First of all, I want to apologize to all if I have been ‘cranky’ tonight - Low pressure coming in with cold rain/sleet/snow mixture - Sure has my sinusitis in an uproar.
LOL Maybe this would be the perfect time to lay some accumulated experience on why you should can your own food out there...
Some of you may have seen where I have had a couple of years of experience in the commercial food preparation business. I worked as an Area Manager for Receiving, Clean & Prep, Initial Processing and Freezer operations for a now closed very large food processing company here in the East.
I left that company over some of their practices even though many of them were standard operating procedure throughout the industry. Knowing those normal operating practices is what really drove me to canning my own.
A few examples...
What do you do with a truckload of string beans that has been rejected for worms? Process them as french style beans - worm strips are not readily noticeable.
If peeled potatoes are left exposed to the air till they turn dark - even almost black - what do you do with them? Put them in the can anyway, but increase the salt. After 3-5 years in the increased salt solution they will lighten up or bleach out to where it isn’t noticeable. Yep that can may have been sitting in a warehouse for 5 years before it was sent to the distributor then to the grocery store.
Vegetables are transported throughout the plant by pumping the product. Each pump has a drum that the vegetables drop into from a dewatering reel from the previous pump. Quite often, pumps plug up and overflow the drum and fill the pit where the pumps are located - a worker or two are put into the pit with shovels to shovel the vegetables into the unstopped pump - along with the slime, mold and whatever has accumulated in the pit. They do change the water in the pumps once a day and rinse off the tanks with hoses to knock the foam/slime/mold off.
Flash frozen vegetables are run through a blast of super cold air blast which has been blown over ammonia coils - those coils freeze moisture on them from the vegetables and from the air - so Glycol (an anti-freeze) is continuously sprayed on those coils to deice them. Mist from that is blown through the vegetables traveling on the freezer bed. Yum.
USDA - while having one inspector for the whole plant, and a couple of technicians (mostly for paperwork) only toured the plant once a month and relied on opening 3 cans from each lot (about 10,000 cans) and inspecting what was in the can to assign it a grade. Most of the time, plant workers selected best looking vegetables as they went through for the inspections. Marking the cans to be pulled for USDA.
Ever wonder how those potatoes and carrots are peeled in such large quantities? They are dumped into a vat of caustic - yep very hot Lye. Then the conveyor runs them up and into a scrubber that has first hard rubber rough rollers which beat off part of the lye dissolved outer layer. Then they are run through a polisher which consists of brush rollers and then it goes to the pumps and off to a conveyor for obvious trash and bad potatoes or carrots are removed by hand on a 3’ wide conveyor running 1-2 deep past 8 women at a pretty good clip who are trying to pick out the bad. Then to another pump to the cutting and then to the can fillers. Snakes, frogs, other critters usually get past the pick-out tables as the first response is for them to jump back from them. The reels have a grill that takes out most of them.
The peels/lye mixture is pumped into a tank truck and hauled to a lagoon on a cattle ranch. After a few weeks in the lagoon, the pH has neutralized enough to where it can be mixed with hay and fed to cattle.
While most of us believe that Kosher has special processing and inspection - Well, not hardly. To run Kosher lots, the Rabbi comes in and is given a tour of the newer part of the plant once a year, they bring the Kosher Salt, Kosher Onion Powder, etc. out of storage in the freezer for the Rabbi to see and check labeling on it. He then proceeds to the boiler room where incense is burned in the boiler, prayers are said and he departs. As soon as he departs, all the Kosher ingredients go back into the freezer for next years inspection. Production continues as usual.
Ever wonder when you buy peas and carrots or mixed vegetables, how they get them all to mature at the same time? They don’t - The early vegetables are frozen in open tote boxes and stacked in a freezer - then when all the ingredients needed have come to season, they dump the frozen vegetables in with fresh ones and process as though they were all fresh.
Think your particular brand is special and better than the rest? Probably not. This plant processed 26 different vegetables and mixes - they are stored in warehouses in bulk pallets and when an order comes in on any of the over 600 labels they packaged for, they pull the grade called for and run the labels on. When the quantity needed is met, the line continues but with the next label going on. So you can see Aunt Lydia string beans coming off, and without stopping you change to Libby’s then even Del Monte and on and on to fill the orders. 6,000 cases for Libby, 5,000 for Aunt Lidia, 3,000 for Island Farm Brand, etc. all day long.
The final straw for me was when you are taking your turn on the weekends for plant operations, they run cooker charts (temperature and pressure round chart disks) without product going through so they can replace the charts for the lots that had malfunctions or breakdowns when they were run. Then they expect the manager to sign off on those charts saying they actually were from the original cook. Not me... I took all the charts they wanted me to sign and on Monday morning marched down the long hall to the Owner’s office. slammed them on his desk and told him that if he wanted to have these fraudulent cooker charts signed, that he needed to get out HIS pen and start signing, and if he didn’t, then they could expect to have a vacancy. He wouldn’t so I marched right out - never to return.
So, next time you go to the grocery store and pick up a can of vegetables, ask yourself - shouldn’t I be canning these myself - then I could know what is in it and how it was handled and processed and how fresh it really is...
I hope this doesn’t ruin anyone’s dinner, but while I was on my soapbox, I wanted y’all to know the ‘rest of the story’.
Maybe now some of you understand a bit more why I am so passionate on the growing/preparing/canning/freezing/drying your own food right!
Tomorrow I should be back to my normal sweet self (if this sinusitis will just abate a bit) and we can chat about more pleasant things.
Most?
First of all, I want to apologize to all if I have been ‘cranky’ tonight - Low pressure coming in with cold rain/sleet/snow mixture - Sure has my sinusitis in an uproar.
LOL Maybe this would be the perfect time to lay some accumulated experience on why you should can your own food out there...<<<
Yes, you can stack your soap boxes almost as high as I do at times.
LOL, I didn’t realize you were out of sorts, as I too have strong opinions and have thought many the same thoughts at times.
Now for your nose, I doubt that you will have any Oregano Essential Oil around, so you will have to go and hit the kitchen spice rack for Oregano, put at least 2 tablespoons in a cup of water, bring to a slow boil, just enough to let off steam and then hold your head over it, You can use a towel to make a tent and get the steam breathed into that nose.
Then drink the tea.
Few folks are aware that they have real tests on Oregano to discover that it has an ingredient that kills infections and works better and faster than most things available to them.
I have a small bottle of the E.oil and I can smell it deep 4 or 5 times in a day and knock out the sinus infection, that I got careless and let get started.
If you use the E. oil once or twice a day, you will stop having sinus problems, mine were bad enough that they wanted to do surgery on them years ago, I said no.
Another good idea for sinus and sore throats is to drink apricot brandy, just before you lay your head on the pillow, it will coat the throat, kill the germs and stop the sore throat.
Get well quick, we need you ....
I am not even going to talk about your excellent article on canneries , it is too true and still upsetting.
Next time you are in a store, read the label on a Dr. Pepper soda, glycol is on it too. [or it was 10 years ago]
Sorry you’re not feeling well tonight. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.
And I’m looking twice at my canned veggies tonight, wondering what else might be in those cans.....
That is completely shocking.
I wonder how many “organic” frozen vegetables are really that.
Wow.
“I left that company over some of their practices”
OK, you convinced me. I just spent an hour or so arranging my cans of veggies and such in the cabinets downstairs. Of course I have some French cut beans along with some other veggies. Now I’m having second thoughts on them. Guess maybe I won’t buy a lot more and pray our garden does well this summer.