The Dean of Food Science

He did not invent canning or bottling in glass or aseptic processing and packaging or the retort pouch or even the tin can that is under so much fire these days. He had no known patents in his name.

But Samuel Cate Prescott did more for canning than any person other than Nicholas Appert, who pioneered the process. (In 1943, Prescott won the Institute of Food Technologists’ Nicholas Appert Award, however, linking the two men forever in history.) Prescott and his colleague William Underwood provid…