Preserving things

My mother's mother preserved apricots. My father has lively boyhood stories of glass jars of homemade saurkraut exploding in the basement. The summer after I graduated from high school, my family went away for a week -- I had a job and stayed home -- and I had to snap, parboil and freeze a grocery bag's worth of green beans from the garden every night.

So my kids come from a long line of people who preserve things. Which leads me to wonder... what went wrong with the gene pool?

(Yes, water balloons. Packaged in water.)