“There might have been a time when canned foods were considered good. Maybe when fresh fruits and vegetables were hard to find out of season, people were glad to have them available in a can. But when you’ve had good corn right off the cob, the canned stuff is, well, it’s a disappointment.”

My friend Susan agreed with me, just as much about fruits and vegetables as about her small group Bible study, the actual topic at hand. Her group had been watching a teaching series on DVD over the summer and she was ready to be done with it already. As she talked, I was struck by the parallels between canned teaching and canned food. Something is usually better than nothing and the canned product was designed to take the place of the labor intensive and spotty quality of home canning. But my hunch is that something canned it most enjoyable when it is not served by itself but as one ingredient of something prepared fresh, like the can of corn added to the worlds best cornbread recipe.