1KHO 854: The Lost Art of Feeding Ourselves | Diane Devereaux, The Canning Diva

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Ginny Yurich** (0:30)
Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I'm so excited to have The Canning Diva with us today. Diane Devereaux, welcome.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:41)
Thank you.

**Diane Devereaux** (0:41)
Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.

**Ginny Yurich** (0:44)
Okay. So you are an internationally recognized food preservation expert, author, and educator. You have incredible books. You also have canning.university of online classes. You have your own podcast called Canning with the Diva.
What's your backstory? How did you get interested?

**Diane Devereaux** (1:01)
Honestly, after growing up in the city of Detroit and moving to Northern Michigan and living on an actual farm, that was my interest. I didn't even realize that it would be a part of my everyday life and a business for me right now. It's just what I gravitated to as a teenager. And then, you know, owning my first home and having children and, you know, a 40-foot garden, 40 by 40-foot garden. It was just, it was a natural for me. And I didn't make it into a business until I left my career in disaster management. So that is truly how it got started because my husband wanted me home. He was tired of me traveling all over the world and decided that this, you know, passion of mine, originally just starting it as the canning diva so I could teach the art and craft of home canning to people in the Greater Grand Rapids area. And then it just, it really grew from there.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:01)
It sure did. It exploded. You've got your podcast, Canning with the Diva, ranked top 100 on Buzzsprout with over 87,000 downloads and growing. And then you have these incredible books. So the one I have right here is called From Seed to Table. You also have Meals in a Jar.
Then you have Complete Guide to Pressure Canning, Beginner's Guide to Canning, which has incredible recipes in it. Canning Full Circle, so how do you cook with the stuff you can, which that one I think is really important because a lot of times we do the canning, but then we're scared to eat it. And then there's also the newest one, which is Preserving for Your Pet. Can you just give a little overview on these different books and why people would want to add them to their home?

**Diane Devereaux** (2:44)
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for asking because it has been a very long road. I mean, we're going on 10 years of me writing, right? The first self-published book was in 2017, you know, Canning Full Circle. A second edition came out a few years later, but From Seed to Table truly encompasses all of the food preservation avenues. So whether it's canning, dehydrating, freeze drying, freezing food, cold or dry food storage, it is all a part of it because what you're doing is you're learning from growth, right? The gardening aspect, collecting the seeds. Basically, creating your food source, how to preserve it, and then the last chapter teaches you how to utilize that pantry, right? So now, just as you said, you've got all these canned goods, you've got dehydrated items, you might have even freeze dried your own food or bought it, right? What do I do with it all? So From Seed to Table teaches you how to utilize your food stores and create breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, appetizers, and then I even did the math and created a really nice chart so that if you happen to have these items in your pantry and you see a recipe online or in another cookbook that you'd like to create, you can do the math using this chart that I created so you can take a freeze dried item and convert it into fresh or a home canned item and convert it into fresh so that that way you can still create whatever recipe floats your boat.
But you get to utilize those food stores.

**Ginny Yurich** (4:20)
Okay, so let's talk about the health benefits here. One of the things that you talked about in this book from Seed to Table, is that you spent some time in Italy. So you're there, you're there for a couple of weeks, you're learning about the Italian way of life and their seasonal food production and things like that. And you said that Italy made the decision in 2024 to ban lab-grown meat and insects from traditional foods like pasta.