Oh man I loved all the weird facts in this great issue. Esp. the conveyor belt machine that fills six semis and the 350 filet per minute portioner! It’s amazing the things people can figure out when they want to make money!
Also only 50 plows in Erie County? What?
Your post had me recollecting one of my favorite sayings: “God has no taste.” We all pride ourselves on our refined sensibilities but God, at least a proper God, just loves everyone. Sometimes I am torn between wanting to love everything and wanting to judge the hell out of everything, which is also super fun!
They had most of that assembly line connected in THEIR FACTORY. They would build, work out the kinks, take it apart, ship it to the final destination and put it back together. It was so GD big to be absurd. They had these breading tubs which were like twelve feet long and maybe six of them in all. Hard to believe people like breaded chicken that much! They would warn people when they were going to start things up cause it was SO LOUD. All to make "chicken"
I got to see a portioner working. It is just idiotic and if you go to a restaurant, regardless of price, you realize that everyone is using the same shape. One of the engineers was explaining they operated similar to cutting shoe leather and want to minimize the waste and scrap. What they did with the scrap was another story. Suffice to say, the technical term for the part of the animal that is unusable is called offal and pronounced just like awful.
We had our first significant snow this year today. Everytime I looked outside they were plowing or salting or applying liquid chemicals. Just like the WWTP, folks here go overboard. Many cities around the country now have contests to name their plows I think.
I think our friend Mr Estrin who seems to have a modest obsession with The Big Lebowski would enjoy one of these recent ones. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/nameasnowplow/
As I've gotten older I think it is so clear to me that the loudest purveyors of God seem to behave least like what you describe. They mostly go with the judge the hell out of everything. I love your quote. Yours is an inclusive God!
Wow those plow names are FANTASTIC! People are so clever and awesome.
My favorite sense I think are sounds, because they strike me as the most funny. If you just close your eyes and listen, everything is trying to tell you something, some louder than others.
Oh I forgot to thank you for mentioning the CAFÉ ANNE theme song in your post. I got a big kick out of that!
When the George Floyd unrest was ongoing, the Governor declared a curfew. Rather than having police all over the periphery of the City, they just used the asinine number of plows that MN-DOT has and parked them sideways on basically every exit and entrance ramp into Minneapolis. Lots of trucks. Protesters had so few options, they tried to block the Interstate and cross the Mississippi to St. Paul on foot. It was about the only way.
As a booklover, you would enjoy I once saw a plow named F Salt Fitzgerald :)
Our hearing IS AMAZING. I am with you on that. I love being out in wilderness camping where no light. You hear the GREATEST sounds!
Ah, the McRib. I've never tried one as it looks totally revolting, yet I'm oddly fascinated by it. It does have something to do with the "pressed cookie" approach they use, like WTF? I'm differently intrigued by things like Impossible meat, which I tried to use for chili once (with a result between ick and middling) until I realized I wasn't supposed to freeze the leftovers. A failed experiment. I remain curious about Turducken and am sure I'll try it someday, it's just too absurd not to. Thanks for the enjoyable article!
You made me laugh with the pressed cookie. If you could imagine this young "food scientist" fresh out of school holding trays of crazy food and "would you like to try". I am sure the McRib has to be the consistency of cookie dough before it is pressed.
As I do a PBD nowadays (some meat but not that often anymore), I wrote a story about the Impossible Burger titled "Heme". Parts of it might give you a laugh and the making it bleed is JUST CRAZY. You are right about the freezing I think.
There is so much bending of nature to commercialize food it is just crazy. Having lived in California for a number of years, I remember how infrequently it rained in our coastal area. Basically a desert growing cotton and almonds and pistacchios.
My dissertation advisor wrote a book about the intersection of gustatory and literary taste in the early 19th century -- it's called "Taste":) This post was a fascinating contemporary take on that topic. Like, what is the relationship between the McRib sandwich and wearing a branded shirt? International capitalism? Influencer culture? Are our tastes becoming synchronized across the globe?
Your writing on the food industry is always fascinating -- if disturbing. I've gone way too far down that rabbit hole to think about food the way I did in 2010.
I think I could write purely about my work experiences (I'm OLD) and not run out of stories for a while. The range of human behavior is simply ridiculous to me. Here's a SIMPLE cautionary tale. All of our customers in part of my food experience were price-conscious. We had a product line in which we could mix hundreds of products on the spot. We applied for patent protection on those products and protected their formulations. We then made SKUS for each of four markets, poultry, meat, food & beverage. We eventually added a fifth market DAIRY and we had to charge EVEN LESS. The PRODUCTS WERE IDENTICAL but their pricing was vertical industry biased. We SIMPLY HAD TO CHARGE less in the order presented. The manufacture of poultry products is such razor thin and corners are cut in every way imaginable. I think it is safe to say that purchasing products (beverages, food, meat, poultry and finally dairy), one should be cautionary as you get to the meat and poultry and dairry side of things. The absurd things required to process them into products would take your breath away. After any faciliity visit, my habits would change for a while.
We had a long-term renter from Northern Italy (about 7 years) -- nothing was funnier than to observe their patterns and how they prepared and ate. Claudio was firm in his assertion that any Italian food offerred near our suburban home was not Italian to any appreciable extent.
My sister and her husband have spent their lives in the restaurant industry. She almost went into food sciences once and it was fascinated to learn the research that goes into things like potato chips. Your experience goes even further into it!
This is a favorite sub-topic of mine. I would imagine your sister and her husband have bumped into Ecolab along the way. I think almost anything is interesting if you dig in! One of these days I am going to write about chicken & poultry. I'll put a warning in as some people don't want their food ruined by TMI.
Some businesses just trudge along. The food industry is unusual in that b/c we all have to eat we have invested AMAZING effort to improve our yields and calorie density. While some of this was great as it put starvatiion at bay in the Green Revolution, most of the effort has been anti-health and the onset of lots of health issues. Some of the efforts are SO ABSURD to be OOTW. A lot of the efforts intersect with your writing about the land. Land use and the lengths we go to construct proteins are perverse.
Modernity and affluence have led most of the food industry to get us to increase serving size WAY BEYOND healthy. If you are in a business making food, the population is not growing fast enough to sustain growth. The subsidies in the system create highly processed, calorie dense products with lots of salt and sugar and extracts of corn & soybean. This is the ONLY path to growth and it is done at the expense of our health I fear.
I have shared in my writing before but 75% of the SKUs in a grocery store (including the produce) contain soy and/or corn. Crazy and we pay a premium for it. It is laughable when someone tells me they avoid GMO; I would like to see their shopping cart as even the containers the food is in are corn and soy-based.
I like my "John Deere" sweatshirt a lot. It's warm, it's comfy, it's got a capacious kanaroo-style pocket for my stuff, and it features a cute jumping deer logo on the front. At this point we use a Kubota tractor, but I still wear the John Deere shirt with the frayed wrists because I like it. Besides, green is a much better color for a tractor then orange (edited!).
Having done some work in the Quad Cities and living in corn and soybean country, I agree John Deere green is popular! A good logo to boot. One of my relatives had great memories of riding on a Kubota small tractor and they named their dog accordingly! Based upon sales, I would imagine Americans will soon be wearing Mahindra hoodies as their new fashion statements :) Thanks for commenting.
Seems to me that young women have incorporated bib overalls as a thing. Dairy farmers would be proud :) I am going to laugh and think of you the first time I see someone wearing a Mahindra t-shirt
Oh man I loved all the weird facts in this great issue. Esp. the conveyor belt machine that fills six semis and the 350 filet per minute portioner! It’s amazing the things people can figure out when they want to make money!
Also only 50 plows in Erie County? What?
Your post had me recollecting one of my favorite sayings: “God has no taste.” We all pride ourselves on our refined sensibilities but God, at least a proper God, just loves everyone. Sometimes I am torn between wanting to love everything and wanting to judge the hell out of everything, which is also super fun!
Thanks for reading AND commenting.
They had most of that assembly line connected in THEIR FACTORY. They would build, work out the kinks, take it apart, ship it to the final destination and put it back together. It was so GD big to be absurd. They had these breading tubs which were like twelve feet long and maybe six of them in all. Hard to believe people like breaded chicken that much! They would warn people when they were going to start things up cause it was SO LOUD. All to make "chicken"
I got to see a portioner working. It is just idiotic and if you go to a restaurant, regardless of price, you realize that everyone is using the same shape. One of the engineers was explaining they operated similar to cutting shoe leather and want to minimize the waste and scrap. What they did with the scrap was another story. Suffice to say, the technical term for the part of the animal that is unusable is called offal and pronounced just like awful.
We had our first significant snow this year today. Everytime I looked outside they were plowing or salting or applying liquid chemicals. Just like the WWTP, folks here go overboard. Many cities around the country now have contests to name their plows I think.
I think our friend Mr Estrin who seems to have a modest obsession with The Big Lebowski would enjoy one of these recent ones. https://www.dot.state.mn.us/nameasnowplow/
As I've gotten older I think it is so clear to me that the loudest purveyors of God seem to behave least like what you describe. They mostly go with the judge the hell out of everything. I love your quote. Yours is an inclusive God!
So what is your favorite sense?
Wow those plow names are FANTASTIC! People are so clever and awesome.
My favorite sense I think are sounds, because they strike me as the most funny. If you just close your eyes and listen, everything is trying to tell you something, some louder than others.
Oh I forgot to thank you for mentioning the CAFÉ ANNE theme song in your post. I got a big kick out of that!
When the George Floyd unrest was ongoing, the Governor declared a curfew. Rather than having police all over the periphery of the City, they just used the asinine number of plows that MN-DOT has and parked them sideways on basically every exit and entrance ramp into Minneapolis. Lots of trucks. Protesters had so few options, they tried to block the Interstate and cross the Mississippi to St. Paul on foot. It was about the only way.
As a booklover, you would enjoy I once saw a plow named F Salt Fitzgerald :)
Our hearing IS AMAZING. I am with you on that. I love being out in wilderness camping where no light. You hear the GREATEST sounds!
Ah, the McRib. I've never tried one as it looks totally revolting, yet I'm oddly fascinated by it. It does have something to do with the "pressed cookie" approach they use, like WTF? I'm differently intrigued by things like Impossible meat, which I tried to use for chili once (with a result between ick and middling) until I realized I wasn't supposed to freeze the leftovers. A failed experiment. I remain curious about Turducken and am sure I'll try it someday, it's just too absurd not to. Thanks for the enjoyable article!
Thanks for reading.
You made me laugh with the pressed cookie. If you could imagine this young "food scientist" fresh out of school holding trays of crazy food and "would you like to try". I am sure the McRib has to be the consistency of cookie dough before it is pressed.
As I do a PBD nowadays (some meat but not that often anymore), I wrote a story about the Impossible Burger titled "Heme". Parts of it might give you a laugh and the making it bleed is JUST CRAZY. You are right about the freezing I think.
There is so much bending of nature to commercialize food it is just crazy. Having lived in California for a number of years, I remember how infrequently it rained in our coastal area. Basically a desert growing cotton and almonds and pistacchios.
My dissertation advisor wrote a book about the intersection of gustatory and literary taste in the early 19th century -- it's called "Taste":) This post was a fascinating contemporary take on that topic. Like, what is the relationship between the McRib sandwich and wearing a branded shirt? International capitalism? Influencer culture? Are our tastes becoming synchronized across the globe?
Your writing on the food industry is always fascinating -- if disturbing. I've gone way too far down that rabbit hole to think about food the way I did in 2010.
I think I would enjoy that book!!!
I think I could write purely about my work experiences (I'm OLD) and not run out of stories for a while. The range of human behavior is simply ridiculous to me. Here's a SIMPLE cautionary tale. All of our customers in part of my food experience were price-conscious. We had a product line in which we could mix hundreds of products on the spot. We applied for patent protection on those products and protected their formulations. We then made SKUS for each of four markets, poultry, meat, food & beverage. We eventually added a fifth market DAIRY and we had to charge EVEN LESS. The PRODUCTS WERE IDENTICAL but their pricing was vertical industry biased. We SIMPLY HAD TO CHARGE less in the order presented. The manufacture of poultry products is such razor thin and corners are cut in every way imaginable. I think it is safe to say that purchasing products (beverages, food, meat, poultry and finally dairy), one should be cautionary as you get to the meat and poultry and dairry side of things. The absurd things required to process them into products would take your breath away. After any faciliity visit, my habits would change for a while.
We had a long-term renter from Northern Italy (about 7 years) -- nothing was funnier than to observe their patterns and how they prepared and ate. Claudio was firm in his assertion that any Italian food offerred near our suburban home was not Italian to any appreciable extent.
My sister and her husband have spent their lives in the restaurant industry. She almost went into food sciences once and it was fascinated to learn the research that goes into things like potato chips. Your experience goes even further into it!
This is a favorite sub-topic of mine. I would imagine your sister and her husband have bumped into Ecolab along the way. I think almost anything is interesting if you dig in! One of these days I am going to write about chicken & poultry. I'll put a warning in as some people don't want their food ruined by TMI.
Some businesses just trudge along. The food industry is unusual in that b/c we all have to eat we have invested AMAZING effort to improve our yields and calorie density. While some of this was great as it put starvatiion at bay in the Green Revolution, most of the effort has been anti-health and the onset of lots of health issues. Some of the efforts are SO ABSURD to be OOTW. A lot of the efforts intersect with your writing about the land. Land use and the lengths we go to construct proteins are perverse.
Modernity and affluence have led most of the food industry to get us to increase serving size WAY BEYOND healthy. If you are in a business making food, the population is not growing fast enough to sustain growth. The subsidies in the system create highly processed, calorie dense products with lots of salt and sugar and extracts of corn & soybean. This is the ONLY path to growth and it is done at the expense of our health I fear.
I have shared in my writing before but 75% of the SKUs in a grocery store (including the produce) contain soy and/or corn. Crazy and we pay a premium for it. It is laughable when someone tells me they avoid GMO; I would like to see their shopping cart as even the containers the food is in are corn and soy-based.
I like my "John Deere" sweatshirt a lot. It's warm, it's comfy, it's got a capacious kanaroo-style pocket for my stuff, and it features a cute jumping deer logo on the front. At this point we use a Kubota tractor, but I still wear the John Deere shirt with the frayed wrists because I like it. Besides, green is a much better color for a tractor then orange (edited!).
Having done some work in the Quad Cities and living in corn and soybean country, I agree John Deere green is popular! A good logo to boot. One of my relatives had great memories of riding on a Kubota small tractor and they named their dog accordingly! Based upon sales, I would imagine Americans will soon be wearing Mahindra hoodies as their new fashion statements :) Thanks for commenting.
So our citizens look to rural America for fashion sense? :) Kubota is king around here, but John Deere will always have my heart. :)
Seems to me that young women have incorporated bib overalls as a thing. Dairy farmers would be proud :) I am going to laugh and think of you the first time I see someone wearing a Mahindra t-shirt