Missing in Action

Well, Missing in Idaho anyway. I apparently haven't been in a blogging mood lately. I tend to get out of touch when I'm travelling for work. I get some news and such, but my only real connection to anything else is Franny. Outside of her (and by extension, the Mizz), I don't really deal with the rest of the world much. Odd, since I have more free (stir crazy) time out here than I do at home, so I can't say I've been too busy.

I'm in Pocatello (still). We've been here since Friday night. We had Sunday off, but that's it. Other than that, it's been pretty busy days.

We actually had a pretty rough day Monday. We went to Soda Springs, Idaho, which is a little town not on the way to anywhere. From what I hear, at the time when Brigham Young founded the town in it's current location, there were a number of geysers in the valley that had coated the area in mineral deposits. So of course we built a dam and made a lake over the geysers. Now the best they have is the only man-made geyser in the world. Building a hotel, they dug in the wrong spot and found the aquifer that fed the old geysers, which started leaking or geysing or whatever. They decided to attach a bunch of plumbing and regulate it, so now they have their own old faithful. All the excitement of a small town fountain mixed with the slight smell of rotten eggs. Cool.

They also have, and actually are proud of, a slag heap. For those who don't know, slag is the leftover stuff from smelting ore into metal, in this case, into phosphorus. And a heap is a big pile. In this case, a REALLY big pile. Anyway, the slag comes out of the furnace REALLY hot, and when they pour it on the heap at night, it supposedly looks like lava flowing down the sides. This was mentioned to me several times that day, so either it's REALLY cool looking, or they REALLY don't have much to do there. From the looks of the town, I'm guessing the later.

I actually worked at the phosphorus plant with the slag heap. Apparently they make the purest elemental phosphorus in the country. It's used in all sorts of things: food, fertilizer and weed killer (go figure), toothpaste, etc. Plus it's insanely reactive in air and melts at around 100 degrees, both of which make it interesting to handle. It's kept under water at all times, as it bursts into flame when it touches air. Nice stuff. But, mix some other chemicals with it and it whitens your teeth or grows your potatoes.

(start complaining) Anyway, this place made for the rough day. When we first got in town and contacted them, they said that we'd have to wait until later because their power was going to be cut off for a couple hours. I went to help our other guy work on some stuff elsewhere, when I got a call that the power wasn't going to be cut off after all, so come on over and get started. Needless to say, after an hour of safety video and discussion and stuff, the power went off. I was resigned to having to make the trek back some evening to finish, but the other guy got so delayed working on his stuff that we were still in town when the power came back on. By this time, it was too late to do anything back in Pocatello, so my partner waited in the van while I went in and calibrated for two hours plus. He hadn't done the safety stuff earlier, so he was out of luck. Longer work for me and boredom for him. Everybody wins. Anyway, we rolled back into our hotel at 8:30 that evening after leaving at 7:00. And by the end, we had barely managed to do work that should have taken one person a normal day to finish. Good times. (end complaining)

Other than that, it's been long days, but not near as annoying. One of our customers even gave us cake today. It was their September company birthday party, and they weren't taking "no" for an answer. Since they had triple chocolate something cake, I wasn't giving "no" for an answer. Everybody wins.

Melamine everywhere

I'm sure everyone has heard about the melamine contamination in pet foods. Mostly just the dog and cat foods have made the headlines, but the contaminated wheat gluten got in lots of other animal feed too. Last week, I was working at a US Fish & Wildlife research fish hatchery and they were in the process of investigating a die-off of some of their juvenile trout. They were concerned because there was nothing they could find about the water or any microbiological issue, but they were loosing fish at a fast enough rate that it might jeopardize their ability to continue the study long enough to get results, which means wasting grant money and not getting it again. Anyway, they were just looking into the possibility that they might have some melamine contamination. According to this article, they were probably right. They do get some of their food from Bio-Oregon, which is listed in the article. Incidentally, I work there every summer too.

The thing that gets me about this melamine thing is how far it got before it was caught even though it clearly has widespread health effects. The problem is an over dependence on China as a supplier for everything: a) because they have as much manpower as we want them to throw at anything, and b) because they are willing to make everything very cheaply. This is fine for a lot of things, but cheap food ingredients are not necessarily the best choice.

The melamine was used because it fools a test for protein, but is much cheaper than actually fortifying the food for real. The normal test for protein in food is a determination of the amount of nitrogen in the food. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen, but unless further testing is done, it just raises the overall result of the nitrogen test, which is taken as higher protein content. Now, the companies involved are no longer in business, but it has been pointed out that this is a widespread practice well known in the industry in China.

So now we've discovered another test to run on foods from China, and I'm afraid that we'll pat ourselves on the back for solving this particular problem and then go back about our business of buying basic food ingredients from the lowest bidder. But how many other kinds of routine deception are happening, in China or elsewhere? If they are not an immediate health issue, would we even know? What if some petroleum byproduct happens to be a good looking substitute for vitamin C or something? What if it accumulates in people and causes birth defects or whatever? The problem is that we are getting our most basic needs filled by the lowest bidder and until something happens, we have no idea at all. Just look at the ingredient list on just about anything you eat. Chances are, unless it says nothing but "apple," there is probably something on it you can't identify. Guar gum, or soy lecithin, or some chemical you can't even pronounce that is added to keep the guar gum from sticking to the soy lecithin while your frozen whatever is shipped to your grocery store. Even the things you do understand (this case was wheat gluten) have unknown origins.

The problem is that we like to pretend that we are at the top of the world food chain, that we have the safest and best of everything, and that all the food companies have our best interests at heart. In real life, we are incredibly dependent on the rest of the world for our food supply, we have food that is safe until we find melamine or e-coli or whatever, and food companies want to avoid contamination only because it causes lawsuits and hurts shareholder value. We love to have anything we want, anytime we want, and as cheaply as possible, and in order to do that we have to keep pretending.

The alternative is making all this stuff ourselves. We have the capacity to do a lot of that, but right now, our main ability seems to be growing freaking corn. So we use it for everything we can imagine: plain corn, corn meal, corn starch, corn oil, animal feed, and high fructose corn syrup. These days we even use it as a fuel and for other industrial compounds. Aside from plain corn, most of these uses are better served by other items, i.e. sugar instead of corn syrup, but we are in a good climate region for corn, so we subsidize the hell out of it, put tariffs on the competing products, pour on gobs of fertilizer and grow as much corn as we possibly can. This is great for products that can be made out of corn, but for many other things, we now have to look elsewhere, and that is what makes us vulnerable.

The irony is that we are one of the most efficient food producers in the world. By sheer volume or total calories or whatever, we make far more than we need. But we've concentrated it into a few basic products (corn, wheat, potatoes, a few other basics), but for most other things, we have to buy from the rest of the world. We grow a lot of other things, but not in the volumes we need. We import meat, fruit, vegetables, and lots of basic ingredients from all over the world, and that puts us at risk for unscrupulous companies or even entire industries taking advantage of any cost-saving shortcuts they can think of.

As a country, we have to change our attitudes about what is worth paying for. There are many reasons I can think of for eating locally produced foods, but this may top the list.

Sorry for the rant.

But not really.

Science With Franny -- Butter

So she got me again last night. I'm falling asleep and I hear "What IS butter?" "It's fat Franny. Good night." "But how is it made?" "Are you serious? Alright..."

Butter is mainly fat. It also has some water and other milk remnants, proteins and such. Some milk is sold as is straight from the cow, although usually pasteurized first. However, most dairies separate the cream out first. The result is sweet cream, which is ~35-40% fat, and skim milk. Some of the cream is then added back in in whatever amount needed to produce the proper blend (1%, 2%, or whole, about 4%) for the grocery store. This is more exact than trying to take out just a certain part of the fat in the original milk. Therefore the final product is more uniform and the American consumer does not have to be distressed by inconsistency. The rest of the cream can then used to make butter. It is somewhat processed (pasturized and then cooled), and then churned. This mainly breaks up the fat globules and makes them stick together better. It also works out most of the remaining water. In an industrial process, this might be done under a nitrogen environment to help prevent rancidity during the process, which allows for larger batches at a time, but doesn't mean much to the end product. The cream has now been separated into solids (the butter) and liquid (buttermilk), which are sent on their separate ways. Depending on the desired product, other things might be mixed in at this point, such as salt, preservatives, or colorings (to get that particular Land-O-Lakes yellow or whatever).

There you have it. Where butter comes from. The cream might also be used for other things like ice cream (excellent use), or the whole milk might be used for cheese or yogurt or whatever instead.

Payback's a b...

...aby. For all the time's I've felt bad about the Mizz crying and potentially keeping people up, now I get a taste. I'm in the crying baby section of my new hotel in Burley, ID. Across the hall is a baby who is apparently not happy with the accommodations. Even better, I can hear Mom over there trying every trick she knows to calm him/her/it down, but no luck. Actually it's not that bad. I hear the baby occasionally, but like most very young ones, it doesn't last long. There's also a kid that once in a while decides to run down the hall yelling back at his sister. I have nightmares of Mizz doing this. It's cute right now while he's doing it at home and he can't run very fast anyway, but that won't last long I'm afraid.

In other news, one of the cool things about my job is getting inside industries and seeing where things come from. However, one of the occasional bad things is seeing where things come from. I worked at a place that processes potato starch, which shows up as an ingredient in all sorts of things. It helps keep McD's fries warm longer than what you can do at home. It sticks the corn to the dog. It keeps paper-thin fast food burgers from falling apart when cooked. Anyway, it's a staple of lots of mass-produced processed foods. However, now that I've seen where it comes from, I'm not as happy. No details today, just ewwwww. Logically, I've seen the precautions that go into the food industry, and everyone has seen the mass hysteria that happens when something bad slips through. Emotionally though, I just have to shiver sometimes and give a big "YUCK". As my boss put it one time, "It's the kind of place that makes you want to grow your own food."