# Canning: The Invention That Fed Armies

IELTS Academic Reading - 13 questions - 20 minutes - Flow-chart completion, True / False / Not Given

Source: Written by Testmigo.

## The passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on the passage below.

For most of history, soldiers on the march could carry only food that would not go bad quickly, and navies on long voyages depended on dried and salted provisions. The difficulty of feeding large numbers of men was one reason why military campaigns were usually limited to the summer and autumn months. The method that finally changed the diet of soldiers and sailors did not come from a scientist, but from a Paris confectioner named Nicolas Appert.

Appert was born in 1749 in Châlons-en-Champagne, in north-eastern France. He later spent thirteen years as head chef to a German nobleman, the Count Palatine of Zweibrücken, and from 1784 he worked as a confectioner and chef in Paris. In 1795 he began experimenting with ways of keeping food, and over roughly fifteen years he succeeded with soups, vegetables, fruit juices, dairy products and jams. It is often said that the French army had offered a reward of 12,000 francs for a new way of preserving food. At first he chose glass rather than metal, because the tinplate produced in France at that time was of poor quality.

His method was surprisingly simple. Food, often partly cooked, was placed in thick glass bottles with wide mouths, and a small space was left at the top. Each bottle was then closed with a cork. Appert regarded this as the most important stage, writing that the success of the whole process depended chiefly on the corking. The cork was hammered in with a wooden bat and tied down with crossed iron wire, so that it could resist the heat that followed. Next, each bottle was wrapped in canvas to protect it from breaking and lowered into a water bath, a large vessel of boiling water. The length of time it spent there depended on the food: for joints of beef, mutton and poultry, half an hour was enough.

The French navy was among the first to test the results. In 1803, health officials at the port of Brest examined food that Appert had prepared after it had spent three months on ships lying at anchor, and they reported that his beans and green peas still had the freshness and flavour of newly gathered vegetables. In January 1810, the Minister of the Interior granted Appert 12,000 francs, on condition that he publish a full and exact description of his process. He did so that year in a book called The Art of Preserving Animal and Vegetable Substances, of which 6,000 copies were printed. Appert believed that heat, applied once air was shut out, stopped food decaying, but he never understood why it worked. About fifty years later, the French scientist Louis Pasteur showed that microorganisms cause food and drink to spoil. Heating killed the microbes in the bottle, and the airtight seal kept new ones out.

Meanwhile, the idea had crossed the English Channel. On 25 August 1810, an English merchant called Peter Durand was granted a patent by King George III for preserving food in vessels made of glass, pottery, tin or other suitable metals. Durand tested the method using only tin cans, some of which held as much as 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms) of meat. He arranged for the cans to sail with the Royal Navy for four to six months, and members of the Royal Society found the food perfectly preserved on its return. Durand did not go into the food business himself, but sold his patent for GBP 1,000 to Bryan Donkin and John Hall. Donkin, an engineer, set up a factory at Bermondsey in London with Hall and a partner named Gamble, and by 1813 it was producing canned food.

Each of these early cans was made by hand from iron coated with tin, and the food inside could take up to six hours to cook, so canned food was far too expensive for most people. Its main customers were the British army and the Royal Navy, and explorers soon followed. In 1824 William Edward Parry took canned beef and pea soup on his voyage to the Arctic in HMS Fury. Later, the Crimean War and the American Civil War introduced great numbers of ordinary soldiers to canned food. By the 1860s, smaller steel cans could be made by machine, and the cooking time had fallen from around six hours to thirty minutes.

Strangely, for decades there was no convenient way of opening a can. The first cans were so solid that they could weigh more than the food they contained, and the instructions on them told users to cut round the top with a chisel and hammer. The first purpose-made opener did not appear until 1855, when Robert Yeates, an English maker of cutlery and surgical instruments, designed a claw-ended tool that was worked by hand around the top of the can. Three years later, Ezra Warner patented an opener in the United States which the US Army used during the Civil War. The familiar rotating-wheel design was not patented until 1870, sixty years after Durand's patent.

## Questions

### Questions 1-5: Flow-chart completion

Complete the flow-chart below, which shows how Appert preserved food. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Food is put into thick, wide-mouthed glass **(1)** _____, leaving a little space at the top.
Each container is sealed with a **(2)** _____, the step Appert thought mattered most.
The seal is held in place with criss-crossed metal **(3)** _____ so that it can withstand the heat.
The container is covered in a protective **(4)** _____ bag to prevent breakage.
It is heated in a water **(5)** _____ for a length of time that suits the type of food.

### Questions 6-13: True / False / Not Given

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Choose TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

6. Appert had professional experience of cooking before he started his experiments on keeping food.

7. Appert used metal containers from the beginning because French tinplate was strong and reliable.

8. Sailors at Brest said they preferred Appert's food to their usual salted provisions.

9. The French government's payment to Appert required him to keep his method secret.

10. Appert understood the scientific reason why his process prevented food from going bad.

11. Durand's patent covered containers made from more than one kind of material.

12. Parry's crew ate canned food every day during their Arctic voyage.

13. The first purpose-made can openers appeared more than forty years after Donkin's factory began making canned food.

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