Want To Build Food Resilience? Start By Making Jam

Making jam is the accessible starting point for food resilience, connecting a simple kitchen practice to a deep history of economic stability and personal empowerment.

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If you’re a home preserver, chances are you started with jam. It’s the first canning project for most people—it feels forgiving, and you just need a pot of fruit, some sugar, and a jar. That little jar ends up meaning a lot; it’s a way to hold onto that summer abundance, a first taste of food independence.

For me, jam has always been the gateway to food preservation, the moment that turns you from a consumer into a maker. “In the US, we often view jam through a narrow lens: a partner for peanut butter, a spread for toast. After a few uses, it might get tucked away in the fridge door and forgotten. What if jam isn’t just a condiment, but a medium that teaches you a set of skills that can help you create food resilience?

Step back from that jar for a moment and look at it as more than a fruit spread. Making jam turns fruit, sugar, and time into something entirely new. You start with fruit at its peak, juice running, sugars bright. Add heat, sugar, pectin, and acid, and what was once liquid shifts into something semi-solid, spreadable, suspended. It’s concentrated flavor you can hold in your hand — tartness balanced against sweetness, textures smoothed into something uniform yet alive. Depending on the fruit, you get flashes of brightness, depth, even bitterness, all locked into a substance that can last months, sometimes years. Think past the toast or yogurt shorthand. It’s the transformation itself: chemistry and season condensed into a jar.

Making jam teaches more than how to seal a jar. It teaches patience — the kind that comes from watching bubbles shift and thicken until they reach the right texture. Home canning teaches discernment, learning to trust your senses more than a timer or a recipe. It teaches care, because you can’t rush fruit; you have to meet it where it is. Those lessons echo far beyond the kitchen. In the language of resilience, they become practice: learning when to add, when to wait, and when to call it done.

That transformation is also why jam has long been the starting project for home preservers. It’s forgiving, relatively safe, and endlessly adaptable, which is why generations of canning guides start with strawberries or peaches before moving on to pickles or pressure-canned vegetables.

The USDA still lists fruit spreads among the most common home-canned goods, a reflection of how jam carries both tradition and accessibility. The practice itself stretches back more than a century.

According to the National Agricultural Library of the US Department of Agriculture, canning guides and preservation campaigns date to the early 1900s, when government programs encouraged households to save seasonal abundance as part of everyday food security. Successfully processed jars show up in farm kitchens, larders, gift shops, and suburban pantries alike, passed along as gifts or tucked on pantry shelves, always waiting for the moment when abundance needs to be saved for later.

“In my view, jam is a great start,” says Dara Silbermann, a community-based food advocate and former urban farmer with over 15 years of experience in food preservation. “Its sugar content preserves most kinds without the need for added acid or pressure canning. Even batches that are ‘messed up’ because they didn’t set properly have a use. The canning time is short and can be done in jars as small as four ounces. Start small with jam.”

A Tradition with Modern Relevance

Food preservation has always been part of the American table, but its meaning keeps shifting. Once seen as the work of homesteaders, survivalists, or grandmothers, it’s now being reclaimed by a generation that values self-sufficiency and care in the face of uncertainty. The reasons are practical as much as personal. People are buying fruit at its peak and finding ways to stretch it. They’re saving money, avoiding waste, or simply wanting to slow down long enough to taste a season before it disappears.

Food preservation has also long mirrored questions of access and class. What was once a working-class necessity has often been reframed as a lifestyle choice. Yet the skills themselves — saving fruit at its peak, finding use for every scrap, sharing knowledge across generations — have always crossed boundaries of class and culture. From rural canneries to immigrant kitchens, these traditions are less about nostalgia and more about persistence.

Climate disruptions are changing harvests. Recalls keep reminding us how fragile our food systems can be. The cost of groceries has turned small, simple acts — freezing berries, canning peaches, putting up sauce — into measures of stability. At a time when so much feels out of our control, preserving food, even in jars on a kitchen counter, can be a way to take back control.

Even as inflation eases in other areas, food costs in 2025 are still climbing. Coffee and tomatoes are more expensive, due to ongoing tariffs and constant recalls, which haven’t helped people feel confident about what they’re buying. The FDA is short on staff, and food-safety warnings keep coming.

Despite easing inflation, the Consumer Price Index shows food-at-home prices have risen over 3 percent this year. Many households now pay nearly 80 percent more than a decade ago, following years of steady increases. Wages are falling behind. Now, each grocery trip involves a choice: what to save, what to do without, and what to learn to make at home.

Preservation is a way of holding onto abundance, stretching a season, and making more with less. According to a 2023 study in Public Health Nutrition, gardeners who received food preservation lessons reported greater food security, ate more fruit and vegetables, and produced less waste. This is evidence that these skills ripple into everyday eating.

Research in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development found that home gardening on the Wind River Reservation helped Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho families carry resilience across generations. Food tended and preserved in those gardens wasn’t only about calories or storage; it became a way to pass down knowledge, sustain relationships, and strengthen Indigenous food sovereignty.

We’ve been here before. It’s a different era, but the same instincts come up. When the cost of food rises and trust in the system falters, people turn back to what they can make, store, and share themselves.

During the Great Depression, community canning centers and government pamphlets taught households how to capture the taste of produce ahead of the hunger of winter. Those instincts appeared again during wartime rationing and the early pandemic. Scarcity changed what “enough” meant in those moments. That instinct to preserve food always surfaces in uncertain times. When the systems we count on feel shaky, we turn to skills like this one for a sense of control.

A Modern Larder

In McMinnville, Oregon, Alchemist’s Jam, a bakery and jam shop, takes that lineage and stretches it forward. Their jams are cooked in copper pots, hand-poured into jars, and built on fruit sourced from local farmers. The team practices sustainability every day. The result is jam that feels less like a condiment and more like a medium — one that connects flavor to place, and preservation to possibility.

“Each year as summer turns toward autumn we have crates and crates of plums, pears, and apples in every nook of our jam shop,” says Jennifer Fisher, co-founder of Alchemist’s Jam. “It’s frenzied and messy, with sweet fruit juices covering every surface and piles of peels being readied for compost, and the most delicious smells filling our space. Every year I look around at my employees working so diligently, at the copper pots with fruit roiling, and I take a deep breath and feel so grateful for the work that we do. It reminds me that there’s such beauty in sustaining life in the real and tangible way of preserving food.”

“It might sound silly but I often send a little prayer of thanks to the raspberry and marionberry plants,” Fisher says. “The more we slow down, lean in, and observe the seasons changing, the more we understand our role in the world.” That kind of understanding turns preservation into more than a skill. It helps us stay connected—to the land, the people who grow our food, and the seasons that shape our meals.

What Comes Next: The Preserver’s Journey

Once you’ve filled your first jam jars, the fun really begins. Turning that possibility into a well-stocked pantry, however, requires moving from a single success to a reliable practice. “After jam, I’m a fan of tomato sauce and pickled vegetables,” Silbermann says.

At Alchemist’s Jam, even the café menu reflects that ethos. Their “Jam Latte” brings housemade preserves into a daily ritual — another way of connecting seasonal fruit to everyday life.

Search interest in “food preservation” has climbed steadily over the past decade, peaking in the last three years. According to Glimpse data, people aren’t only asking broad questions — they’re zeroing in on the details. Rising searches include “canning green beans,” “canning peaches,” and “blackberry jam,” alongside perennial favorites like dill pickles. In the past year, “canning” and “pressure canning” have dominated the search landscape, outpacing other methods like curing or drying. Jam may be the introduction, but curiosity keeps going.

From Preservation to Power

Skills gained at the stove ripple outward. “I think people forget how much corporations and capitalism desire our collective disconnection from traditional food preservation techniques,” Silbermann says. “It forces communities to rely on them rather than providing food security for themselves. Understanding how to raise and preserve your own harvest is a critical skill for fostering independence from capitalist systems and for generating community resilience.”

That link between preservation and self-determination has deep roots. Civil rights leader and organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who co-founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Mississippi in 1969, understood this deeply. She and other organizers grew, canned, and shared food as a way to combat hunger and the economic control used as a political weapon in the Delta. As she explained, “If you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family, and nobody can push you around.”

Hamer’s words and work are a reminder that food and power are always linked. Her work shows canning as self-determination, not simply thrift, and that aim remains unchanged.

Lesson in a Jar

In the end, making jam is about more than saving fruit. It’s about learning a skill that holds when everything else feels uncertain — the intentional, steady work of keeping what you can, what matters, and learning to make space for what comes next. In a moment when food costs rise and waste feels harder to justify, maybe that jar in the fridge is less of a leftover and more of a lesson — that what we preserve, and how we choose to use it, says as much about us as the fruit inside.

The fact that jam has anchored preservation guides for more than a century shows its staying power, but also why it continues to spark curiosity. From USDA pamphlets in the early 1900s to Google searches today, jam keeps resurfacing as the project that opens the door to more.

As food prices rise and supply chains stay shaky, more people are turning back to skills that make them less dependent on the system, such as freezing, canning, and putting up what they can. Preservation isn’t romantic; it’s practical.