My grandparents Ed and Arnell Streeter were not your typical doomsday preppers clad in camo living in a bunker. They were nice federal government retirees born in rural Arkansas, living for their gardens, grandkids and their daytime stories.

They were also survivors of the Great Depression, stocking their Prince George’s County home with nonperishables such as canned soups, sardines and saltine crackers, and two full refrigerators and a giant freezer stocked with enough meat and fresh-caught fish to get through an entire winter. You weren’t gonna catch Granddaddy and Grandma unprepared.

I thought about them and their meat freezer recently when I read about how Americans are becoming reinvested in canning, a food preservation method and pastime popular in our grandparents’ days. In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when so many of us were stuck at home anxious about our food supply, Google searches shot up for “canning” and “Ball jars,” the clear glass vessels used to seal scores of soups and batches of beans.

Even years after lockdown, with rising food costs and a general unease about society’s stability, canning’s comeback continues. I was curious about making enough matzo ball soup and vegan chili to last the winter, so I sought the advice of Becky Calvert. The Baltimore native, writer and expert canner has taught both kids and adults everything there is to know about good preservation in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is working on the upcoming official Charlottesville City Market cookbook.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Calvert, 55, who has been canning for 25 years. Her mother was an aficionado of the craft during her childhood, when they lived on a farmette outside Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, not far over the state line. During what she calls “the 200 tomato plant year,” her mother “had planted an entire acre in her vegetable garden,” she said. “I remember that she said that a tomato at the store is not actually a tomato. She made her own ketchup.” Now that’s commitment.

The family canned for many of the reasons people do today. “Money was tight during the recession of the early ’70s, and once we sold the farm, canning was not as big a thing but my mother never stopped baking bread and making butter pickles,” she said.

In her classes, Calvert has seen the aforementioned preppers, hipsters looking for the next cool old-timey thing, and people who grow their own food and “want to preserve their harvest. Some have planted this fig that has gone crazy, and what are they gonna do with it? They can’t give any more figs away,” she said. And this solves the mystery of that one Christmas when your aunt gave everyone jars of fig jam!

She’s also had inquiries because of the recent onslaught of hurricanes and people seeing the damage that can happen. Unlike the big freezers my grandparents relied on, canning makes for good shelf staples that will survive if your house loses power.

Calvert’s own conversion to the canning life, ironically, centered with the same red fruit her mother grew so much of during that certain summer. “I am obsessed with tomatoes,” she explained. “When they came in, it was more than I could eat. I started out just freezing, and then canning. I thought, ‘Can I put up enough tomatoes for my family that I never have to buy a factory farm tomato ever again?’ That became my goal.”

My own interest in canning is part of a personal evolution and some of the same reasons others come to Calvert’s classes: It’s become more and more important to know what I’m putting in my body. I am very fancy-pants when it comes to food, but for health reasons, I’m now doing things like making my own no-sodium vegetable broth from scratch. Eating what I made and saved myself seems like a worthwhile progression of my whole self-improvement campaign.

So how to get started? We’re past the local growing season, whose summer yield would have been made into sauces, soups and jellies to be eaten in the winter. But getting started next year (or now, if you’re working from store-bought ingredients) involves an initial financial commitment of your glass jars. Calvert said that the price of jars jumped in 2020 and has’t gone down. Currently, a dozen 16-ounce Ball jars are just under $12 at Walmart and on Amazon. The good thing is both the vessels themselves and the metal rings that seal them are reusable. After that, she said, it becomes less expensive than buying premade food.

One of the easiest methods is hot water vacuum canning in which you treat the Mason jar-contained food in hot water — a process that’s appropriate for fruits, jams and jellies and pickles. But things such as soups and meats need to be pressure canned because of the acid levels in the food, Calvert said. Safety is very important in any new hobby, and it’s worth knowing what you’re doing.

Calvert enjoys the nostalgia that canning evokes, but cautions that in this case, some modernity is a good thing. “One of the main rules of canning is do not use your grandmother’s recipe because it’s probably not safe,” she said. “Our food safety standards and research have come so far. There’s also a little stomach bug in the winter when people clean out their pantries and eat improperly canned food. That’s where the botulism comes in.”

And there’s more to fear than botulism — Shauna C. Henley of the University of Maryland’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources said people are at risk of the equally unappetizing listeria or salmonella if items aren’t properly canned. So it’s not just avoiding Grandma’s recipes, she said, but “not finding recipes online from video blogs, which could be risky in terms of food safety.” Instead, she suggests curious canners check out ideas at the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia.

I do not want any of those diseases, but I do want to start growing my own tomatoes on my Baltimore patio and try my hand at canning them, so I am going to do my research before I start. Calvert has offered to give me a personal lesson next summer, and in the meantime, the University of Maryland Extension’s Family and Consumer Sciences program is hosting a food preservation workshop on Nov. 4 at the Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm in Baltimore. So we can all get healthier and craftier, one can of veggies at a time.