In the late 18th c., Napoleon the Great, seeing that his army was being decimated by food poisoning, granted a big sum of money to any inventor who could come up with a method of preserving food for a long time.

Finally, it was not a food technologist but a Parisian cook, Nicolas Appert, who found the way, by heating the food at high temperatures and closing it in hermetically sealed glass containers. This solution would have been adopted for a long time if the glass containers were to be used for domestic needs and not as food package for the army, carried by carriages and horses in the rough terrains where Bonaparte was chasing his destiny. In most of the cases the glass containers were being broken, and as a result the food was wasted and the crisp uniforms of the glorious French soldiers were getting dirty.

Finally, an English trader, Peter Durand, manufactured the first can 200 years ago. It was metallic and elegant, and it could preserve not only vegetables and fruits but also ready meals. It took another 54 years for the opener to be invented, and . . . this opened a new era in the field of human nutrition.