Because I was a city boy aged 8 when this went on and didn't know anything about it, I went Googling to find out more. Here's a pretty interesting story about it from 1999 that may serve as a reminder of what can happen when inflation and gas prices start climbing.
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http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/taste/11432746.html
Home cook: Canning memories
Canning lids are simple but clever things. Once off a jar of homemade tomato sauce or Christmas chutney, and no longer held down by their screw-top partners, they drift freely around a household, congregating in drawers and cupboard corners, or morphing into coasters, candleholders, floor protectors, plumbing parts, shims and shooting targets. They resist disposal, and they multiply.
But for a couple of summers, not so long ago, canning lids were like gold.
Shortages of dolls, but lids?
It's hard to imagine in this generation of year-round strawberries, cheap gas and 24-hour grocery stores that there was ever scarcity of anything other than Tickle Me Elmo dolls. But in the summers of 1975 and 1976, the Great Canning Lid Shortage spread over the land like a plague. History books aren't likely to make much note of it, but in those summers just after Watergate, it was front-page news. Congress investigated. It was a short-lived calamity, but it changed lives. It turned floppy-hatted gardeners into conspiracy-mongers. And it made canning people into freezing people.
The summer of 1975 was our third on a farm in southern Iowa, and our garden had expanded yet again. But under the tutelage of our landlord's mother, we'd become canners the year before. Now there was no amount of plenty we couldn't peel, chop, blanch, cram into jars and boil in the hot water bath until vacuum-sealed. That year, we had all the equipment ready to go, including lots of leftover jars and collars. All we'd need was the lids, the only equipment that has to be new.
July brought buckets of green beans. We found it strange that we had to visit a few stores and borrow from neighbors before we had enough 1-dozen boxes of lids.
'Sorry, no lids today'
When the tomatoes started coming in August, lids had vanished from the landscape. Grocery stores posted signs on their doors reading, "Sorry, no lids today." Neighbors weren't parting with any extras. There weren't any extras.
We took to calling grocery stores. Occasionally, a produce manager would tell us he was expecting a shipment overnight. The next morning we'd show up half an hour before the store opened, and find a queue of dozens of other people with the same idea.
This was six years after Americans had put a man on the moon. Why couldn't anyone manufacture enough little metal discs with rubber sealers on one side?
Of course, there was one way to get new canning lids. That was to buy new jars, which came with a matching supply of lids. But people had jars. Why pay a couple of bucks for jars you didn't need, when all you needed was lids, at 33 cents a dozen?
Well, because by now, when a stash of lids did turn up somewhere, they sometimes sold for as much as $1.19. (In 1998, that would have been an increase, over the course of a summer, from $1 to $3.61). This was only two years after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries had hit on the clever idea of withholding oil supplies, doubling the price of gasoline in the United States and creating long lines at gas pumps. Consumers and Congress had a new sensitivity about cartels and pricing, and in short order executives from the big canning equipment companies were called up to Capitol Hill.
They blamed consumers. With inflation high, people had found that home gardening was a way to cut expenses. Now, the executives said, they'd been surprised by the demand for canning equipment, and just couldn't keep up. They were doing what they could.
We did what we could, too. We had friends over for meals and learned that tomatoes can be roasted, baked, stewed, stuffed, fried, creamed, juiced, sauced and dried. We turned to plastic freezer bags and containers, cleared out the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, stored what beans and corn and fruit and sauces we could and hoped we'd never lose power.
The next year we'd moved away from the farm and garden, and read in the papers that the canning lid shortage had returned by midsummer. The industry promised it would make 4 billion lids for 1977, and I suppose that was enough because I haven't heard of a shortage since.
I don't garden like that anymore, but living through any shortage makes for nervous memories. SuperValu and Cub store officials say they expect to have enough lids for the canning season this summer, which is some reassurance. But if you're shopping for canning stuff, pick up a dozen lids for me, will you? I can always use more spoon rests.
