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Show Utah Canning Crop Grew In America In Pilgrim's Time Varieties of at least four of the fruits and vegetables canned in Utah were growing in America when the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving 331 years ago this month. They are corn, tomatoes, snap beans and berries. Eaten by the Indians, for the most part only in which they were grown, the foods are now available in cans the year-around all over the country. coun-try. "Indian food-preservation methods meth-ods were crude and inadequate," explained Dr. F. W.- Geise, manager man-ager of the agronomy division of the American Can Company, which perfected modern can-making and canning methods making possible the year-around distribution of many essential food items that otherwise would be available only a few weeks of the year. "Even under the most favorable circumstances, Indian salted and dried foods meant a monotonous and inadequate diet in winter months," Dr. Geise said. "When bad weather, disease or insects destroyed de-stroyed crops, famine caused many deaths. The white man faced the same difficulty. The canning industry in-dustry not only has helped solve this age-old problem of hunger in periods of bad weather or adversity ad-versity but has brought a wide variety of delicious and nutritious foods to dinner tables everywhere." every-where." Cf all the food contributions of the Indians, corn, beans and tomatoes tom-atoes are best known. The Indian name for corn was maize. It had deep religious significance to the Mayans of Central America, but until the discovery of the Western Hemisphere it had been unknown to Europeans. An old Indian legend leg-end relates how a crow brought both corn and beans to the North America Indians from the god Cantantowit's field in the Southwest, South-west, carrying a kernel of corn in one ear and a bean in the other. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Mass., in December, 1620, Miles Stanish unearthed from a pit "not only a goodly cache of Indian maize but also a bag of beans." A friendly Indian, Samoset, taught the colonists the next spring to grow corn and later on to prepare it for eating; to mix it with native beans and enjoy Narragansett's resulting "msiick-quatash" "msiick-quatash" succotash. The tomato was found by Spanish Span-ish explorers in Central and South America. Called thee "zitomate" by the Aztecs, the tomato was eaten eat-en by wild tribes of Mexico. When it was taken to Europe, the tomato tom-ato was thought to be poisonous because of its relation to the deadly dead-ly nightshade. It was raised there at first only as an ornamental shrub. Pumpkins and squash are thought to have originated in tropical South America. They were common Indian foods in North A-merica A-merica at the time of the Pilgrims' Pil-grims' arrival. Berries, of course, were known to Europeans before the first colonists col-onists stepped ashore in America, but many varieties of blackberries blueberries, redberries and gooseberries goose-berries were native to the American Amer-ican continent. These and other fruits and vegetables veg-etables were imported from Europe Eur-ope and Asia by horticulturists who sought to improve crops. But the old Indian foods are still typically typ-ically American. Packed in cans, the fruits and vegetables that have grown here since before the Pilgrims Pil-grims landed still account for an important share of the diet of people in all parts of the country. |