WASHINGTON – The march of Western civilization and the prosperity of the United States have partly hinged on the quiet little object behind those boxes of pricey whole-grain rotini pasta on the third shelf of your cupboard.

The object is cylindrical and silver and wrapped in a paper label. It is dusty. Its expiration date has passed.

“You think it’s still good?”

“I dunno. Open it. No, wait. Don’t.”

Or do. Several years ago, on the 50th anniversary of his marriage, an Englishman in Denton ate a can of cooked chicken he received as a wedding present. His only complaint? It was “a little bit salty.”

Such is the power, the longevity, the simplicity, the overwhelming ordinariness of the can. Until food can be bought, cooked and consumed on an iPhone, we will remain a container society, a canned civilization, preserved, pickled, hermetically sealed against the ravages of time, a people whose food and drink shall not perish from the Earth.

Aug. 25 marked the can’s 200th birthday. Here are some great moments in cans:

1810. A Frenchman named Nicolas Appert discovers a way to preserve soups, produce and dairy products in glass bottles using boiling water to force out air, and sealing the contents with cork, wire and wax. Other inventors soon adapt the process to tin cans, which are lighter, cheaper and more durable.

1978. A Delta Tau Chi fraternity brother named John Blutarsky methodically crushes several cans of beer on his forehead during the movie “Animal House,” causing generations of macho collegians to wound their brows (and pride) in copycat attempts.

Kick the can. Shoot it off a fence post with a BB gun. Construct a string telephone with it. Get 60 percent of your daily value of sodium from it. Get 5 cents for it (in NY, CA, ME, CT and VT). Make a purse out of pop tops. Stock your bunker full of canned goods. Eat as cheaply and variedly as possible.

Is there a sundry item more stackable, more actual, more sturdy and comforting and collectible and quintessentially consumerist?

Ho ho ho, Green Giant.

Anesthetize yourself with the implacable geometry of an aisle of cans in a grocery store, row after row of tin-plated plenty, peas and peaches and tamales and tuna and beans and beef. Curse quietly as a can tears through the dampened bottom of a paper bag just before you reach home.

The homeless man’s currency. The campfire companion. The makeshift ashtray. The throwback catcall (“Nice cans!”). The symbol for an entire artistic movement: Campbell’s soup cans, repeated over and over in a red-and-white binary code of commercialism. The building blocks of American life for centuries now.

“People have been predicting the end of the can for years,” says Allan Sayers, founder and publisher of The Canmaker, a British-based magazine. “But if we’re talking about sustainability and green issues, the can wins hands down in all forms of packaging. I think the egg is the only thing that beats it.”

One-hundred-thirty-billion cans are produced every year in the United States, a metal army rattling down conveyor belts, tumbling down vending machines, fueling football fans, littering riverfronts.

What if the can had never been invented? What if gold prospectors relied solely on foraging on their treks out West? What if tinsmiths didn’t handcraft 35,000 cans a day for meats and condensed milk during the Civil War? What if Chef Boyardee and Hormel Spam didn’t nourish Patton’s armies? What if canned food had never freed the American homemaker from time-consuming dinner duties?

Where would we be?

“You could argue that without food processing we wouldn’t have the advanced civilization we have today,” says John Floros, head of the department of food science at Pennsylvania State University. “In that context, the invention of the can and canning has truly helped society resolve major issues of hunger and diseases connected directly to lack of food or nutrients.”