an uptown flavor contradictory to the humble origins of food preservation. Please, going to the farmers market and paying $16 for a couple quarts of strawberries??? You can find organic berries (and other foods) much cheaper (as other letters have noted). The whole point of home canning etc is butchered when people take some upscale "foodie" approach to the enterprise. Perhaps this kind of cultural appropriation may provide people with some self-congratulatory moments but get real. If you're trying to come up with your own precious recipies sourced from esoteric fruits and vegetables for which you have paid far too much, you are most definitely not in line with the spirit of thrift and self-reliance that drove these traditions.

I was too busy foaming at the mouth to be coherent! :o)

Ms. Karnasiewicz's account of her foray into home preserving reminds me of Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess and milkmaid. As a number of posters have already said, homemade products can be either very expensive or very cost-efficient. Everyone really has to do the math for themselves and decide if it's worth the time and effort to them individually. And one has to pick and choose among DIY projects. I live alone, only have room on my property for a small garden, and though I can cook quite well don't especially like to, so I don't preserve food. I do, however, make many of my own clothes, gifts and home furnishings, and do my own home renovations, and though I indulge in high-end materials occasionally generally live very economically as a result. I hate to think of what an exhausted wreck I would be if I had to make everything I ate and wore and sat upon from scratch. We present-day first worlders are so very lucky that we have the luxury of making these choices. And, since I grew up on a farm with a mother who preserved many kinds of food from our large garden, this thread gave me quite the nostalgia hit. I'm craving the elderberry pies she used to make from the tiny berries that were such a finicky, time-consuming chore for us kids to pick over.

This made me laugh:

How in the world do modern parents expect their kids to learn adult skills? Letting them marinate in the cathode rays of the latest ultra-violent video game...

I've been playing with variations since I read it:

"Letting them crank up the phonograph to listen to the latest rap music..."

"Letting them use the electric typewriter to send god-knows-what kind of dirty letters to their friends..."

Try it; the possibilities are endless!

If she was so inexperienced that she used WILD strawberries, it’s no wonder her jam cost $15 a pint! Why on earth would anyone do that?

My wife made strawberry jam this week, with very good domestic berries straight from the field (and they were pre-picked, too). It took her about 45 minutes, and here's what it cost:

2 quarts berries: $6.00

1 pouch pectin: $1.00

1 pound sugar (appr): $1.00

Jars: re-used from last year

Total: $8.00

Yield: 4 pints

Cost: $2.00 a pint

Now, our jam doesn’t use unprocessed sugar or any of the other over-priced and rather pointless ingredients the author added, but it’s all the better for that: it's pure, traditional strawberry jam. And it’s cheaper than any supermarket jam I’ve ever seen.

Moreover, those prices are Canadian dollars (we live in Nova Scotia) so you can cut the price per pint to about $1.75 in US dollars.

This is a highly misleading article. Homemade jam is neither hard to make nor is it expensive-- that is, if you don’t insist on using wild strawberries and boutique ingredients that (in my opinion) only detract from the true flavor of the fruit.

Yet another article on Salon.com by someone who dismisses an entire "trend" based on her personal experience. Because everyone lives in Manhattan and only makes preserves out of insanely expensive wild strawberries from the greenmarket (and how did a $15 jar of jam turn into a $17 sandwich -- did she use the whole jar?).

As other people have said, canning can be done quite economically using peak season produce and reused jars. Time and effort necessary diminish with experience, and anyway, unless you're self-employed, you probably wouldn't have been doing something more productive with that time. Better yet, invite some friend(s) over and have a canning party, which pools resources and makes it fun. I'm about to ask my sister if she wants to get together and do something with the upcoming glut of tomatoes and squash in my (and presumably her) garden.

And again as others have said, there are two good reasons to can: to preserve excess food you've grown yourself (despite what Salon writers would have you think, not everyone lives in tiny apartments in Manhattan or San Francisco); and to produce foods that are better quality than those available commercially, or only available in from expensive "artisan" or "boutique" producers (if they're available at all). Considering the prices for gourmet jams and preserves, even $15 a jar for fancy organic preserves is not that far out of line.

Occasionally, we'd hear a loud explosion and it was one of the jars bursting; a sad thing, but it happens.

That house must have smelled like a deli for weeks.

I tried pickling cabbage once in an attempt to make oshinko for some sushi I was making. Both turned out to be a disaster, with my wife declaring the sushi to be more akin to a mutant burrito, and my oshinko to be a foul attempt to poison her to death. I'll stick with cukes.

1. in my previous letter, I meant to say i picked the wild blueberries in 2007, not 1997. weird. I just turned 36 last month, perhaps this is some sort of early onset old lady brain thing mixing up my decades. Either way, the jam was delicious and though I was adamant that I give none away to anyone (it was an incredibly dry year in the BWCAW that year and most blueberry patches came up empty or the fruits were tiny or had already been picked clean by hungry bears. We were warned to be extra careful of bears that year as they were also not finding the blueberries they so loved) I ended up putting one in a basket of other canned goods for a charity auction, one to my sister because I'm a softy when it comes to her and one to appease a rightfully angry neighbor who had to listen to my dog bark all night when I was called away on an emergency. The remaining 4 were hidden away and loved dearly by me.

2. It's been mentioned and should be mentioned again, you don't can perfection! The beauty of making jams, sauces and relishes is that bruises, marring, imperfections and mushiness are all meaningless. You don't go out looking for the best tomatoes or cherries, you go out looking for the best deals and that means getting some bruised, imperfect, not good enough for a produce section kind of produce. Perfect, small batch heirloom strawberries probably should be appreciated fresh and natural. On the other hand you also don't want to use those icky styrofoam flavored mass produced Driscolls strawberries either.