About

Jason Bradley writes every page on this site. There is no team, no editorial board and no reviewer, and where a page makes a judgement rather than reporting what a document says, the judgement is mine and the page says so in the first person.

There is no biography on this page, and that is deliberate

You will find About pages in this subject that open with a grandmother's kitchen, a number of years, and a number of jars. Mine would be invented, so it is not here.

I have no standing in home food preservation. No family tradition I can point to, no seasons of practice, no shelf of jars behind me. If you are looking for a reason to trust me personally, there is not one on this page and I am not going to manufacture one.

What is here instead is the method, set out below, and the reason it is built the way it is. This site does not ask you to trust the person who typed it. Every load-bearing sentence carries the verbatim quote, the document, the page number and the date somebody opened it, sitting right next to the claim — so the check is available to you without knowing anything about me at all.

That is not a consolation prize for having no credential. It is a better arrangement than a credential, and the rest of this page explains why.

What I am not

I am not a food scientist. I am not a Master Food Preserver. I am not an Extension agent, I hold no appointment at any university, and I have never run a thermal process study or measured the interior temperature of a jar in a laboratory.

Nothing on this site is expert testimony. It is careful reading of documents written by people who are the experts, quoted at length so you can check my reading against theirs.

That admission is not throat-clearing and it is not modesty. It is load-bearing. A credential is the thing that makes a reader stop checking, and this site is built so that you never have to stop checking: the verbatim quote, the document, the page or section, and the date it was last opened all sit next to the claim, on the page, every time. If I had letters after my name the pages would look exactly the same, because the pages are not asking you to believe me.

Why a pen name is fine here and a fabricated qualification is not

Jason Bradley is a pen name. That is worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to work it out.

It is fine because of what you are actually being asked to trust. You are being asked to trust a method, and the method is inspectable: the quote is verbatim, the document is named, the page number is printed, the link is live, and the date somebody opened it is on the page. Every load-bearing sentence on this site can be checked by a reader who has no idea who typed it. A name adds nothing to that and removing it takes nothing away.

An invented qualification is a different act entirely. It asks you to trust the person instead of the document — to skip the checking, on the strength of something that was made up. On a subject where the failure mode is botulism, that would be the worst thing this site could carry, worse than any single wrong figure, because a wrong figure can be corrected and a false credential poisons every page at once.

So: no borrowed authority, no implied laboratory, no "certified" anything. If a page here is right, it is right because the source underneath it says what the page says it says.

The method

Six habits, in the order they matter.

Read the primary document, not a summary of it. Most bad canning pages are not lies. They are faithful summaries of a summary of a source, three steps removed, where a condition got dropped at each step.

Quote verbatim, and print the page number. "The USDA says" is not a citation. Which document, which revision, which page.

Render, do not soften and do not harden. If a source says something with three conditions, the plain-English version next to it has three conditions. "Not recommended" does not become "banned", and it does not become "some people avoid it" either.

Where two tested sources disagree, show both. Dated, side by side, with no attempt to smooth them into a single voice. That situation is real and more common than the niche admits, and where the guidance stops is the part of the site built for it.

Where nobody has run the research, say so. "Never tested" and "tested and found dangerous" are different claims about the world, and collapsing them is the most common failure in this subject.

Publish no processing schedule of my own. Not one time, pressure or headspace presented as mine. When you need a number, the page names the tested document that holds it and links you there.

How this site works sets all of that out in full, including the corrections policy and what a correction is worth to me — which is more than being right quietly.

The other thing I wrote

Water Bath vs. Pressure Canning, described honestly on the book page, including the one thing a printed book structurally cannot do that this site can.

Reaching me

Contact. Corrections first, and especially corrections that say a source has moved. Those are the most valuable messages this site can receive, because a site whose whole claim is that it knows which text is current fails the moment a text changes and it does not notice.