16 Great Posters on Preserving Food, When It Was Life or Death

By
Lloyd Alter
Lloyd Alter
Lloyd Alter
Design Editor
  • University of Toronto
Lloyd Alter is Design Editor for Treehugger and teaches Sustainable Design at Ryerson University in Toronto.
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Updated February 14, 2016

It's that time of year when the harvest is coming in, and people are boiling bottles doing their canning. It has become a popular hobby and a great way to save money, but during World War I and II it was a critical part of the war effort. Twenty million American families had victory gardens, and when autumn came, much of that had to be preserved.

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Waste Not Want Not

credit: McGill Collection

As in this WWI poster from the McGill Canadian War Poster collection shows, mom passed on the skills to daughter. Join the party: Kelly shows you how to can tomatoes.

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Are you a victory canner?

credit: US Dept of Agriculture

Staying on the sidelines for two years meant that Americans were late to the Victory Garden and canning scene, and their posters started off being a little melodramatic, with a young lady liberty dressed in the flag.

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Prepare for the next war

credit: National War Garden Commission

She got around; this version confused me, preparing for the next war. America had just entered the first one.

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Preserve

credit: Carter Housh

More subtle and more interesting is this series of posters by Carter Housh, who was an illustrator for McCalls in a sort of Maxfield Parrish / art deco style. I just love these, wonderful graphic design.

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Carter Housh

credit: Carter Housh

This is my favorite: Columbia gets canning.

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Uncle Sam

credit: Carter Housh

It's not just women's work; Uncle Sam got into it too.

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Women, Get to Work!

credit: Pennsylvania State College

Although at Penn State, it is clearly the women who are the fount of canning wisdom.

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London calling

credit: Food Production Department London

It was much the same in Britain, although there are not a lot of canning posters to be found.

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Can All You Can WWI

credit: National War Garden Commission

Can all you Can was a popular slogan in World War I.

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Can all You Can WWII

credit: University of Minnesota

This carried right through to World War II.

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Am I Proud!

credit: Hennepin collection

This poster is perhaps the most famous of the WWII canning posters, you can see it everywhere.

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You can learn

credit: unknown

This looks rather like my old darkroom, now lined with shelves and full of my wife's canning, although that certainly doesn't look like Kelly.

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Lots to eat

credit: Hennepin collection

And my favorite WWII canning poster, the mom and daughter in matching outfits, hard at work. There is something demonic in that child's eyes, I often wonder what or who is really going into those jars.

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Victory Garden of Tomorrow

credit: Joe Wirtheim

It is still happening; Artist Joe Wirtheim's Victory Garden of Tomorrow project includes this one about preserving. He describes the poster:

Yes-- those are space pickles. Space is a vacuum, the perfect place to can. Preserving food has re-emerged as a household activity. My own grandma would pick local Ohio peaches and strawberries, can them and fill shelves in the basement with these colorful mason jars. Plus, I like how this rack looks like the space station in the film poster of "2001: A Space Odyssey."
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Collect your own!

credit: Library of Congress

If you want to get bigger, better copies or other posters, here are my favorite sources: Library of Congress, Hennepin County Library, Vintage Maine Images University of Minnesota and Beans are Bullets.

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Holy Victory Garden Batman

credit: Superman

Also, I just discovered this, the best collection that I have found yet on Pinterest, by Pam Dewey.