New blog available to home food preservers

Consumers can find the latest on preserving safe, high quality food at home on a new blog called Let’s Preserve. Cathy Guffey, nutrition and food safety educator, with Penn State Cooperative Extension in Bradford County maintains the blog.

She has taught classes and answered consumer questions about home canning, freezing, and drying for more than 25 years.

Guffey herself is new to blogging and considers her blog a "work in progress." If blogging is new to you, she suggests "thinking of it as a log of information on the web. The Let’s Preserve blog is a collection of information on home preserving. After reading a blog selection, readers have the option of making a comment or asking a question. The blog also provides links to related information on the web."

Guffey started the blog to give consumers a place to find up-to-date information. She says, "There is a lot of information on home preserving on the Internet. However, it is not all based on sound science." She also hopes to increase the awareness of consumers who are using out-dated methods for preserving food. For instance, she says "many home canners do not know that tomatoes should be acidified or that adjustments may need to be made for altitude when pressure canning."

Guffey has already addressed acidifying tomatoes on the blog.

She adds, "Methods for preserving food are often handed down from one generation to the next. However, new research leads to practices that result in safer, higher quality preserved food.

This makes it important to stay up-to-date." She likens it to the field of medicine. "If we go to the doctor with an illness, we do not expect the doctor to treat us the same as 50 years ago if a new and better treatment is available."

For consumers looking for reliable sources on home preserving Guffey recommends the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP). Its home is at the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension. This site includes online versions of two resources, The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2009, and the So Easy to Preserve guide to canning, freezing and drying foods, 5th edition.

State extension sites are also reliable sources. Links to both the NCHFP and the Penn State Food Preservation websites are on the blog.

For those without the internet, both books are available for sale at the Bradford County Extension Office. The So Easy to Preserve book and how-to DVD are also on loan at all public libraries in Bradford and Sullivan Counties. Guffey was able to use grant funds to place the book and DVD in the libraries. She encourages consumers to check out the blog and make comments or suggest topics.

The blog is found at http://letspreserve.blogspot.com. Cathy Guffey can be contacted via the blog or at (570) 265-2896 or cbg1@psu.edu.