Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The Mason Jar: A Non-Book Review

This was written a while ago for a narrative non-fiction class and was homeless. Now it is squatting my blog. While it is a satirical piece, it does contain some disturbing language. I can't do a "Read More" cut on blogger, unfortunately, but I'm putting a trigger warning up here. -d

The Mason Jar


(drawing by The Argyle Academy)

• Canning
• Fermenting
• Storage
• Beverages
• Menstrual Extraction
• Porch lanterns

I usually head straight to the appliance aisle of the local Five-and-Dime, eager to emerge from the store, five minutes and ninety-nine cents later, cradling the soda-lime glass curves of a Mason jar.
The jelly of our childhoods came in Smucker’s containers that were disposed of with the Monday morning trash. Watching fire flies jet across our front yards, we daydream about collecting them in glass jars sealed with cheese cloth. Bitter that our parents’ generation traded in simple pleasures for flashy 90s convenience products, we sit at urban bars sipping gin & tonics from these former canning implements and, channeling our inner rusticity, use them to ferment honey wine and brew hot tea on cold days.

Contrary to what the first-time observer might imagine, the Mason jar was not developed by an Ikea designer in her quest to create something that melded a country kitchen with the sleek utilitarianism of a Chelsea loft. John L. Mason, who invented the jars in 1858, was primarily concerned with botulism. His screw-on zinc cap replaced the error-prone canning method of using sealing wax to hold on a tin lid. Improperly sealed cans could lead to microbial growth (including botulism, the lethal, paralysis-inducing bacteria), so Mason’s invention allowed farm families to enjoy the preserved surpluses of their harvests without the risk of musculoskeletal paralysis and possible death.

One hundred and thirteen years after the jar was patented, Lorraine Rothman and Carol Downer slipped two tubes in to a Mason, connected one to a syringe and the other to a cannula and began performing menstrual extractions. The two-way bypass valve design prevented air from entering the uterus, giving menstrual extraction an excellent safety record, and the canning jar allowed more material to be removed from the womb. It was 1971, two years before Roe vs. Wade, and the simple kitchen and hardware tools utilized allowed do-it-yourself abortionists to access supplies as easily as if they were fixing the plumbing or making jam. The glass jars that now hold our spare change or our grandmother’s raspberry preserves have also collected the thick blood of distraught women, and sometimes, the fleshy, tiny-limbed fragments of their regrets.

Fermenting is hip again, as New Yorkers who crave half-sour pickles and sauerkraut are moving to the countryside and recreating deli counters in their root cellars. You can make most of the recipes in Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz’s treatise on the subject, with a Mason. I once brined garlic in a Mason to craft a health tonic and a test-taster compared its’ flavor to a “cross between pickles and floor polish.” My next-door neighbor is making his kombucha, black tea cultured with a colony of bacteria and yeast, with Hershey’s chocolate syrup. Bacteria are allowed in to our one-quart jars to bring improved flavor and health-benefits.

Contemplating uses for my jar as I leave the store and make my way down the street, I almost forget that the object I am holding in my hands has saved the nervous systems of my log-cabin dwelling ancestors and extracted unwanted fetuses from the wombs of my grandmother’s generation. Lime-soda glass, rubber and tin, filled to the brim- at various points in its history- with jam, rusty nails, kraut, blood and nostalgia, the Mason Jar is a truly multipurpose container.

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